Homesteading Forum banner

Milk from Walmart for bottle calf?

6K views 19 replies 10 participants last post by  muleskinner2 
#1 ·
Milk is $.98 a gallon at walmart and MR is $2 a gallon. Could I just use the store bought milk?
 
#4 ·
Do it. Replacer can't touch it for the money. You can't crowd the real thing anyway. Now jersey milk would grow one better than the holstein milk in those jugs, and it would be better not cooked to death, but you have to drop some real money on any replacer that will come close in digestibility. It's almost like cow milk was designed for baby cows to drink or something. If you want to really make them grow, buy store milk and add enough replacer to it to get the fat up a little. Stay away from 2% skim.

Get it while it lasts, as soon as enough dairy farmers look at their finances and shoot their cows or themselves or both (happening with alarming frequency) the markets will right themselves and milk will be 5 bucks a gallon. The only people still in business at that point will be the corporations that are immune to any negative impacts from a single suicide, and they will simply set their prices at a profitable level when it is advantageous to do so.
 
#5 ·
We have two extra fridges set up right now. Use coupons, shop around. Gosh people look at you funny pushing three carts of milk out of the grocery store. We just look at them and say it's calling for snow and our bread truck just pulled out better try a different store if they need bread and milk. Knew a guy that had connections and got expired milk and fed dairy steers. His steers looked good. He kept them on milk untill the fall. Once they got bigger they just drank it out of a trough.
 
#14 ·
Currently, neither.

Doesn't change anything. Why would you use pasteurized milk to feed a calf, they start drinking it fresh. Why change that and give them a lower nutritional profile?

Cheaper I guess, but I would prefer not to skimp out on anything I grow and raise. I like eating more nutritional and better tasting food.
 
#16 ·
Storebought milk tastes like garbage, yes, but nutritionally, it still has protein, fat and carbohydrates. It is pasteurized, so it doesn't have beneficial bacteria, or harmful ones. Feeding unpasteurized commercial milk would be a good way to get Johnes, and a host of other nasty diseases. Pasteurization changes nothing significant in the nutritional profile. The issue is that it is holstein milk. So a little lower fat. I have raised calves on jersey milk after taking the cream off, they actually seemed to scour less. Jersey milk has a little too much fat for calves, because after all, jerseys are GMOs.
 
#18 ·
Feeding unpasteurized milk from a dairy barn is sketchy. Look up the statistics for dairy cattle with Johnes in the US. We have always had a practice of canning milk when there was a surplus. Cheaper than buying replacer, can be used to replace fresh milk when their were a lot of mouths to feed. Freeing up fresh milk for human consumption. Never had a problem whatsoever, and canning is essentially pasteurizing. There is little significant nutritional loss. There is beneficial bacteria loss, but that is easy to manage in a multitude of ways. I would be far more concerned with Johnes than any perceived threat from babies starving to death from pasteurization induced calorie evaporation, which defies all known laws of physics.
 
#19 ·
Feeding unpasteurized milk from a dairy barn is sketchy. Look up the statistics for dairy cattle with Johnes in the US. We have always had a practice of canning milk when there was a surplus. Cheaper than buying replacer, can be used to replace fresh milk when their were a lot of mouths to feed. Freeing up fresh milk for human consumption. Never had a problem whatsoever, and canning is essentially pasteurizing. There is little significant nutritional loss. There is beneficial bacteria loss, but that is easy to manage in a multitude of ways. I would be far more concerned with Johnes than any perceived threat from babies starving to death from pasteurization induced calorie evaporation, which defies all known laws of physics.
I'm fully aware of the existence of Johnes and know the standards which my neighbors maintain and while I would agree that just picking any dairy is unwise, I'm pretty comfortable with my emergency solution.
 
#20 ·
If milk replacer is $2.00 per gallon, buy the time you weaned the calf you would have more invested than you could sell the calf for.

When I was twelve years old I milked four cows every morning before I got on the school bus. We drank that milk, cooked with it, made butter from it, and fed it to the pigs and chickens. And none of us ever got sick from it. Oh yeah, before we drank it we strained it through a cotton dish towel.

Muleskinner2
 
This is an older thread, you may not receive a response, and could be reviving an old thread. Please consider creating a new thread.
Top