My girls and I were on our way to AWANA last Wednesday night  when I got a call from a friend. She had a dairy cow that had broken its leg. Their own freezers were full so did we want it. I directed her to call my husband (Rick) since I was not going to be home that night. While I was at women’s Bible study, they worked out all the details, and Rick (my husband) found another couple that would come help for exchange of half the meat, and called his boss to schedule a vacation day the next day so we could process the cow. As an high school agriculture teacher, I have had classes in meat science, tour numerous processing plants, and taught meat science to students, but to tell the truth I was a little intimidated with the prospect of doing it myself. I was worried that we would not get the retail cuts done correctly, but as a group we decided to just do stew meat and ground beef. Our decision was based on that typically dairy cows have an extremely low fat percentage and the older the cow the tougher the meat. Any meat from our cow may be dry and tough. Grinding the meat cuts the tissue down into smaller sizes and I will can the stew meat so water and slow cooking will aid by adding moisture and breaking up the tougher fibers. A person may also add fat or mix ground pork to add fat and flavor to extremely low fat meat. 
 
By 9 AM the next day, we had the cow at our house. We made her comfortable and gave her a half an hour to relax before we would start. Our help arrived a short time later and we got started. We said a little prayer for the cow thanking the Lord, our friends and the cow itself for providing our families with meat to eat.  We were comforted by the fact we could end the cow’s pain. Rick provided the cow with a very quick death by shooting it in the head at a close range. 
  

The men worked quickly to hang the carcass up and drain the blood. The blood is full of nitrogen and will be spread throughout the garden. The next step was to remove front feet and head, then the hide. The hide is removed from the high point (back legs of hanged properly) down. This allows gravity to aid in removal.   The hide was stretched and is currently drying. The offal or guts are then removed, by tying off the anus with string, then cutting through the hide (but not into guts) down from anus to throat. The guts should roll out and be removed. Offal was fed to the pigs this time. Maybe next time I will save soup bone and such. For the sake of time and our own learning curve, the pigs ate well (and loved it.)

The carcass was then cut into quarters and moved to a table were the group worked on cutting it off the bones and removed connective tissue.  We didn’t cut the injured leg quarter up due to blood clots and injured tissue. After getting the quarters cut into manageable pieces, we moved into the house and cut the large pieces into stew meat and smaller chunks that could fit into the meat grinder. As typical of dairy cows, the meat was very lean. Some pieces looked just like tuna. We ground about 150 lbs of beef and bagged 30 pounds of stew meat. I packaged the meat in 2 lb packages, but I think they probably weighed close to 2½ to 3 lbs. 

I canned the stew meat in quart sized jars with a tablespoon of boullion. I processed them in a pressure canner at 10 lbs for 90 minutes.  

A special thanks goes out to Sarah and Mr B for helping provide for our family.

From the start I have been crowing on about Redpoll cows to all and sundry and then ... 2 Jersey cows turn up on Maple Field. Whats happening? I wobbled violently over whether or not the gene pool of the ‘dairy’ side of the Redpoll breed had become an oxbow lake. Had the influence of ‘beef’ and breeding for a good carcass not a good udder, since the 1960s, turned them into sucklers, not milkers?

I puzzled over this problem until last Saturday. Over a delicious bacon roll at the nearby Bowerchalke Market, I met Quentin Edwards who keeps Redpolls on his farm at East  Knoyle (www.boxbeef.com). He is an evangelist for the breed and since his herd comes from a dairy background, he can (and frequently does) sell milk-producing heifers. We are off to East Knoyle next weekend for an udder viewing. My late uncle –John Ironmonger – kept a pedigree herd of Redpolls for milking in the 1960s on the Shaftesbury Estate, Dorset until the fashion changed to Fresian herds with separate beef enterprises. Don’t forget that  beef  production was always a by-product of the dairy herd. Only quite recently have specialized herds of single-suckler cows ranged over our lowland farms.

Fitting out the Dairy room has slowed to a snail’s pace as my builder friend has become ill. It's not a bad thing for we have changed the position of the cold room to the opposite corner of the room, which means there is no door to the outside. Better security in all respects and easier to ‘cool’. This has got to be right, and time spent now may save us in the long run ... and this is for the long run don’t forget.

