The Indispensable Family Cow

Community Resilience, Farming & Homesteading

When you have a family cow, you have it all

The cow is the most productive, efficient creature on earth. She will give you fresh milk, cream, butter, and cheese, build human health and happiness, and even turn a profit for homesteaders and small farmers who seek to offer her bounty to the local market or neighborhood. She will provide rich manure for your garden or land, and will enrich the quality of your life as you benefit from the resources of the natural world. .

The following excerpt is from One-Cow Revolution by Beth Dougherty and Shawn Dougherty. It has been adapted for the web.

Twenty years ago, you could have driven back roads over every twist and turn of these hills, from one end of the county to the other, without scaring up a single hand-milked, grass-fed, homestead dairy cow. Once to be found on practically every small farm in the country, in the past seventy years the family dairy cow has nearly reached the point of extinction.

But that’s changing. The family cow has made a comeback, and why? Because for much of the planet, the dairy cow is the pivot around which ecologically sound, small-scale food independence may be built.

Food First

The primary imperatives for human life may be reduced to just two: eat today; make provision to eat tomorrow. That is to say that, along with today’s need for calories, ample and appropriate, we have also to make plans for tomorrow’s meals. We need to farm, today, in ways that ensure our being able to farm tomorrow. That means producing food and fertility.

This is where the intensively grazed ruminant proves her value.

Properly managed grazing ruminants on native pastures not only produce ample high-quality proteins and fats for the human diet in the forms of meat and milk, they also lay down an overall increase in soil organic matter and fertility to assure future harvests.

And because good grazing produces denser pasture stands with deeper roots and shaded soil, holistic pastures will feature drought resistance, an active soil biome, and the healthy mycorrhizal relationships necessary for building complex plant nutrients. Not only ample meat, milk, and dairy products but also rich, bioactive soil fertility are the natural results of keeping a holistically grazed family cow, and more and more folks are finding this out firsthand.

Barriers to Entry

We knew none of this when, having bought that parcel of degraded land above the Ohio River, we began thinking about a dairy cow. We just wanted good milk for our growing family; but when it came to adding a dairy cow to our homestead, we got hung up on the issue of practicability.

Just how much work were we talking about? And where was the time going to come from? What would this cow cost in money and forgone options? When all was said and done, how could we be sure this would be a practical choice? Like most families, we were already busy. We barely managed to show up clean and in nice clothes in all the places we were supposed to; more time at home in muck boots and dirty jeans seemed like retrograde motion. Obviously, for this cow thing to happen, we were going to have to reassess our way of valuing time and physical labor.

Modern Prejudices

Despite years of gardening and other homestead chores, we, like most people in industrialized societies, had an ambiguous relationship with protracted bodily work. Sure, “working out” has value in the general estimation, but the performance of physical labor—dirty, repetitive, physically demanding, productive work—makes modern people uneasy. We are so used to substituting mechanical labor for human effort in every possible situation that we end up wondering whether slow, sweaty progress is really progress at all.

But if the farm chores were to be done, then we needed to see time outside, time performing manual tasks, as of equal importance with income-generating work. If we were actually going to do what was necessary to make our farm fertile and productive, then the labor of producing milk and dairy products would have to be valued at least equally with whatever else we might have done in the same time.

Based on our experience with dairy goats, we figured that the care of a single dairy cow would probably take one person up to an hour, once or twice a day. While not a negligible chunk of daylight, it was time we could spare. Enjoyable as sports time, screen time, or hit-the-snooze-button time might be, we decided we were willing to forgo them in exchange for all the benefits we thought a dairy cow could offer us.

Personal Availability

Milking a cow meant committing to being home without fail at a certain time, every day, and this we thought we could undertake. After all, our lifestyle was already home-centered. Homestead chores come around each day like clockwork—not just milking chores, but all chores. An overindulged preference for ease, freedom, and unfettered spontaneity was going to be an obstacle to homestead bliss; so would a calendar full of off-farm commitments. Enjoyment of home, family time, and shared work is a must for the prospective dairy person.

So we had priority reevaluations to make, lifestyle adjustments to consider, before we could find a place in our lives for a dairy cow. There would be other changes that would have to be made on the fly; we couldn’t work out the details as a mental exercise.

