Cows have earned their reputation as the gold standard for milk production, and for good reason. On a family farm or homesteadcows play a crucial role, serving as more than livestock — they’re the heart of a sustainable way of life.
If you’re considering investing in a cow for your farm or homestead, read on to discover the many benefits of keeping a family cow.
The following excerpt is from One-Cow Revolution by Beth & Shawn Dougherty. It has been adapted for the web.
Cows Rule: The Benefits of a Family Cow
Humans have been partnering with ruminants for millennia to build an abundant, resilient foodscape. Whether we’re looking at the savannahs of Africa or South America, the steppes of Asia, or the Great Plains of North America, grasslands have played an irreplaceable role. Cows have not been our only partners; wild herds of deer, antelope, reindeer, buffalo, and so on have been and still are the basis of many foodways. Among domestic animals, sheep and goats outnumber bovines by a large margin. Each of these species can be the intermediary giving us access to the food energy in cellulose.
In different times and places, the human preference for domestic species has been a response to several factors. Our first step when we came to this farm was to buy dairy goats. We had several reasons for this choice, some better, it turns out, than others. The first reason was the best: we brought in goats because the land was growing goat food. That is, and always will be, the first consideration when choosing an appropriate ruminant for your homestead. Since your land is already growing a crop—native, perennial, volunteer, self-renewing, and ubiquitous—the next step is to bring in the animal that eats that crop.
Our second reason for choosing goats over, say, cows, was our belief that, for people getting started in dairying, goats were just going to be
easier. There, we couldn’t have been more mistaken. In a contest between goats and cows for ease of husbandry, cows sweep the field.
One difference becomes visible about five minutes after you bring the animal on the farm: cows will stay in a fence, and goats won’t.
Sure, we all know someone, somewhere, who says her goats aren’t an escape issue, and such people deserve our congratulations, but most goats are Houdinis for whom an 8-foot (2.5 m) brick wall is scarcely an obstacle. Cows, on the other hand, can be confined with a single strand of electrified twine—and they’re not too particular about whether it’s electrified.
Cows, at least as presently managed by humans, are also much easier to keep healthy than are goats.
There are a variety of reasons for this, mostly having to do with management styles, but the long and short of it is that you can manage a cow or herd of cows for years without using meds or wormers, while by far the majority of goat keepers have regular recourse to a whole pharmacopeia of chemicals to keep their animals healthy. Further, unlike goats, with their multiple-offspring births and the tangles of legs and heads that can ensue, a well-managed cow almost never needs help at birthing time. Given all this, we can’t help feeling the only thing that’s really easier about goats is lifting them
off the ground.
There are other reasons we’re cow people.
Taste is one—we just like cow’s milk better than goat’s milk, at least for drinking (chevre is another matter). The abundant, self-rising butterfat in cows’ milk is another: cream without machine separation. But there are two more reasons that would, even if we left our food preferences aside, incline us to keep cows whenever the native plant communities made it an option.
The first is in the nature of forages.
If you’re growing briars and shrubs, you’re growing goat food, and you should keep goats. If you’re growing grass and forbs, that’s cow (or sheep) food. But over time you’ll notice an important difference in how these forages respond to impact (grazing).
Grass likes to be grazed, and gets thicker and lusher under good grazing practices. Bushes and briars, by and large, will be damaged or eradicated by regular grazing. The more they are grazed, the less there will be; it’s like planned obsolescence. There is more than one reason for this difference in plant response, and that discussion belongs in another book (one we’re presently working on), but it is a fact that good grazing of grass pasture is going to produce more forage over time, and browsing brush mostly won’t.
The second reason we lean heavily toward cows is a simple preference for volume.
We want a lot of milk, and we want it all year. Milk—energy derived from completely local sunlight—is so valuable on the farm that it’s hard to imagine having too much of it. A single cow may easily provide multiple gallons of milk per day on average throughout the whole year or even several years, a feat that would take more than a few goats, which not only produce less milk but have a shorter lactation period.
We don’t mean to say it couldn’t be done, and if your land produces more goat food than cow food we’d encourage you to do itbut these are some of our own reasons for preferring cows—and why the rest of this book is going to focus on milk production from bovines.
Milk Feeds Everything
Now, let’s talk about milk, and the qualities that make it indispensable.
Abundance
Remember, milk comes from cellulose—that primary and superabundant source of food energy for the planet—and ruminants will
give us milk every day.
Nutrition
Milk is a whole food—every mammal on the planet begins its life on a diet of nothing else. Everything a baby mammal needs is present in this one perfect food. Not only does milk provide all our macronutrients, like proteins, fats, and sugars; grazing animals also pass on to us the nutraceutical phytochemicals (read: plant substances that are good for your health) from their forages. That’s as though you, yourself, were eating a diet including hundreds of species of plants—some serious diversity, with all the attendant benefits.
Versatility
Milk feeds everything. Really. Calves, obviously. People, and not just as drinking milk, but as all the probiotic milk ferments, like yogurt, kefir, quark, butter, and the thousands of kinds of cheeses. And then there’s the homestead. Let’s think about it.
Human beings have been milking ruminants for thousands of years, their lives deeply enriched by access to grass energy in the form of milk—lots of milk. More than people can use while it’s fresh. So, what happens to the gallons and gallons of secondary products (skim milk, buttermilk, whey) when milk is processed for storage? What do we do with all those wonderful, perishable nutrients?
We convert them into other forms, by feeding them to pigswho turn them into long-term, on-the-hoof, delicious protein storage; and chickenswho use it to make eggs; and predator- and pest-control animals—dogs and cats—so they know where home is but are still hungry enough to hunt.
Turns out milk is the high-nutrient supplement that ensures farm-fed animals get the proteins and fats they need for health and growth, and daily, or even twice daily, our cup, and theirs, literally overfloweth.
Homesteading—the word means “home-stay” or “homestand”—is about staying put. We arrive at a good place and want to settle down, and grazing animals is how we do it.
All hail to the kitchen garden, bravo to the orchard, warm kudos to the vineyard— these adaptations on the local terroir are greatly to be blessed. But the strength, the durability, and the character of the land are in what the land is already doing, naturally and without assistance—and that’s growing grass. Grass makes soil; grass holds soil; grass produces soil fertility; grass protects soil. And ruminants turn it into milk, daily, forever.
