OUR COWS
Everything Revolves Around the Cows
The cowherd is absolutely central to the farm and in a sense, we owe them everything. In earlier times the cows pulled the wagons and plows of the settlers; they still feed and clothe us today and, above all, they sustain the fertility of the land in which all our food crops are grown.
On our farm, we keep a herd of a little more than 80 milking Holsteins, one or two breeding bulls and about 80 head of young female stock or heifers. We raise the heifer calves to replenish our own herd and if we have too many we sell them to other farmers.
The baby calves are raised on whole cow's milk and after five months, when they have started to eat enough rolled grains and hay, they are weaned off milk and start living the life of a ruminant in earnest. After about two more years the heifer should give birth to her own first calf and graduate to being a milking cow.
The milking cows' feed consists primarily of fresh grass and rolled grains in the summer and alfalfa hay, silage and rolled grains in the winter. They get a mineral supplement and salt to meet their nutritional needs.
On average each cow gives about 28 litres of milk a day and they do this for 300 days a year. They get two months off for maternity leave, what we call the 'dry period.' Then, with the arrival of the new baby calf, the cycle starts all over again. A cow has to regularly give birth to a calf to continue to produce milk. Her gestation period lasts for 9 months and 9 days. She will usually have a calf every year.
During the summer months, the herd spends a lot of their time in pasture, coming in only for milking. They spend most of the winter in the barn, but still go outside for fresh air and exercise.
THE DAIRY BARN
For the longest time our cows were kept for shelter and milking in a traditional timber frame barn, with all the hay and straw stored above in the mow. Although charming and rich in history, it had its drawbacks and we were starting to get crowded in it, too.
In 2011 we finally decided to build a new barn to address cow comfort, labour and manure management, in that order. We settled on the compost pack barn design, where the cows have the least restriction of movement and are milked in a herring bone milking parlour. The barn is still located directly across from the yogurt house and the milk gets pumped via pipeline into the processing room.
The bedding material is wood shavings which absorb the manure and get raked with a cultivator twice a day. The heat of the composting process eliminates pathogens and weed seeds and the resulting compost is used to fertilize the crops we grow. Because the cows can move around and socialize at will, they can now express much more of their natural behaviour and are healthier for it.