Farm Month in Review: Dairy Updates

Hopefully you’ve been able to stay in touch with us over the past month via Instagram or Facebook, but if not, we have a lot to catch up on! I’ll be dividing the past month into themes: Dairy, Pork, and Fun Farm Stuff. First up is dairy!

The last time we posted, we hadn’t even announced Peggy Sue’s bull calf’s official name – Percy! He is over a month old now and we are still debating what to do with the little guy. While we would love to keep him as a herd sire (he has great genetics, including a mom who milks well and is polled!) we are not very familiar with keeping a bull. They can be the sweetest creature…until they’re not. And with kids around I’m a little hesitant to  have an animal around that I can’t entirely trust.

But, it wouldn’t entirely be worth banding him and making him a steer to finish for beef, either. While Jersey meat tastes just fine (especially grassfed!), they don’t yield much meat because of their small stature and it will take 2 full years to finish him (including 2 winters of hay – $$). We could sell him for cash as a herd sire to another farm or to someone who wanted a small steer to raise but we’re just not sure yet. For now, Percy remains here with our 2 heifer calves, drinking lots of milk and learning to be a big boy. 😉

On the topic of the dairy herd, we’ve had two big developments in the past month. The first is that we’ve condensed all our Grand Rapids deliveries to one day and time! We are now at the Fulton Street Farmers Market every Wednesday between 4 and 7 pm. This is a CSA pickup market only – so no farms are allowed market sales. This has been working really well for us since we’re able to save precious time and gas in and out of the city, and considering we usually have kids in tow, minimizing their time in the car is essential. It’s also been fun to hang with the other farms who have their CSA pickups there, too – Groundswell Community Farm, Hope Farms, Green Wagon Farm and Full Hollow Farm.

We also were finally able to find and purchase a bulk tank for the dairy! We were using a homemade (very creative + effective) chiller for chilling milk – a defunct freezer with a submersible marine chiller to cool the milk in a water bath to around 36 degrees. It worked really well for the past year! The problem was that we didn’t know the cooling capacity of our chiller until we hit its capacity! It turns out we were milking too much milk to cool in that space.

The milk begins at 101 degrees (the internal body temperature of a cow) and, ideally, needs to be cooled to less than 40 degrees within 4 hours. When it’s not cooled that quickly, it allows the flavor to develop more and can taste more than goat’s milk than cow’s milk. It also shortens the shelf life of the milk. When chilled quickly, the milk has a clean, fresh taste that lasts for much longer.

The solution, for us, was to purchase a bulk tank which is pretty much what is sounds like – a large, stainless steel tank that holds bulk quantities of milk. The milk is poured into the tank immediately after milking and the tank is surrounded by several layers of ice jackets to cool the milk, as well as containing an agitator that circulates the milk over the ice to cool even faster. The agitator also helps to keep the butter fat (cream) evenly distributed in the milk. Once the milk is poured off into jars and not agitated, the cream will rise to the top.

Buying a bulk tank sounds more simple than it is. We knew it would be a large investment for us (several thousand dollars) but well worth it in the end. In addition to the initial cost of the bulk tank, we had to consider the monthly expense of running the tank and keeping it cool.

Until the early 1990’s, most dairy farms were small operations that needed small bulk tanks since farmers didn’t need many cows to support themselves. Then, there was a large push in the industry to “get big or get out” and so, today, it is commonly promulgated by industry experts that a farm needs to milk 400 cows to break even and maybe earn a meager living, depending on what the market is paying for milk. Last year prices were around $23/hundredweight – pretty high for convetionally produced milk (approx. $1.92/gallon). This year, however, the market was flooded with milk and the price has dropped to around $14/hundredweight ($1.17/gallon) – not a good price if you want to stay in business for very long!

If you milk 400 cows per day, at 10 gallons per day (the average for Holsteins in confinement operations, fed a high-grain diet) then you’re looking at 4,000 gallons per day. Since coops pick up your milk only a few times per week, even a “small” dairy farm currently needs a 10,000-15,000 gallon bulk tank. Many farms in our area have 30,000 + gallon bulk tanks, especially the ones milking 1500+ cows three times per day.

Now, we milk 5 cows averaging about 4 gallons per day. We also pour off the milk each day since it goes out fresh to customers. It was incredibly difficult for us to find a bulk tank less than 400-500 gallons. Literally, we found one in Wisconsin and a few in Iowa. Or, we could order a smaller one from Europe since most farms are grass-based there and would be considered “micro-dairies” like we are by the folks in the U.S.

Since European farming models stress quality over quantity, they don’t push their cows for production, instead focusing on herd and land health to reduce antibiotic use and the like. Can you tell where most of our continuing education materials come from? 😉

So, our options were to order a new tank from Europe in the 60-80 gallon range for $5,000 + shipping or buy a used 150 gallon bulk tank for half the price in Green Bay Wisconsin. The bonus with the WI tank was that we could drive there to pick it up for far less than the $650 shipping cost. {Even accounting for Dan’s pasty + coffee budget driving through the U.P.!} Since a tank only needs to be filled to 10% capacity in order to not freeze the milk, we were able to purchase to 150 gallon tank with room to grow and expand the dairy.

In our opinion, the milk is better than ever now. It is now chilled to 36 degrees within 1 hour of milking, tastes fresher, cleaner and keeps for a loooong time. A long time is relative for raw milk since it is so highly perishable but it should keep 8-10 days vs. 5-7 days prior to the bulk tank.

Also, in the process of tracking down our chilling problem we had our milk tested in June to see if it was a herd health issue. We ran a Complete 16 tests at AntelBio in East Lansing and had our vet culture the milk for 72 hours, looking for the presence of any pathogens. Both labs thought they had errors because they found nothing! We ran the tests again and still little to no colony forming units (CFU) of bacteria and no pathogens.

Click here to see the list of pathogens the Complete 16 tests for.

Click here to read the report.

So, if you’ve ever been curious or interested in trying raw milk now is a great time! It’s clean, fresh and cold from happy cows on grass! Contact us for a free sample half gallon to try before purchasing a herd share.

P.S. – After reviewing our numbers, we have decided to lower our herd share purchase and jar fees in an effort to make raw milk more affordable and accessible to families. Click here to view the new rates. However, we will no longer offer payment plans for the fees so they are due, in full, with the initial share purchase. Thanks!