Til the Cow Comes Home

"The Jersey cattle has a small deer-like head, muzzle fine and dark and encircled by a light color, horns small, crumpled, and of amber color, chest broad and deep, back straight, tail fine, udder full in form, well up behind and running well forward, milk veins prominent, escutcheon or milk mirror high and broad and full on thighs." — S. G. Goodrich, 1885
Source: S. G. Goodrich, The Animal Kingdom Illustrated (New York: A. J. Johnson & Co., 1885)


We are still shopping for a milk cow, but in the meantime, I started buying raw milk locally from a grassfed Jersey-cross cow. It is the same price as what I pay for Horizon organic milk, which is pasteurized and homogenized and comes from confinement cows, so I was confident that I was making a better deal.

This was a great plan, but like so many of my great plans, there was a major flaw that only revealed itself once I implemented it. In this case, it was my assumption that we would use the same amount of raw milk that we did of the store stuff. Reality? We sucked down a whole gallon in less than 24 hours and repeated that scenario the next day. True, my chocolate-milk-loving nephew was here, but he had been here for a week before we started getting the raw milk, and there was no big difference in our milk consumption. We often have to throw out the remainder of a gallon because it goes bad before we can use it all: Nathaniel was really the only one who drank it.

But the raw milk is different. It's good and good for you, as they say, and we do not want to go back to our pre-raw milk days.

This situation has kicked up a notch the urgency with which we are hunting us a bodacious bovine of our very own. Green grass we have a gracious plenty of. Green m00-lah to pay retail for a gallon of raw milk every other day is limited.