Book Recomendation: Keeping a Family Cow

Keeping a Family Cow: The Complete Guide for Home-Scale, Holistic Dairy Producers

This is a great read for anyone, even if you live in an apartment in a big city, you will find out a lot of interesting things about the history of the dairy industry, food safety, and raising a healthy family.  You'll find recipes for various milk products you can make in your kitchen at home.  Not all the claims are substantiated, but there is a lot of research referenced and a fairly impressive bibliography in the back.  This is not the blind dogma I see in some other pro raw milk propaganda.

For the cow-curious, the book further details a lot about how to care for a cow on as little as one acre with just a family garage for a barn, and details many other benefits of having a family cow besides fresh milk and homemade milk products for the family table.  (High quality feed for chickens and pigs from waste milk, beef, and garden fertilizer...)

I still think large raw milk dairies and bottling plants are stupid.  One mistake with one cow can contaminate the whole batch.  Much better to work with a single cow.  Even with a single cow, mastitis usually only affects one quarter at a time, and is easily detected.  The affected quarter could be milked separately and fed to chickens.  Fecal contamination is harder to detect, but the book outlines a strict protocol for barn cleanliness, cow cleanliness, and preventing the cow from kicking and getting her feet near the milk.  I'm satisfied that fresh milk from my own cow could potentially be cleaner than any of the vegetative foods I eagerly pluck raw and devour right in the garden.

I'm cow-curious, but don't see how having a dairy animal is compatible with my current schedule...  Speaking of, time to go, I'm late bringing the sheep in for the night.

Sleep and Emotional Stability

Just a very brief contemplation tonight.  Does my improved health, and decreased need for sleep have anything to do with increased anxiety?  I have fewer prone hours to work out my stresses each night...

On the other hand, a lot has changed, I've got the farm to manage, not letting myself let chores slide as much now that I don't have the tired and sore excuse.  I'm constantly counting pennies and wondering when the farm will become a profit center rather than an expense...  (Latest investment is 9k, expected to pay for itself over 10 years.)  My job is interesting, but I'm a one man show, no teammates to rely on and chat about my work with...

Either way, I should stock up on more dark chocolate (aka flavored magnesium supplements), and I'm trying to start getting to bed early enough to go back to sleep for a bit before my morning alarm.

Poor, Underappreciated Margarine

Everyone knows Margarine is evil.  You ask the traditional nutritionist and they say it has too much fat, you ask the rogue nutritionist and they say it's hydrogenated oil high in Omega 6 and possibly rancid.

But it wasn't always that way.

Margarine, as originally invented, is an emulsification of skim milk and tallow.  Yes tallow, the ultimate perfect fat (when from grass finished beef) in my diet plan.  I regularly render large amounts of tallow and then it just sits there unless I want to do some deep fat frying, because it's too hard to easily spoon out for everyday cooking.

Making margarine from tallow would be a great way to serve more tallow, and there are options for making dairy free margarine for those allergic to dairy and looking for a decent spread or soft cooking fat.

Andreas Viestad suggests limitless possibilities with emulsification of fats and labels them all margarine.  You could use tallow, coconut oil, coconut water, brightly colored juices, etc...

This vegan recipe describes well the emulsification process, using the freezer to cool the fat quickly while emulsified.

denisedaniel concocted a recipe using tallow/lard and cashew milk to get around major allergy problems.

Lost Formula has bulk recipes for margarine.  (From 1927?  Possibly a rough translation.) That include several different fat alternatives and are flavored with a bit of cream.

The Washington Post has a couple additional recipes:

• Homemade Herbed Margarine

• Homemade Margarine With Coconut and Ginger

I think this is going to become an experiment soon in my kitchen.

Shearing Day

First of all, if you're a shepherd who does his/her own shearing, I recommend the book Shearing Day, although I'm going to disagree in a bit on the diet recommendations within it.  The tips on how to prepare the shears and how to hold the sheep were very helpful.

The biggest health related note about shearing, is that this is an endurance exercise.  Champion shearers can finish a sheep in a couple minutes, and they maintain that pace for eight hours.  A sheep can weigh up to 300 lbs, and although most of the time the majority of their weight is on the floor, you have to move that weight around in a precise manner through six positions to keep the sheep calm enough to remain passive while you get to every inch of it's body.  (And that's after you've managed to catch a sheep and move it to the shearing floor.)  That is a lot of work.

I'm no Champion shearer.  I'm not even sure I've really understood position 1 yet, and I couldn't tell you how to transition to position 2.  Last night we spent some time in position 1, got some belly wool clipped and hoof trimming done.  By this time I was exhausted and called it a night.  But the sheep was also exhausted, and decided not to try very hard to get up.  I took advantage of her passive nature and sat down beside her to clean off her head and shoulder in a completely inefficient pattern.  Eventually I decided I was really really done, and rolled the sheep onto her feet to help her up.

Afterward, I was sore.  There is lots of bending over from the waist going on during shearing, and the legs knew it.  I was severely handicapped at bending over, climbing stairs, or even rising from a chair.  I could walk or stand fairly comfortably.  I went to bed and fell asleep with my glasses on and book out while the lovely heated mattress pad soothed my tired body.

In the fibromyalgia days, overdoing it to the point of muscle exhaustion would have been followed by a night of cramps, a half day of walking with crutches while I stretched out those cramps, and a week or two of recovery through drugged sleep.  Now?  I'm a little sore, but I'm recovered enough to consider doing it again tonight.

Here's a couple of my girls before and after shearing:

A bit about diet.  Yes, I was starving when I came in.  I had exceeded my aerobic capacity while shearing.  The diet recommendations in the book reflect standard recommendations for other endurance sports, eating a high complex carbohydrate diet every two hours, with lots of water to lubricate that carbohydrate digestion.  I see no reason why I can't train my body otherwise, like a ketogenic endurance runner would.  I think on future shearing sessions I'm going to bring my heart rate monitor and see if I can set a slower pace that my metabolism can better keep up with.  If I can't keep my heart rate down, then perhaps I should shorten the sessions.