Welcome Xanthorrhoea, with your abundant milk.

  Life really sucked there for a while, when i’d sold the goats, Melaleuca was dry, and no farmer would sell me a decent Jersey cow. Shop milk is absolutely awful when you’ve had the real thing. But I persisted, and harassed one poor man enough that he sold us a cow, probably to shut me up. And what a lovely example she is.

Following the Australian plant names theme, she was renamed Xanthorrhoea. It’s a bit of a mouthful, but the grass tree was the only thing we could think of that really suited her black markings. She gets Xanthe or Zan for short. She’s so quiet she makes Melaleuca look troublesome.

    She did give us a stressful initial 10 days-she wouldn’t eat anything we offered her, except grass. A fresh Jersey making 16 litres a day needs more than grass to keep that sort of production up. She’d nibble a little lucerne, but no grain. The home butcher, who was out here at the time, diagnosed depression (he called it sulking) at her change in lifestyle. We bought a couple of different feeds to try-she snubbed her nose at them. Her milk was dropping alarmingly, and we were starting to entertain the horrible notion that the cow we bought for abundance might end up dropping to six litres a day, six weeks from calving. I systematically went through our pantry until I found she liked barley. Back we went to the stockfeed, bought two types of barley, and she finally began to eat! Only small amounts, but barley with a little copra and some lucerne at least gave her some extra protein.

Then we decided that stripping her out was inefficient and rather stressful, and we’d rather go back to the calf system we had with Melaleuca, where a calf finishes her off at the end of milking. You need to give the calf a fair bit of milk, but in exchange they empty the cow very well and keep the stimulation up so she’ll keep producing more for longer. And you get beef, so really they’re just a delicious long-term milk storage option. Friends with a dairy were happy to send a Friesian bull calf our way, and Xanthe liked him. A lot. So much that she perked up, fostered him without any hesitation, and began to eat ravenously. Her milk supply rose again, so now we take six to seven litres in the morning, then the calf spends the day with her and takes the rest.

  Three weeks in she’s very interested in food-she’s not quite the walking garbage disposal that Melaleuca is, but she’s getting there. It’s been a very good lesson in cow management-and I will never again forget to ask to buy some of the feed the animal’s used to when buying something new!

Happy (belated) birthday, husband

  I promised the husband a Jersey cow for his 30th birthday last year. However, we were in Tasmania, and not planning on staying, and it’s a little hard to move a cow over an ocean.

So he got an IOU. And when we got here, he called it in and reminded me that it was time to go searching. We found Melaleuca, and she’s been wonderful. Placid and tolerant, she’s ex-dairy as she wasn’t producing enough milk for them. The Friesan-Angus calf came with her-we called him Tucker, because that’s what he’ll be. He’ll be our first beef in about five years-we’re sticking to the ‘only meat we raise’ rule.

  

  She’s quickly become something like an oversized dog-she gets pats and handfed tidbits by the entire family. She’s not a big fan of the kids riding her, but that’s understandable. She’ll get used to it. She’s also getting used to playing soccer. And although she is most definitely the husband’s pet, I get to have a shot once in a while. Note the milking setup-as it’s rather difficult to scavenge a stainless steel bucket, it’s looking like we may actually have to buy one. New. Eventually.

  We haven’t bought any dairy for four weeks now. We have as much milk, butter, yoghurt, labne, kefir and cream as we need, and then some. I haven’t got enough to make hard cheeses yet, but considering she’s giving us at least three litres a day and then topping up a calf……………what on earth will we do when she’s giving us fifteen litres a day? Or more? I’m happy to meet the challenge though-I love abundance.

I shall call you rump, and you sirloin

As part of our efforts to eat well and ethically, here is next years dinner.

 

They have no names, they are just 'the moos'. They were five weeks old when we got them a week ago, originally from a Friesian dairy herd which has no use for boys like ours. I wondered if it would be hard to raise animals for eating, but so far it's not at all-sure they're cute, but their final destination is first and foremost in our minds. I now understand when people say it's not like eating your cat. I saw the husband playing with them and crooning to them, and thought uh oh, he's getting attached...........then got closer and realised he was saying to them 'I'm gonna eat you. You're gonna to be delicious!' Pick the family that hasn't eaten any meat for a year.............

But for now they can gambol around the paddock, eat our long grass and save us slashing, and give us lots of bedding straw and cowpats for the garden. Most definitely a good multiple use animal.