We had to commit to the cow, throw ourselves into the challenges, and then ride the waves—euphoric, when we considered the many gallons of milk suddenly added to our working resources; overwhelming, as we entered into a dramatic change of lifestyle for which we had no example—until we found our equilibrium.

We had to commit to a family cow, before we could really know what that commitment would mean.

Access to Land

Land these days is wickedly expensive, so it’s a good thing that in most climates just a small acreage will suffice to graze a dairy cow. Often, as few as a couple of acres will carry a cow clear through the growing season—for us, mid-April through early November—with enough standing grass to last for another month or more. And we’re not talking about prime farmland.

Grass is the default plant cover for about 40 percent of the land mass of the planet, including waste and abandoned acres. Land of little commercial value can often support a cow. Our own land is a case in point: with less than two acres of more-or-less level ground plus a few steep acres of poor pasture, we have fed our sizable family, including a milk cow, for going on three decades.

Financially, the family with a dairy cow may come from almost any income level; lack of funds need not be an obstacle. We see small cow-powered homesteads cropping up on cheap land, rented land, borrowed land, and even squatter’s-rights situations. Many folks, like us, have established themselves on land considered “not suitable for agriculture.”

Money Well Spent

The cost of acquiring and keeping a cow, and the financial consequences of spending more time at home and less at paid work, far from being prohibitive, turn out to be incentivizing. You can buy a dairy cow or heifer for somewhere between a few hundred dollars to—let’s admit it—the sky’s the limit, but you can reasonably hope to add a good cow to your family for less than four thousand dollars, often much less. If she eats grass, her food costs nothing. Incidental expenses can be minimized.

What will she do for you in return?

She’ll mow your land and prevent it reverting back to weeds or woods. She’ll convert your grass into milk, meat, and more cows, while composting and dropping 90 percent of what she eats back where she got it, thus adding organic matter and beneficial microorganisms to build soil and soil fertility. She’ll douse the land in high-nitrogen fertigant (cow urine). She’ll put gallons of milk on the table, and enrich your diet with pounds of butter, cheese, yogurt, and beef. Surplus milk will go a long way toward fattening a hog and increasing your chickens’ rate of lay. And, if your grazing practices are holistic, each year your farm will be more fertile, more resilient, more productive, and healthier—and so will your family. Where would you find a better return on investment?

No Experience Necessary

One of the most exciting things we learned in our early years of homesteading was that the natural world doesn’t require an instruction manual. This was a good thing, because, somehow, we had grown up around our grandfathers’ farms without learning much of practical use. We began homesteading with only two assets: we weren’t afraid of large animals, and we knew how to use a pressure canner. Of course, we had lots of experience carrying 50-pound (23 kg) sacks of commercial livestock feed, but we wanted to go in another direction.

Back in our urban homesteading days we had done a lot of research into the typical first two steps in homesteading: gardening and chickens. We weren’t, at that time, concerned so much with organic methods and outcomes as we were with avoiding farming patterns that relied on purchased, off-farm inputs. We wanted to farm—which meant spending time on the farm, not at an off-farm job—which meant minimizing our cash needs—which indicated the low-budget farm goals. So we were disappointed and frustrated that every USDA bulletin directed us toward hatchery chicks, commercial chicken feed, and petroleum-based fertilizers, when we knew our grandfathers hadn’t bought much of anything.

Where were the instructions for growing food without inputs? We couldn’t find a single manual for doing things the way we wanted to.

Fortunately, despite the many skills and kinds of knowledge needed to practice natural homesteading, the aspiring homesteader can start out with remarkably little information. That’s because the living world is governed by basic operating principles that can be observed by anyone willing to treat Nature with respect.

Much later, we were to find some hidden gems that would have been of great value to us in those beginning days.

Sir Albert Howard, by many considered the father of organic farming, explains the links between soil, fertility, and human and environmental health.

Joel Salatin encourages us to believe that basic grazing patterns, faithfully applied, will give the user all the education necessary for beginning a lifetime of grass management.

Eliot Coleman elucidates the principles of natural soil fertility, four-season organic vegetable growing, and passive season extension, freeing our vegetable production from any reliance on off-farm inputs.

Knowing that humans can use nature’s own processes to enhance the natural productivity of a piece of land puts the budding homesteader on a trajectory for inputs-free success.

How It’s Working

What we want is a bountiful, fertile, durable homestead that will produce food and soil from nothing but local sunlight and rainfall—and that’s just what Nature wants to give us.