The tractor hitch is too high for the bail. When hitched on to the International Harvester 574 the floor of the bail slopes backwards at an alarming degree; we don’t want to make the girls work too hard. We want them to enjoy their milking. Who wants their horizon upset in the early morning? So I tried to reverse the hitch. The nuts and bolts were welded tight with iron age rust. I called in Chris –the 6^th emergency service - and so easily, with heat and moderate violence he took the hitch apart. Is this thing ‘over built’? Do I need the power of 64 horses?

DOODLING: 

If each horse requires 1 acre of pasture to survive the year, I would need to rent 64 extra acres at £100 each = £ 6,400. If they eat through a 20-week winter like my Jersey cows, then 2 horses will eat one bale of haylage per week; 64 horses will need  640 bales at £30 each for a 20-week winter, which gives a feed bill of £19,200. That means that my energy bill for a year would be £25,600. We’ll see how much diesel the International uses in a year. I feel a savings coming on!

I want to answer Chris, who emailed the site to say that he wanted perhaps to milk a small herd. We can help in this endeavour and would most definitely like to talk through the finances with him.

We had (a co-director and I) a very interesting meeting with Tim Jackson – the Principal of Sparsholt College of Agriculture (Hampshire ), who wanted to talk through the microdairying business model. For us it may mean an immediate ‘link’ to the student population with training, experience in small scale dairy farming, and the hope of encouraging many more self-employed farmers to get going.

The processing room – the ‘dairy’ – is the super-clean room in which we shall pasteurize, separate and bottle the fresh milk prior to sale on the doorstep. This week we have ordered the materials and equipment to lay the floor screed. The room within the timber barn is 6 metres by 6 metres. Down the centre of the room we shall cut the concrete and insert a floor drain with removable parts for washing at intervals. Then we shall set the floor levels to allow the screed (50mm thick) to drain into the central gulley. The surface of the sand and cement screed (grit sand ) will be carefully trowelled and left to dry. The final ‘hygiene‘ coat will be a gritty, (for traction) Epoxy resin covering laid on  with a trowel to 4mm thickness. 

Meanwhile, we can start the studwork walls which will be covered in Dairy Board (PVC sheets 2400x1200 and 3mm thick). The dairy board comes with clever jointers and cover strips which ensure seamless cleanliness throughout. Prices for the room will follow and will include labour to fix. I have met an ingenious refrigerator man who will help us with the walk-in cool room and who will direct us while we try to construct our own ‘clunky’ fridge doors. The savings are enormous. Details to follow.  

One of the cows has developed a scratched teat from the sharp teeth of the calf. I shall have to deal with this, as when we switch to machine milking through the new milking bail she may, with reason, kick up merry hell. What about the switch over from purely calf rearing to full-on milking husbandry – how will it go? So much to learn. I need to talk to Sue Cole in the New Forest, who is a deft expert in such matters, and I have Caroline Moody (www.moodycow.com) to provide training. Mentor Ian Crouch (source of the Jersey cows) is selling ‘raw’ milk to customers – how good is that? You can now buy fresh, raw (unpasteurized) milk at the Bowerchalke Market every Saturday. 

I think things are really moving. I think more and more people wonder about where milk comes from and who produces it.

Read, at once, The Untold Story of Milk  by Ron Schmid ND (with an excellent ‘forward’ by Sally Fallon, President of the Weston.A. Price Foundation).

And there is no better person to grapple with on this subject than Graham Harvey. Start with his The Killing of the Countryside, and move on to The Carbon Fields, and then all his other work. 

I want to give credit where credit is due. The Prince’s Countryside Fund have been full of support and encouragement and have introduced me to Mark Allen, CEO of Dairycrest, and Paul Whitehead, Director of Operations- Dairycrest, who are constantly on hand to advise us with this new venture.

The Plunkett Foundation provided Jane Ryall as an adviser with whom to talk through our early ideas and financial budgets. She was terrific (a dairy farmer’s daughter) in helping me to form the company and in providing a solid look at the figures with nothing left out or overlooked. Plunkett  is devoted to encouraging all aspects of local agriculture and employment and was founded in the 1930’s.

Notes on the Side:

This addition to the blog allows me to stray ‘off’ track and comment on other things in the village and on the small holding.

I have started a flock of meat chickens along the lines laid out by Joe Salatan in the USA. They live in a fox-proof contraption which is moved every day onto fresh grass.The idea is that they should follow the cow herd and gobble up intestinal parasites before they can even think of completing their grizzly life-cycle!

Next Time:  A look over the County border at Wilcox Milk

History – a talk with Rex Paterson’s grandson – the great milking bail pioneer of the 1940’s.