Posted in Homestead Barnyard

We had been purchasing milk from other families for a while. And as these things go, we really wanted to have enough to make butter and cheese as well as have milk to drink. So we started looking for a cow of our own. Now if you have never looked for one, finding a family cow can be a little difficult.

One day, my husband called from work and said we were going to look at a cow…and right around the corner, too! That cow looked poorly, but another in the same herd caught our eye.  We jumped at the chance to buy her, knowing only that the cattle farmer had purchased her from the stock barn and she was in calf and due in a month or so.

Now, we had no fence and no barn. Not even a place to milk her. It was a cold and rainy March. The next day, my husband borrowed a fence charger, purchased a roll of smooth wire, some insulators, and fence posts. We began fencing our ¾ acre pasture with a single hot wire as fast as we could.

When Jerry, the cattle farmer, brought Lois to us the fence was not quite completed. Jerry suggested putting her in the garden as it had a good, stout fence. So we unloaded Lois into our 50’x 50’ recently tilled garden while we put the finishing touches on our electric gate. It rained all night with poor Lois in that muddy garden!

The next day, Lois wouldn’t come near us. The mailman, having pulled in to deliver a package, suggested feeding her grain in a bucket on my lap so she would become accustomed to me. This I did. And within 24 hours, she came to me, albeit tentatively, for her grain.

In a couple of days, the fence was complete and all we had to do was lead her the 25 feet from the garden gate to the fence gate and into her little pasture. She came sans halter so with a bucket of grain, I began enticing her to follow. This she did, until she saw the posts on either side of the gate. Then she turned tail, ran around the far side of the house, and into the woods along the road. Here she proceeded to tramp rapidly through the woods and across the next two neighbors’ front lawns, my husband trailing behind her doing what he could to keep her out of the road. Have you every seen a cow with an udder run? Here she met with an old barbed wire fence and her westward trek to find “her herd” was redirected.

The neighbors (a veritable clan) rushed to help and Lois was eventually rounded into a dark, rarely cleaned horse stall in an old shack of a barn. One of the fellows asked my husband if he could just lead her home, after all, they were only 300 yards away from home. So my husband said “sure” and the poor, trusting fellow led Lois out of the barn into the corral only to have her take off, dragging him by the short lead along the ground. He let go and the cow charged a horse, innocently standing by. The horse backed up to the barbed wire fence, and then flipped over the fence, pulling a 360 in the air, landing feet down on the other side. Miraculously, the horse was uninjured. They caught Lois again and this time locked her up for the night.

Now my thoughts as lay awake in my bed, while Lois slept in the neighbor’s barn, were many and varied:

“What were we thinking?!”

“How will we ever get near this cow?!”

“Is her calf o.k.?”

“What if we can’t milk her?”

Jerry, the cattle farmer, came the next morning, loaded her up and brought her back to us. So, we got her home and into the new fenced pasture. She did have an uneventful birth and gave us our soon-to-be-second milk cow, Ginger. She let me halter her and lead her around the lawn to graze without a fuss. And yes, we were able to milk her. Today she walks right into her stanchion for milking and licks me like I am part of the herd. She is content in her home. And she gives us over 4 gallons a day in milk.

Lois enjoying her new barn.

What is my point in telling you this? Sometimes you just have to go for it. You can give your cow a great home without having everything in place at the start. You don’t have to have acres of fenced pastures or high quality forage. You don’t have to start with a barn. You don’t even need a stanchion for milking….just a place to tie your cow, at least to start.

As author Johann Grohman says in her book Keeping A Family Cow, “An over-arching truth about the cow is that she drives the domestic or small farm economy. By living on a constantly renewing resource, grass, she is able to support not just herself and her calf, but your pig and your chickens and still provide milk for the house….She thus vaults the domestic or farm economy into a self sustaining mode.”

So why wait? Go for it. Get that family milk cow you’ve been wanting all these years! It will give you incentive to get that barn built before next winter and improve your land and health too!

Kristin Hoffman homesteads with her family in the hills of East Tennessee and blogs about alternative energy, family farming, and home schooling with her husband at www.solarfamilyfarm.com. She can also be found in the barn milking her favorite cow, Lois, twice a day.