We're Barely Getting Any Milk...

come on let's go hey everybody welcome back to living traditions homestead well it's evening time we're about to do our evening chores and we're going to do something today for the first time ever now this is our dairy cow rose and her calf right next to her that is babe we've been we've been milking rose twice a day since the day that babe was born and up until now it's been working out perfectly but babe is getting older and she's drinking a lot more milk so today is the first day that we will be separating the two of them overnight so that we will get all of the milk in the morning right right now because we're leaving babe with her all the time there's some times when we milk we're only getting about a quart or maybe a little over a quart of milk and milking is too much work takes too much time to only end up with a quart of milk each time so this is a very common way it's called calf sharing it's where you share the amount of milk with the calf she gets about half and we'll get about half and it means that we should hopefully get a couple gallons a day now babe is 14 weeks older just a little bit older than 14 weeks so it is time for her to start eating grass and being introduced with a little bit of grain here and there so this is actually perfect timing for us to start doing this if we were a commercial dairy the common practice is actually to take the calf away the day that it's born usually within just a couple hours of being born they'll take the calf away from the mom and never put it back that way they get all of the milk from the mom of course that's not the way we do things here a lot of people will start this process though about what we're gonna do as early as three weeks old we thought it was better for for babe to be able to stay with rose during this entire time but now it's definitely time so earlier today we set up a corral over here we call this the barn lot this is the fenced in area that's right in front of our barn we set up a corral so that we can actually got chase babe into there overnight and then lock her inside of there she'll still be able to be close to rose because rose can be on one side of the fence and babe can be on the other but she won't be able to nurse overnight she will have access to water and hay and grass so if she gets thirsty or hungry she's not going to go hungry right so let's go walk over we'll show you the corral set up real quickly and then we'll try to get babe in there for the night now tonight we do still have to milk rose because uh it's part of the normal routine tomorrow will actually be the very first day that we're gonna milk only once we'll milk first thing tomorrow morning so let's walk over to the corral and then we'll see if we can get baby in there so this is the corral system that we've set up we built this out of 12 foot corral panels for those of you who aren't familiar with what corral panels are they're big metal fence panels that don't go into the ground permanently they're movable they just sit on top of the ground and they go together with these pins so you can take it apart and move it around if you want to so this is where we set it up for now is again all 12 foot panels and then here we left one of the panels to be able to open and we'll use that like a gate so once we get babe inside of it we'll be able to swing this one shut and then actually put the pins in place and she'll be in there overnight so it's going to be a good system like i said the part i like about it is that they can still be close to each other see each other they're not actually separated she'll be safe here overnight so that we can get the milk in the morning so babe must have heard that it's time for her to be locked up or knows our plan anyway she's getting a bedtime snack it's uh you know it's almost 9 00 pm so it's not early in the evening and we'll be back here in the morning probably by 7 a.m to milk rose so this is one of the reasons why we need to do this separation thing babe drinks like this all day long she's got a growing appetite because she's a growing calf so in order for us to get really any milk at all we need to separate overnight so we get some milk in the morning as soon as she's done nursing we'll lead her into the corral area so we can get rose up on the stand for this last nighttime milking well looks like she's done nursing so we're going to try to shoe her into the pen and see if we can get her locked up for the night okay babe all right that went pretty smoothly all right well i would say that was a success i think the area that we built the gate here was perfect because we could kind of get her into this rounded corner here and then she just kind of ran right in so i think that that is perfect so now we're actually gonna go milk rose we'll catch you guys back early tomorrow morning so we can see how much milk that we get from rose our first time and then after we milk tomorrow morning we're actually going to bring you guys along for all of the chores tomorrow morning because you guys have been telling us that you missed seeing all of the animals we want to show you everything that's going on with the animals on all the different parts of the homestead uh we're excited to bring you along so you can see how everything is growing we'll be back in a youtube second well good morning everybody it is 7am the next morning we're out here ready to milk we've got all of our equipment we're gonna go drop this off in the bar and then we're gonna take a quick peek at babe see how she did overnight and then we'll get rose up on