We aren’t just growing food, we’re growing freedom!
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In the last post, I wrote about a great system for keeping the goats from stepping in, or spilling their milk when I’m milking them. You can read it here. This system has worked well for me since I adopted it. In fact, it hasn’t failed once. However, I HAVE failed! It’s happened a few times now and while it doesn’t usually result in spilled milk, it has resulted in stress on animals and myself. Although, it has made for a very entertaining story! Ladies and gentlemen, this is the goat milk event at the Growing Freedom Homestead Rodeo!
There are two specific commitments I have made to myself regarding this blog. One is to not ever use AI to generate content. The other is to post twice a week on Monday and Thursday. I may drop down to once per week while I’m building our home but not until then. I like to have posts all written out and ready to go so that they can be scheduled ahead of time but, to be honest, I’m not always really great about that. Sometimes I’m still making changes on the day of. On Monday, my morning was busy cleaning because the real estate agent was coming to show the house we’re temporarily living in. Then I sat down to get the post finished up and Mary reminded me that I needed to go pick something up. It was an hour away and I figured I could get it and be back pretty quickly and I would have time to finish my post. What I didn’t anticipate was that
My family has been using raw goat milk for over eleven years now. I’ve heard of the “dangers” of raw milk, especially back before it was more popular. If you go to your favorite search engine and type in “dangers of raw milk” you’ll see all kinds of scary germs and diseases associated with raw milk. In all the time we’ve been milking goats, we’ve never had any kind of adverse health problem or disease from using it. That being said, in my experience, there are some real dangers of raw milk that we have noticed.
Today I want to talk about efficiency. Efficiency is something that I can geek out over! It is something that is becoming a bigger part of our homestead and will be a common topic on this blog. While I was working on making my shoe business more efficient in order to compete with much larger companies, I had to really focus in on getting my process as efficient as possible. I found that the areas that you can really save time and energy are the things that you do every day, over and over. If you decide to get dairy animals of any kind, you will find that it is a daily commitment.
As I mentioned in an earlier post, I have been working on getting my milking routine more efficient. I’ve decided to just do a series of posts to show the changes instead of trying to cram it all in one post. The unique system I want to share today is something I came up with a few years ago. I see pictures of cows, and even some goats who will just stand still while they are milked. In all the years I’ve been doing this, I haven’t had a single goat that will do that! We put their head in a stanchion, give them treats, sing lullabies, etc., but no matter how well behaved they may be most of the time, it only takes one stamp of the foot to put their poopy, dirty hooves in the milk bucket! It usually happens close to the end of the milking session too so it ruins even more of the milk! Because of this, I’ve just decided