You can have a Family Milk Cow! (No experience necessary)

Overwhelmed by the idea of owning a milk cow? Think she’ll be too big to handle? Or nervous that a milk cow = no more vacations or time off?

What about choosing a cow? How do you even go about finding a good one?

We have answers! In this class, you will learn what you need to know to find the right cow for you… and how to milk her and manage her. You’ll learn how easy it is to integrate your milking schedule into your other activities, and how you can still ‘have a life’ while enjoying the best, freshest milk and dairy products you’ve ever had!

And you don’t need to have grown up on a farm. This step-by-step class gives you the confidence to go from not knowing anything about handling and milking a cow to making sure your family always has safe, clean, real milk.

You’ll know exactly how to find and choose the right cow, what (inexpensive) milking supplies to get, how to hand milk your cow, and how to properly handle your milk. Soon, milking time will be a pleasant break from the digital day, and your family and friends will love the incredible home-raised dairy you provide!

Your homestead will become a more Independent Homestead. You’ll make fewer trips to the feed store, won’t need to buy compost for the garden, and will have incredibly fertile pasture, all thanks to your gentle family milk cow. 

You work so hard to provide healthy food for your family. Dairy is one of the most important to get right. Why not make the leap? 

You’ll never again worry about hormones or questionable additives to milk and dairy. Real butter, real cream and real, traditional cheese will no longer be luxuries. If you buy an A2A2 cow, you’ll know for certain what kinds of milk proteins you and your family are consuming. And you’ll know exactly what your cow eats.

And a happy, grass-fed cow is oblivious to inflation or supply chain issues. She makes beautiful milk for you no matter what it costs at the store.

Your Skill Instructor: Shawn Dougherty of Sow’s Ear Farm and The One Cow Revolution:

Shawn and Beth Dougherty have been farming together since the 1980s, for the last 20 years in eastern Ohio, where they manage 90 acres, much of it designated by the state as ‘not suitable for agriculture’. 

Using intensive grazing as the primary source of food energy, they raise dairy and beef cows, sheep, farm-fed hogs, and a variety of poultry, producing most of the food, feed and fertility for humans and animals, on the farm.  

Concerned that farming is so often dependent upon multiple off-farm resources — from feed, fuel and fertilizer to water and electricity — their ongoing project is to identify and test the means by which farming was done for centuries with a minimum of off-farm inputs. 

Their research has led them to identify grass conversion, especially the daily conversion of grass into milk by dairy ruminants, as a key to whole-farm sustainability, combined with the integrated nutrient feed-backs that are possible with a community of diverse animal and plant species, domestic and native. They are the authors of The Independent Farmstead, Chelsea Green Press 2016.