Good Tasting Milk
February 22nd, 2007 by Jim VAt the beginning of 2007, my son Nathan, who is living in Virginia, purchased a cow. (He has written about this in an earlier blog post.) He is accustomed to good Jersey milk, but has discovered that this cow is giving exceptionally good tasting milk. This has resulted in a number of discussions, in Virginia and in Minnesota, about what produces the best tasting milk. His cow is probably a lower producing cow, giving about two gallons of milk a day (correct me if I am wrong, Nathan) and this probably helps contribute to the sweetness of the milk. I read some place that every cow puts the same amount of vitamins into her milk regardless of the volume. This should translate to a higher concentration of vitamins in the milk of lower producing cows and I assume that this will translate in most cases to better tasting milk. The hay that Nathan is feeding his cow is grass with some clover. (Again, Nathan, correct me if I am wrong.) This hay is coming off of ground that should be well mineralized and I suspect that the hay has high sugar content. His cow is not being fed grain. Meanwhile back here in Minnesota, we are feeding hay (again no grain) that is mostly alfalfa. This hay comes from our neighbor, who doesn’t completely understand how to optimally manage the soil. I am beginning to think that grass with high sugar content is important for making the best tasting milk. During the summer, when our cows are on our orchard grass and clover pasture, the milk is always the best tasting. During winter the richness of the taste drops some, except for a couple of years ago when we fed some rye grass hay. While we were feeding this rye grass hay (rye grass is high in sugars) we had excellent tasting milk. Family members were commenting on how sweet the milk was tasting. Obviously breed and/or genetics can influence the flavor of milk. We have Jersey cows but are also milking a neighbor’s Red Holstein cow. The milk from this Red Holstein cow is generally the last milk anyone in our house wants to drink. We keep the Red Holstein milk separate from the Jersey milk.
Now we have some real milk connoisseurs in our house that can notice the least little off taste. These connoisseurs also prefer to drink milk that is three days old, since it seems to be the creamiest at day three. Day three also happens to be the day that the anti-bacterial properties of milk are at their peak. The past weekend one of the milk connoisseurs noted that the milk was not tasting quite right, and had a slight bitter after taste. My immediate reaction was, “Oh no, now I have one more thing to figure outâ€. Immediately my mind went through the list of causes of off-tasting milk that we have encountered in the past:
1) Do we have a cow in heat? In the past one of our cows has given off tasting milk when she comes into heat.
2) Does any cow have mastitis?
3) Are feeding anything, like garlic that might be coming through in the milk? We have done this to help eliminate mastitis. Once someone got milk from us when we were feeding garlic and then called asking why the milk tasted different - not bad, but different. Actually I like “garlic†milk, but onions’ coming through the milk doesn’t taste good. My son, Nathan, has complained that a lot of wild chives grow in the spring in Virginia and can result in off-tasting milk.
4) Do we have a cow that is close to freshening and we haven’t dried her off? The milk taste terrible when it is changing over to colostrum. We did this once.
5) Do we have any sanitation problems? Is the milk getting cooled properly?
But this time we haven’t had the one cow in heat, none of the cows have mastitis, no cows are about to freshen, all I am feeding is alfalfa hay, and I couldn’t find any breakdowns in our sanitation procedures. But then I realized that I have been pushing minerals since December, especially higher levels of copper. The higher levels of copper appear to have improved the health of our cows. Our water is high in iron, which ties up copper, so the higher levels of copper may be necessary on my farm. But copper sulfate tastes horribly bitter. So I decided to eliminate the minerals for a few days, and within about three days the milk returned to its normal good taste. So I suppose that I have filled up the cows need for copper and now long term need to reduce the level of copper that I am feeding. Seems that the milk will be a good barometer of when I am feeding too much copper.
I am curious to hear other farmer’s experiences with making exceptionally good tasting milk. Anyone out there have other suggestions on how to produce exceptionally good tasting milk?
February 23rd, 2007 at 10:35 am
Jim,
I don’t know what would do the trick, all I remember was the milk you brought up here was the best our family ever tasted, bar none! I hope me not having an answer won’t stop any other comments but taste seems to be of much higher quality in just about everything when a person gets away from what’s considered the norm nowdays. Take our beef for instance, it has a flavor that our customers say cannot be bought in any store and I agree. What the people are tasting when they eat our beef is real beef, nothing added.
Our potatoes are totally different than store bought or even the ones a person can “glean” from the field of the potato farms around here. The reason is simple, although I think we can still apply for a few million dollar grant to figure it out, the reason is good healthy soil. No fetilizer, no sprays, no nothing and we get bumper crops of the best tasting spuds on earth. Of course there’s rocks in the soil so that would make commercial production here unfeasable to modern ag.
The same with all the other vegetables on the farm, the taste difference is like night and day. Healthy soils transilate into healthy plants and gradually healthy meat and milk. I don’t soil test much at all, just use the old fashion “farmer’s eye”, rotate the old fashion way, use solid manure wisely, what can I say…..it works good! I don’t know if it’s just me, but I think we as people have a way of overcomplicating something that’s basically simple. It all starts in the soil, and I’m a firm believer one can make a dead farm bloom again with very little boughten inputs. Big Ag don’t like talk like this, but so what. Another thing people should watch out for is Big Ag’s influence on even homestaed thinking. All the little details that we are supposed to being watchful for as far as soil fertility and all the stuff in reality are not all that important. Heck, I don’t even feed our over 100 cows any mineral! None! And we still get a 96 percent calving rate! And the critters thrive except when one mineral is in short supply, that’s H2O
If’n a storms coming I hope it goes well down there!
