Breeds of Cattle: Milking Shorthorn

Something I'll always remember about this breed is what my father said when I'd told him we bought a couple Milking Shorthorn heifers ... WHAT! Are you looking to be kicked to death?! My mother protested and said they were just fine for milking. I'm less than impressed with their kicking skills so far.

Though we no longer have our first MS cows we still have a daughter of one. She's a Jersey X but my best and most favorite cow! Her mother was a pain! Not in the kicking realm but rather the not doing as told. Man she was difficult! Her daughter has her own idiosyncrasies but it makes me want to cry at the thought of selling her. I walk out to her anywhere and I can sit down her untied without grain and milk her! Her lactation curve is very flat and she has longevity. Milked her for over a year once. We have another Ayrshire X we acquired recently. She has similar disposition but isn't quite as calm. I'll let y'all know my thoughts on Ayrshires later.

The biggest problem is that they have been heavily crossed with Holsteins. This hasn't done them any favors. And to find native MS is near impossible. If I had native I'd keep them pure otherwise I view the Milking Shorthorn as an excellent mix in cross breeding with Jersey in particular.

As for their milk, they are a cheese breed NOT a butter breed. I found it good for drinking and making cheese. You will get cream just not like a Jersey.

Garden Activity and Flour

It seems odd planting seeds in the garden right now but I'm giving it a shot on a few things.. I'm trying to get some frost tolerant crops going to see if I get anything from it. Planting at the recommended times of July and August would've been abject failures due to the heat and drought. Now that we have had quite a bit of rain I feel a little more comfortable with the idea. However, it's a race against time.

Harvestwise: I've picked 9 pumpkins with more out there ripening. There are 10ish watermelons out there yet. I'm still getting cukes and summer squash. The tomatoes have lots of green ones all over them. And, finally, the okra is putting on a second harvest.

In other news, we have acquired a 24" stone mill. It needs to be cleaned up, restored a little and a motor matched up but I may be in flour by October. The Country Living Mill we have cannot keep up by any means. The burrs are junk. My new mill can handle bin-run grain as it has a blower and a few screens, which is awesome, and weed seeds won't damage the stones like the steel burrs. Gotta love granite!! 50# of flour per 20 minutes! I'm rather excited about this ...

The drought seems to be breaking ... we're still a little deficient in our area but it's better. Things are actually growing again! However, our pond is still really low. We'll need quite a bit more rain for that to return to it's normal level. What's impressive about the pond is even with all the water we were pumping out if it for the garden and livestock we still had water. I don't know if we would've made it another month though.

In other news, we've been butchering poultry free loaders in order to get rid of some mouths around here. Organic grain is expensive. And I'm trying to be more aggressive about canning. I dislike pressure canning but it's a necessary evil. I like to eat and I don't have freezer space. What's evil about it? The pressure and heat destroy some of the nutritional value of the food being canned. It does provide calories though. We bought an All American 921 5+ years ago so I already had one to use. I never did much pressure canning with it prior to this but my mother is an excellent resource in that she has canned for years. I can happily say I'm getting the hang of it but it sure puts a dent in my wood pile!

The garden is still putting forth fruits so I have more to do yet. I'm wondering if I plant some carrots if I'll actually get some this year. My tomatoes faired awful in the heat and drought. So we ate tomatoes but canning has been nill for now. Corn was a failure. Potatoes were successful but not as heavy of a harvest as could've been. Beans kept getting ate by some critters. Watermelons have done okay, at least one variety, the other variety has yet to give us fruits. Pumpkins are doing alright.

Breeds of Cattle: Jersey

So we've handled several breeds of cattle for milking. When we first started we got a Jersey because that's what I could find. The interesting part was that I'd managed to stumble across Old World Jerseys. Though our first was conventional genetics our next was not. Granted we obtained a couple of Milking Shorthorns between the two. We were told you need to barn the cows and all kinds of crazy things that a girl from a Montana cattle ranch (AKA moi) looks at you cross-eyed about. Unfortunately, there seems to be something to that advice. What we bought, without realizing it until $$$ later, were Jersey's with the 1950s calf mortality issues among other things. Americans cross bred and graded up for multiple reasons. While I don't have any pure Jersey's left, sold our two 3 yro bulls last summer, we do have two Jersey X cows that we raised. The older being a Milking Shorthorn X who is an amazing cow! Her mother was difficult to say the least but the New Zealand Jersey genetics mellowed that. The second a first calf heifer that is a Milking Devon X. She's a little thing and a bit of a spitfire! She had a heifer calf, Daphne, that is 3/4 Jersey and a remnant of one of the bulls we sold. My crosses are hardy and milk on grass alone but the drought forced me to feed grain. I feed for health, not production and genetics do matter especially when it comes to dairy. Allen Nation once said in his Stockman Grass Farmer column that Americans don't know how to properly grass finish beef.. well, we are awful at 100% grassfed dairy, too! But we keep trying and learning from our mistakes!