Mabel Has Her Calf (and we have raw grass-fed butter!)

Our family milk cow, Mabel, is finally over her mama bear phase where she hides away in the pasture with her little one. It happened with Stanley, too, and I am thankful that Mabel seems to be a really good mother. Now these two are up at the barn at least a couple of times per day.

Her calf is teeny-tiny compared to her and it makes sense since we bred Mabel with a longhorn and they seem to have smaller calves. It also makes for easier calving, I guess, but I wouldn’t know for sure since we just found her the next morning with her little one by her side.

The calf is still unnamed but there is a strong vote towards Buttercup from a couple of the children.

Keeping a family milk cow has always seemed daunting to me, it still does in fact. These big animals are one of the bigger livestock investments you can make and when you’re like me, you are kind of learning as you go about this business of milking and breeding. This book has been invaluable along the way and, if you’re curious, we detail what we feed Mabel to avoid GMOs and heavy amounts of grain, how we built a simple milk stanchion and hay feeder very inexpensively and more of our milk cow story in The Doable Off-Grid Homestead.

And then there’s the milk. Above you can see the color difference between the cow milk on the left and the goat’s milk on the right. The cream is a beautiful golden yellow and the butter follows suit. We are using this butter churn…

to create this nutrient-dense delicious butter every couple of days.

The skim milk either gets made into the simplest Raw Cottage Cheese (recipe in The Doable Off-Grid Homestead) or goes to the pigs or meat birds. I just love how, with animals on a homestead, absolutely nothing gets wasted.

And to be able to nourish our children on oodles of raw milk and raw golden grass-fed butter is such a gift. We may be bringing in hay and feed for milking but by our estimations we are still saving money with these milking animals… and we end up with food so good for you that you literally can not buy it around these parts.

And that is such a blessing.