February 23rd, 2007 at 11:32 am
Tom,
I think you are right that it all starts in the soil. Any problems I have always seem to start when we are feeding hay, which we buy from other farmers. At Polyface they are thinking that the exceptionally good tasting milk is due to the way that they have cared for the soil over the last 40 years. Too bad that industrial ag does not care much about taste. I suspect that improved taste usually translates to more nutrition, so ultimately it means that industrial ag cares nothing about our health.
Jim V
February 23rd, 2007 at 3:47 pm
Hi Jim, If ya asked my son “Anyone out there have other suggestions on how to produce exceptionally good tasting milk”? He’d tell ya to add chocolate.
We are toyin with the idea of gettin a cow. How much time a day will it take to manage a milk producing cow. How often does a cow need freshening. What breed do you suggest for a want to be farmer that knows squat about cows?
Guy
February 23rd, 2007 at 5:31 pm
Guy,
With a milk cow, the biggest time commitment is milking. My daughter milks three cows in the morning in about 30 minutes and in the evening we take about an hour for chores, including milk handling and setup and cleanup of the milking system. At night I milk while the children fill watertanks, feed hay and do any bedding that needs to be done. We use a bucket milking system and have to manually clean the claw when we are done. In the evening when I am helping, we do extra things that need to be done, like move cows to new paddocks in the summer, fill stock tanks with water, etc. If you hand milk, the setup and cleanup of milking equipment is much faster, but hand milking can take a long time if the cow is a hard milker. If you get one cow with nice long teats and large orifices, hand milking can go very fast and total chore time might be closer to 30 minutes (and you do this twice a day.) Some people will only milk once a day, you just need to make sure that any high producing cows do not get mastitis. We error on the safe side by milking twice a day. When you start having a calf to deal with, you are adding extra work. In theory you can have a calf every year, but I breed our cows to calf roughly very year and a half. As the lactation goes longer the milk volume goes down, but the butterfat goes up, plus the longer lactation helps keep the cows from getting too thin (we don’t feed grain). I have one cow that I bought as a cull cow. She was culled because the original owner could not get her bred. We have milked her for 4 years without her calving. In the summer she still gives three gallons a day and now in the winter she produces about two gallons. We prefer Jersey cows - they are smaller, can be easier to manage, and give higher butterfat milk. For your first cow you probably want to go to a local dairyman and have him pick out a gentle cow. Often if you ask for a lower producing cow, they will be happy to sell one to you at a reasonable price. The cow my son purchased in Virginia was a lower producing cow that the owners were happy to sell. Make sure you don’t get a cow with high somatic cell counts - which is really a low grade chronic mastitis. My first cow was one that has four good quarters, but the orifice on one teat is plugged, so in actuality only three quarters work. As a result the farmer was thrilled to sell her. Before you buy a cow, you should probably try hand milking it - if you are going to hand milk. Some of the modern dairy cows can be a real bear to milk by hand. Having to milk a hard milking cow twice a day year round can be a real pain. Sometimes having cows can get old, like when you go to visit relatives for the day and end up milking at 11pm, but I think it is an excellent tool for teaching children responsiblity and the self-control necessary to carry out tasks that are not always easy. I think it also gives children an opportunity to learn to think and trouble shoot rather than just always having the right answer given to them.
Hope this helps. Feel free to fire away with other questions. Sometimes it is hard to remember things that someone new to milking might need to know.
Jim V
February 24th, 2007 at 2:33 pm
Thanks Jim, I saw a short film clip on commercial milk on one of the blogs and I can’t get what I saw out of my mind. I have not enjoyed milk since. Again thanks for takin the time to answer my questions.
Guy
March 15th, 2007 at 4:13 pm
Jim,
I’m so glad to find someone knowledgable! We have a Jersey cow that will freshen in August. Her milk supply has dwindled to 1 1/3 gallons per day. Just this morning she gave one gallon that tastes very salty. There were no lumps in the strainer, however. Can this be mastitis with no lumps?
We recently got rid of a Jersey because she had chronic mastitis that just seemed to switch from quarter to quarter. We replaced her with the current cow and now fear the same problem. Are we doing something wrong? My daughters milk and take care of her. She eats corn and hay. We’re willing to try about anything we can. Thank you so much for your time.
Wendy
March 15th, 2007 at 4:54 pm
Wendy,
Right before a cow freshens the milk can start tasting bad, but you are far enough from calving that there should not be any problems. Do you have a California Mastitis test that you can test her milk with? There are also other quick little mastitis tests that you can use. You should probably find some way of testing her for mastitis. It could be mastitis, or it just could be something she is eating. Have you just put out salt and she pigged out on salt? Is she eating a lot of kelp? Are you giving her minerals and they are coming through the milk? If it looks like mastitis, try feeding her garlic powder mixed with molasses. Keep feeding this for a while. The garlic may come through in the milk, but it will help clear the mastitis. If it is mastitis, post another comment and I can give you a number of additional things to do. Are you feeding any minerals? What part of the country are you in? The soils are more mineral deficient in some portions of the country.
Jim V