Proper grazing of dairy animals on native forages not only generates an abundance of the highest-quality proteins, fats, and sugars, it also lays down a fund of organic matter and soil biota that, each year, increases the quality and quantity of those forages. When humans provide natural patterns of management, animals acquire greater familiarity with diverse forages, rediscover instincts for forage selection, and develop knowledge of therapeutic and medicinal forage species—they become “pasture wise.” Each successive generation receives knowledge from those previous to it and adds discoveries of its own, reducing or eliminating the need for off-farm feeds, chemicals, or medications.

All this is free—with one condition. But it’s a condition with a price tag.

To receive all these benefits flowing naturally from the natural world, we have to commit. Because dairy cows need daily care. Grass management can’t be done on autopilot. Portable fence systems mean walking, lifting, carrying—so, to use them, we have to use our bodies. Faithfully.

We have to abide by our choices, and maintain them in the face of other, perhaps temporarily more attractive, options. We have to relinquish the option of having options; forgo the possibility that, when the mood strikes us, we might just not bother.

In exchange for this commitment we get, first of all, the best food in the world.

The old saying “let your food be your medicine” finally makes sense in this context. It can’t be described. Most people today have never tasted immediately fresh, minutely local, mineral-rich, nutrient-dense food like this. It’s an experience that, alone, would be reason enough for the commitment.

But it goes beyond food.

Managing cows on grass, daily, we acquire a deep and intimate knowledge of our place, our living nonhuman community, our land, our climate and soil. We serve Here; we become people of Here. We become native.

Natural beauty is another result of good grass management, and that beauty belongs to us. Not merely because we have title to the land; this is a beauty that moves into our minds, becomes our experience of the world, part of the fabric of our own being. Living becomes a joy and a privilege.

And aware, now, of the possibility of living as reverent parts of the many-lived Earth, we will not—we cannot—any longer be comfortable with behaving as autonomous units. We can no longer justify, or even imagine that we can justify, choices based on purely individual imperatives. We may no longer think that our personal rights can justly override other rights, not just those of other humans, but of the whole, living community that is Creation. We come to realize that the world is right only when people at least attempt to honor all rights. You can’t make health by inflicting sickness; injustice imposed on another can never win justice for ourselves.

Community Benefits

Once we moved out of town, committed to our new lifestyle, and began to reap the harvest, we found that the benefits of our new life extended out in wide ripples to include our local community. Belonging to our natural surroundings, we found that we were also better connected to the human environment as well.

Today, when our low-income rural Appalachian county includes more small, grass- and dairy-powered homesteads than we can easily count, the bounty overflows from country to city in the form of herd shares, farmers markets, and community-supported agriculture. Workshops and evening lectures on gardening, meat production and butchery, and healthy food choices are a regular part of our social landscape; the winter lecture series at our village coffee shop draws folks from other states. Our Saturday market features produce from nearby small farms, as well as locally produced bread, beer, and cider. Farm vendors are a significant presence at our monthly street fairs; downtown, one business makes local, organic food available in a low-income neighborhood no longer serviced by even a single grocery store. These are all significant blessings—good food, pleasant social events, a healthy local economy—benefits flowing from our growing commitment to knowing and serving this piece of the planet.

And we’re beginning to see a blessing of even more value: encountering this commitment to place, other folks, too, decide to stay and be local. Staying is a natural response, because this is such a good place to be. We stop waiting for the next job to take us somewhere else promising more money or prestige, or better entertainment possibilities. Our availability to one another stops being conditioned by the belief that the advantages of being somewhere else will someday outweigh the blessing of being together.

It turns out, in fact, that when we give up alternatives for the sake of choosing to milk grass-fed cows, that what we’re actually choosing is a whole plethora of other good things. We choose to have the best, most nutritious, most delicious food—free, in great abundance. We choose the right to work, at least some of the time, with whom we want, when, and under what conditions. We choose to determine our own times for work, play, and rest, instead of clock-punching for someone else. We choose what we will grow, how much, and when we will harvest or slaughter. We are the arbiters of what our children will eat, and, to a significant extent, the kind of world our children will know, and how well they will know it. We get to build their inheritance.

It’s a good life; it may even be that it is the only sort of life that can persist.

One-Cow Revolution

Achieving Food Independence with a Grass-Fed Family Cow

$24.95

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