Remember when your first wedding anniversary rolled around? Yes, way back when. Anyway, remember wondering what your husband might buy you to celebrate that momentous occasion? According to Hallmark, the contemporary gift for your first anniversary is clocks. And china for the second one and on and on it goes. For the thirtieth it's diamonds. Ooooooooo......
Well, this is what
we bought
together to celebrate our 30th anniversary, which is today, June 1st.
Isn's she adorable? Her name is Buttercup and she is a mid-mini Jersey cow. She is 5 months old and we plan to breed her late next summer. After she has a calf we can milk her and have our own dairy products right here on our farm. How. Very. Exciting.
This past Saturday we drove to the Land Between the Lakes in Kentucky to a beautiful farm owned by a veterinarian. She breeds these little guys and when we pulled up to her farm there were several dozen small Jersey cows happily munching their way thru a huge pasture. After some instruction from her farm hand we loaded Buttercup up in our animal trailer and started the 4-1/2 hour drive home. We were anxious to get home before dark so we would have time to get Buttercup settled in the barn while we still had some daylight to work with.
The alpacas all lined up to see who was taking up residence in "their" side of the barn. Eventually we will pasture the cow with our girls, but for now we are keeping Buttercup in the barn. Now you can understand why we have been creating more pasture out in the front of the farm. We are working toward the goal of doing rotational grazing with our animals. Um, yea, I'll explain that in another post later.
It only took a moment of coaxing to get her to step out of the trailer and into the barn. And before we knew it she was eating her dinner and snuggling down on her fresh bed of straw. Hey, it's hard work for a baby getting trailered for half a day!
I get so tickled every time I go down to the barn to work with her. She is still not too happy about being led around with a lead, but is getting more used to it every day. I love working with our animals and this one is no exception. I wish you could see her long eyelashes up close. She is just too stinking cute!
And why a mid-mini cow you ask? I'll explain why. If we owned 50 acres and had tons of pasture we would probably have a full sized Jersey cow. But a full sized cow eats a lot of grass, and in winter when there is no grass you have to provide hay. Hay costs money unless you have tons of acreage to grow your own. And we don't. So, a mid-mini eats a lot less pasture, of which we have a finite amount. A second reason for a smaller cow is milk production.
Yes, I did take a class on making cheese and plan to do that eventually. And yes, I have been buying raw milk from a local farmer and making our own butter. There are so many other foods we plan on making once our cow is producing milk. But if we had a full sized cow, she might give us upwards of 3-4 gallons of milk a day. Yikes! I don't want to make
that much cheese. But our sweet little Buttercup will more than likely only produce 1-1/2 gallons a day.
Now I know that sounds like a crazy amount of milk, but not when you break it down like this. It will probably take 2 days worth of milk to make our weeks ration of butter. And I plan to freeze what we don't use weekly because eventually her milk will dry up and there will be no more butter until we breed her again. And then there is the cheese I want to make, and the yogurt and let's not forget sour cream and whipped heavy cream that rises to the top of the jar for my cappuccino every morning. Yes, there are so many ways to use the milk.
And so, we bought ourselves a cow. For our anniversary. Doesn't everyone?
Looking forward to the next 30!
Debbie & Joel
