Enjoy fresh, real milk, fewer trips to the feedstore, and incredible soil fertility with your Family Milk Cow!
Do you want to be more food resilient and know that no matter what, you can feed your family? Then the most important step you can take is not a garden, not chickens, not even pigs. It’s to put a dairy cow on your property, and milk her!
With your family milk cow, you’ll turn yesterday’s grass into today’s clean milk and tomorrow’s food! (Yogurt, butter, cheeses, kefir, and more)
Not only will your gentle cow feed your entire family, her milk will also feed all your animals — dogs, cats, pigs, and even chickens. Plus, she’ll provide incomparable fertility to your soil, your gardens, and your pasture.
A grass-fed family milk cow is THE key to running your entire homestead on “local sunlight”, with a minimum of outside inputs or stress. And managed properly, she’ll provide you with both incredible benefits while you still live your normal life!You save money on feed. You enjoy virtually free, ‘beyond organic’ dairy products, and your family and livestock all eat healthy. Regardless of what’s happening in the world. That’s resilience! (And delicious!)
204 minutes
Class duration
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 Traditional Skills Lesson Plan
With Keeping the Family Dairy Cow, you'll go from homestead to Independent Homestead!
- Lesson 1: You Can Raise Grass-Fed Cows
- Lesson 2: Meet Shawn
- Lesson 3: Get Your Supplies
- Lesson 4: Breaking Through the Barriers to your Milk Cow
- Lesson 5: Getting Your Infrastructure Ready
- Lesson 6: Finding the Right Milk Cow for You
- Lesson 7: Feeding Your Milk Cow
- Lesson 8: Gathering Your Milking Supplies
- Lesson 9: Hand Milking Your Family Cow with Shawn
- Lesson 10: Milking and Musings with Beth
- Lesson 11: Handling Your Fresh Milk
- Lesson 12: Caring for your Cow
- Lesson 13: Breeding
- Lesson 14: Calving
- Lesson 15: Taking a Break and Making it Work
- Lesson 16: Your Next Steps
- BONUS: FAQ Video Section…
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.
Continue Building Your Traditional Skills … Confidently!
Fermenting Vegetables
Traditionally Cured Pork
Nutritious Bone Broths
Raised Bed Gardens
Garden Season Extension
Pastured Poultry
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