Milking Cows

LiveReal.org

We love our dairy and our fresh cows milk

Okay, now this is pretty extreme. I'm still eating seafood, cheese and other dairy products as well as eggs. This article talks about going all the way to vegan which I don't think I could do. I'd have to spend the whole day cooking and eating to get enough protein, iron and calcium, it's hard enough as it is.

But the article at Alter.org does offer some good links as well as some good ideas. Including "Meatless Monday"---sounds an awful lot like the old Catholic thing of not eating meat on Fridays.

I was a vegan for 2 years. I became incredibly skinny. It was very hard. Very rarely was I able to eat out. Dairy is in everything. I have not tried to be a vegan since that 2 year experiment.

I have found that the bacteria in RAW unpasterized milk has been very good for me. I used to have horrible allergies but have not had them since drinking the raw milk. It is made on a farm with 30 cows so I know it is the closest to sustainable as I can get without milking them myself.
-Daren, Los Angeles

That must have taken an enormous amount of discipline---TWO YEARS!

I've been thinking of trying unpasteurized milk. They have it at Whole
Foods, I think...or is that just organic milk, not sure...but I have been drinking more milk and I'm wondering if I should switch.

I tend to get dermatitis every so often...hives...but I never have been
able to figure out what causes it and it just comes and goes. I wonder if
it would help with that.

Of course, my husband is of the opinion that humans weren't meant to eat cow's
milk...but then again he loves good cheese, so the opinion is just that...
-Cindy, FL

Cow Milking Stories

I had to laugh, I was picturing him milking the cows himself but I really can see him doing that. I can see him on a big farm with a giant organic garden with nice healthy cows to milk and a solar paneled home and I would buy that for him, if I could.

Milking cows does bring back memories of me visiting my Aunt Inez's farm when I was a little girl and seeing them actually getting down with the cows, squatting on a stool and milking by hand. Some of the cows liked to kick...a bit of excitement in the barn....ha..
so those cows had to be hobbled, their legs chained together....but getting the hobbles on the cow was an experience in itself. Most cows were gentle and liked to be milked while eating their grain. By the time I was in Jr. high and had gone to live with my Aunt and Uncle they had a modern (walk-in) barn where the cows stood up high behind a cage like thing that locked them in to be milked and the milking machines were used they had a pipeline to the big vat that held the milk. You still had to wash the cow's tits off with a warm soapy rag (my job) and hook up the electric suction cups (my job) and sometimes milk by hand enough to make sure the cow's milk was ready for consumption.

For example, after a cow has a calf, you have to make sure there is no blood left in the milk. Sometimes it did get in the line and in the milk and after a few days, the calves were taken from their mothers and fed by hand which was my job and so much fun. We would put milk in a bucket and then let the calf suck on our hand down in the milk. They were so cute. After they got the hang of it, they would just drink from the bucket until they got old enough to eat grain and grass. The mother cow, after making sure her milk was ready, was then ready to milk (giving lots of milk).

At times, my uncle liked to squirt milk into his mouth and he would fill up a big pitcher with milk to bring in the house. This did not appeal to me as I could not drink the milk straight from the cow. I could hardly drink the milk from the bottle (only in cereal with lots of sugar). I hate milk but I love cows.

I used to stand behind the cows and braid their tails, sometimes get on the cow and ride them around the lot and sometimes even ride them in the barn. I named all of them (45 or 50 beautiful Holsteins) and we had one big bull!

I can still feel and smell the wonderful early mornings when I was jousted out of bed at 5 a.m. to go head up the cows for milking while it was still dark. Sometimes the cows would be waiting near the barn standing in line ready to enter the barn and sometimes they lingered in the pasture about a half mile away. After they were milked they would all lie around the lot and chew their cud. When I didn't have to get ready for school, I would go out and climb on their backsand talk to them and stroke their coats. It was such a peaceful time...after a while they all got up and strolled off to the pasture to graze for the day…

It was a wonderful experience for me. I just wish my kids could have seen (and experienced) this time in my life.
-Sharon, OK

My milking story is not nearly as pretty and quite a bit sillier: when I was about 8 or 9, I was staying on my uncle's small dairy farm while my parents were in the big city for some VFW function. While my uncle was busy hooking the Holsteins up for milking, I slid down next to one of them to observe the finer mechanics of milking at the source. This made her nervous, of course, and the next thing I knew, I was slammed up against the corrugated barn wall with one hoof print on my chest and one on my face. That little event precipitated 6 or 7 years of petit mal epilepsy for me. The seizures eventually stopped, but ever since, I never miss a chance to eat a cow.
-Ray, CA