Another dairy cow question

[FannyMay]

Okay, everyone in my other post said to buy the bred cow. So now I have another question. Exactly how am I supposed to milk her. What kind of head stall or head catch should I use. The reason I had thought about the heifer was she would be small and i could halter break her and then I could tie her up when I was going to milk her. I seriously doubt the two year old has been halter broke or messed with much. On average if everything goes okay how long will it to take to milk out the cow everyday? I will problably have a lot more questions. Thanks for the help.

[April]

There's a wealth of information here:http://familycow.proboards32.com/index.cgi.

Read the stickies also, they have tons of information.

Searching that forum for "stanchion" helped us figure out how to build a stanchion for milking. Our cow will do just about anything short of vacuuming the living room for a little bit of grain - so, once we put the grain in the stanchion and she stuck her head through, we slipped a halter and a lead on her and started working with her. (We take it off later, of course).

While we still can't catch her without a treat-based bribe of some kind, once we do catch her and put the halter on her everything's smooth sailing. We even take her out of the field on the lead to let her "mow" some areas that the lawnmower won't go.

I do so love that cow!

-April

[FarmboyBill]

Dad had a manger in the barn, (a long hay trough, with boxes around 6/8ftaway from each other for ground corn. At each of these boxes he had a divider that came out from the manger, and sat around 4ft above the floor. At each box was a hole drilled into the manger and a chain passed through it and wired together. The other end we fixed around her horns at milking time. Since most cows now dont have horns anymore, and we got one or 2 in the time I was home, we wrapped the chain around her neck