Yesterday evening we attempted to bring the cow in for milking unsuccessfully. It was windy and raining heavily, maybe this was why she decided that she wasn't coming in.
Anyway, after a few attempts and a lot of running we called it a day!
So I brought her in this morning and gosh was she full!
One quarter milked blood. The milk from this quarter is coloured a pinker off colour instead of the usual lovely cream.
There was no heat or hardness in her bag or clots in the milk that would indicate mastitis.
With all the running around yesterday evening, not ideal for a milk cow, she bruised her bag and burst a blood capillary in that quarter.
We will be milking that quarter to the pigs for the next few days and using the others for the house.
The cow was due to come into heat on Wednesday. There has been no sign of heat so fingers crossed that she took with that last AI straw. We would be expecting a calf then next March. A lovely time of year and a full two years since she would have last freshened.
She is currently giving us 7-8 litres a day on a once a day milking and a year+ since freshening!
I am still hand milking, which is easy and quick when only milking that volume but when she freshens I will machine milk as I doubt my hands/wrists could cope with milking 25+ litres a day!
Hi Marie, I wanted to email you some more details about writing the hand-milking chapter for my ebook. Can you please email me on eight.acres.liz at gmail.com and we can work out the details? Cheers, Liz
ReplyDeletePS hope your cow comes right. We had pink milk from molly for the first week after she calved, and the problem with machine milking is you tend to just milk all quarters at once, so you don't know which one is affected. She healed up ok and is a lovely milker now :)