04/15/04, 08:47 PM
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In Remembrance
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Join Date: May 2002
Location: central New South Wales, Australia
Posts: 1,607
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You'd better be ready to buy a LOT of grain, make a LOT of cheese, and have a LOT of calcium gluconate on hand ready to treat milk fever.
Fact is, she's bred to produce enormous volumes of milk and need enormous amounts of supplementary feed to do it. If the feed flags, the production won't adjust quickly; and she'll run her bodily reserves of calcium down and tend to go into milk fever.
None of this is necessarily bad - a family can live well with a milk cow, maybe a goat to cover the gap when she's heavily pregnant, and chickens. Cheese is a good thing.
Another approach is a less heavily productive milk cow that produces better beef calves, and that's the way I'd go for a straight homestead cow, but it's not the only way. Just know what you're getting into.
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τΏτ Don Armstrong,Terra Australis
Grandad, tell us a story about the olden days, when you were young and men could walk on the moon.
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My dream is finally true!!