the milking stand and we'll see if we get more milk this morning so far both of them are pretty calm we haven't heard any kind of noisiness no struggle to get in with our calf or out with the mom so i think things are going well i think it probably helped that babe had a nice big belly full of milk before we separated last night but let's get going so we can see how everything is going to turn out this morning morning rose excuse us mama good morning babe you look pretty relaxed this morning for being separated overnight from your mom well guys she's just laying down kind of chilling out she's actually chewing her cud like maybe she was eating some grass or a little bit of hay last night so she looks pretty content yep she's definitely chewing her cud look at that but mom is getting a little bit antsy so let's get ready to milk we can see how much we get from rose this morning gotta wait a little bit mama are you ready she's nice and full so do so well she did a great job she's been such a good milker it's been a long time actually that she's kicked at all on the milking stand and that feels very heavy like she had a lot of milk in there so we're very pleased with that so we're gonna let her out and let out babe before we take care of the milk inside you ready to come out with your mama babe well i think that that was a success the nice thing about waiting until babe was older to start this process is that you know she is eating other things and drinking water she it wasn't so ravenous to get out and just you know so hungry in the morning because she hadn't had anything else to eat she's got grass she's got hay and she's got water so even though she is nursing now and drinking a little bit of milk um you know it wasn't such a big deal to her to be taken away overnight all right let's get this milk in the house and find out how much we got well i can tell you it looks like way more than a quart of milk let's strain it and get it in some jars and see how much is actually here so so well a little over a gallon and a half i would say that that is way better than the court that we've been getting the last few days so we're extremely happy with that let's get this put away we need to wash up the milking equipment and then let's get outside and take care of all of the other animals now that we're done with all of the milking chores it's time to do all of the other animals we need to go let the chickens and ducks out the ducklings out we need to go feed the beef cows feed the rabbits and go feed the pigs so we still have a lot of morning chores to do i've got the duck and chicken feed ready let's go do those next well let's let out the chickens and the ducks from the hoop coop i did also want to give you guys an update on this chicken moat deer fencing system that we have here the double fencing all the way around this one acre plot we did that to keep deer out of our orchard with the thought process of deer won't jump a double fence that's four to six feet away from each other because they don't have very good depth perception we've had quite a few questions from you guys about well how is it working and actually it's working great and we're so happy none of our baby orchard trees out here have any signs of any nibbles from deer and we spend quite a bit of time out here you know with animals and the little garden we have planted here in the orchard we haven't seen any deer poop at all we have been seeing tons of deer around though in our past year where rose and babe eat we've seen deer in there we've seen deer just all around but none of them have jumped into or made it into our orchard area so it is working and we're so pleased with that okay let's let the chickasaw and the ducks out of the hoop coop is okay let's go let out the ducklings you guys haven't seen them in a while you are going to be shocked at how big they are so the last time you guys saw the ducklings they were pretty little and we're actually still having them in our chicken tractors since that time they've grown a lot they're six and a half weeks old now so they're not quite old enough yet to join the rest of the flock with the chickens and the other ducks we'll have to wait till they're about eight weeks or a little more before we do that but they've outgrown the chicken tractors so we built them this little temporary pen here out of some old fencing that we had we'll take this down and we're not using it anymore but it's just a nice temporary spot for them to be able to be outside in the sun and as you can hear they're excited to get out now we're raising two new kinds of ducks here on the homestead we're raising pecans which are the big white ducks like you see on the aflac commercials sarah and i used to actually raise a lot of peak and ducks when we lived in arizona and we absolutely loved them they are a big duck they're a multi-purpose breed so they're good for meat and they're also very good egg layers and then the other breed that we're raising are called welsh harlequin now they're a little bit smaller than the pecans but they're also a very good layer and they don't fly neither do the pecans none of the ducks that we have our flight can fly so they will stay in this chicken moat area okay they're too excited i'm gonna go let them out you guys are gonna be amazed at how big they are at six and a half weeks old can you believe how big they are i know you guys have missed us having a lot of ducks here on the homestead i miss having a lot of ducks to be honest if i had to pick whether or not we have a lot of chickens or a lot of ducks i would always pick a lot of ducks because to me they just have so much personality and they're so fun to watch now it's been a long time since we have shown you the rabbits giving you an update on the rabbits now rabbits are something that we are always going to have on the homestead they are a very sustainable type of meat that you can raise on your homestead we have access to a lot of other types of meat animals these days and so our need to raise a lot of rabbits for meat for our family just isn't there anymore so recently we did scale way back on our breeding stock of rabbits we actually have kept one breeding pair of samantha our daughter her new zealands there was a local family that was very much interested in raising the silver fox rabbit so we actually sold the rest of our silver fox breeders to that family now rabbits are something that can be scaled up very quickly in a situation where we need to rely again heavily on rabbits so for now we just have one pair of breeders that are new zealand whites so so next up is our cattle you can see that they're laying down well maybe you can't see but they're way over there laying down in the shade uh it's already pretty sunny out this morning i saw them all out grazing earlier so now it's nap time i think they like to lay down in the shade to chew their cud so i'm gonna go get them a bucket of range cubes we told you guys a few weeks ago that we're training them to come every morning to when we shake a bucket and have a bucket full of range cubes it makes moving them from one pasture to the next that much easier so i'm gonna go get a bucket of cubes and then we'll go out and we'll see if we can get them to come up it's also how we count them every day when they're just free ranging i mean this paddock that they're in right now is a very large paddock and so the best way to be able to count them every day and make sure everybody is here is to get them all in one spot by feeding them the range cubes they all come up to one spot and we can count them very easily make sure that everybody is where they're supposed to be our new bull tex is working out really well he's loving having all these ladies and it looks like he's doing his job come on cows come on cows well they're coming one thing that i've learned is that cows don't come fast usually they'll hear you they'll kind of look over your way then they'll think about it for a while decide whether or not they want to come but usually eventually they will come they just kind of walk at their own pace go on cows come on come on cows come on good morning techs there you go so if everybody's here we should have ten cows five calves hudson who's the steer that we're raising for meat and our bull tex now hudson you guys may remember was the calf that our old dairy cow hope raised and he's by far the tamest out of all of these cows he loves to be scratched the rest of the cows are are tame in fact you can go up and pet most of them but they're pretty standoffish they don't really want your attention they kind of tolerate it the calves are always the last to come up in the morning and it's funny that it seems like the cows kind of rotate amongst themselves which cow is going to stay back and watch the calves and make sure that the calves actually do come and as usual the calves are coming up and there's one cow staying back with them just making sure that they're safe so all right now that we've counted all the cattle we made sure everybody is here it's time to go feed the pigs so let's go over and feed the pigs all right last thing we need to do for our morning chores is to go feed the pigs so let's take a walk down there's some news we have to report with the pigs and one other thing around here that we need to talk about now you may notice that it seems just a little bit quieter here on the homestead this morning a lot of times you guys can hear our turkeys in the background but we've actually gotten rid of the rest of the turkeys as you know for the last few years we've been raising a heritage breed of turkey called blue slate turkeys now we actually hatched some of our own and we had quite a few of them we're down to just having three male turkeys left they have gone by now and we've decided that we're going to take a break from raising turkeys we do enjoy raising turkeys and we enjoy having the meat from the turkeys but what we didn't enjoy was having the turkeys all the time which we had to do with the heritage so going forward when we do want to raise some turkeys we're going to go back to raising kind of a faster breed of turkey like the broad breast did for us it just makes more sense financially to not have to feed them year round we have enough other renewable meat sources on the homestead now it's kind of the same mindset that we have with the rabbits so that'll be the plan going forward in the future is to get some more turkeys but there'll be ones that we can raise over the summer butcher in the fall and not have to have them over the winter and everything else all right let's keep heading down toward the pigs before we make it all the way down to the other pigs you might notice here that we have kind of a temporary shoot built this is what we use when we need to load pigs into a trailer we've told you guys in the past that we've been having a problem with our one sow mildred that even though she was in with our bore for a long time six or eight months she was in on and off with him trying to get her bread and we just were not able to get her bread so we made the decision that we were going to get rid of mildred um we actually contacted the original breeder that we got her from and see if she would want her back so that she might be able to try breeding her with a different bore so just yesterday they came and they got her and they took her back to the original farm that she came from we still have myrtle we still have all the other pigs and actually this summer we're going to be getting two new gilts from a farm in wisconsin they're going to be bringing them down so we're excited about that and those two gilts will be registered ipp so we'll be able to start selling registered breeding stock after they grow up a little bit so we're excited about that um we're excited to expand the pigs but when you know mildred just because she wasn't getting pregnant we're just not able to keep her around just to feed her if she isn't serving a purpose here on the farm so hopefully the other breeder will have good luck with her and she'll be able to get her pregnant all right let's head down and take a look at the other pigs so you might notice here in the big pig pen now are our young pigs this one here is ginger she is a registered idaho pasture pig she will be one of our new sows when she gets older all right now she's a guilt which means she's a young pig that hasn't had babies yet and this one here is out of the litter of pigs that myrtle had uh this last winter you can see what a great job she's doing we're actually going to be raising her up for meat but these two are loving being out in this big pen now all this room you can see they have a lot of grass to eat uh they're excited to be out here right now they're excited because i have this bucket in my hand so let's take their food down give it to them because they're excited to eat come on girls um well looks like charlie and myrtle are excited for their breakfast too so let's go over there while we're here good morning well you gotta let me dump it so myrtle this is myrtle she's currently in with charlie are bore hoping that she will get pregnant now charlie has had no problem getting myrtle pregnant in the past in fact the baby that we just saw in the other pen is one of charlie and myrtle's babies so we know the issue with our other sow wasn't charlie uh he was more than willing to try to get her pregnant it just seemed like she had become kind of territorial and aggressive toward charlie and every time she tried to breed her she would you know walk away or push them off or even get a little testy with them sometimes so it just seems like that was really the issue i don't even think that it's necessarily like a health issue with mildred that she couldn't get pregnant i think she became kind of the lead pig over charlie and she wouldn't let him breed her anymore so we're hoping that by sending her to another farm uh that they'll have better luck with her uh we won't be getting her back we didn't send her there just to get bread and come back uh they're actually gonna be keeping her and breeding with their bore from here on out but we're hoping that myrtle will get pregnant here soon we just put her in with charlie last night if she gets pregnant right away within the next couple weeks she'll have be having babies sometime between the middle and end of october so you guys will be watching for that if you're interested in raising some idaho pasture pigs these won't be registered because myrtle isn't registered but we will have baby ipps again for sale in the fall hopefully well morning chores are complete well morning animal chores are complete now we move on to all the other things that we have to do around the homestead today taking care of the gardens making sure everything is getting watered and just staying on top of all the little odds and ends generally in the course of the day our morning chores take about two hours and our evening chores do also making sure that everybody is fed and watered in the morning letting them out in the evening putting them away and in between there like heaven said is when we're keeping up with gardens and any projects that we have going on spending time with our girls that kind of thing so we always like to give you guys a true picture of what homesteading is like it's a lot of work most days we work a good 12 hours we take a very short break for lunch but you know it's a life that we absolutely love we wouldn't trade it for the world i would much rather work 12 to 14 hours a day every single day out in the heat taking care of our gardens and taking care of the animals than being stuck behind a desk so i'm glad that those days are behind us and this is what we're doing now it is a great life so you guys that's where we're going to end the video today we're so glad that you came with us while we separated our cow and our calf for the first time so we could get a really nice milking this morning and taking care of all the animals it was good that you guys had an opportunity to see them all and hear our updates so if you're enjoying our channel and our videos make sure that you hit the subscribe button below make sure you give this video a thumbs up and as always really the best way that you can help us here on the homestead is just to share our videos on all your social media until next time thank you so much for stopping by our homestead take care and god bless god bless

Channel: Living Traditions Homestead

Views: 102,199

Rating: 4.974966 out of 5

Keywords: Living Traditions Homestead, Missouri, Ozark's, homesteading, Ozarks, self-sufficient, homesteaders, unjobbing

Id: eN4HrrN7PVI

Length: 33min 9sec (1989 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 23 2021