Eco-village loses a beloved milk cow

Story and pictures from ourecovillage.org

Introduction (and pictures at bottom) by Raoul Bedi (www.biofield.ca ): It is refreshing, and even somewhat mind-expanding, to read about how the community at OUR ecovillage  had bonded with their recently departed cow “Bossy” to the point where she was  literally a family member. This article offers a very different and altogether unheard of perspective, in contrast to the modern view that sees a cow as a “commodity-producing composting unit”! Perhaps the final frontier of agriculture is not science and corporatization after all , but instead, developing a personal, sacred, relationship with water, the land and the animals, as the Native Americans have always done. As raw dairy farmer Michael Schmidt would say ,”We need to put ‘culture’ back into agriculture”.

Mike, with Bossy, the much loved community cow. Photo via ourecovillage.org

It is with huge, huge sadness that OUR community has to report in that we have had to say goodbye to OUR beautiful Bossy – family cow extraordinaire. She had been with the land for the last two years as the start to OUR onsite cowshare and brought so much learning to hundreds of children/youth/visitors who came to participate in some way to learn about hand-milking, making butter, and the joys of seeing a baby calf in OUR barnyard.

The surest way to get raw milk regularly

What’s it like starting out from scratch to take care of a cow on your own?  From the Promised Land Farm blog:

Image from The Promised Land Farm blog.

“We welcomed our first family milk cow to our farm in 2010. We had never ever milked a cow before… by hand or machine!

Elsie, our first Jersey milk cow, was dropped off one evening and the next morning she calved… aaahhhh! What do we do now?! (Click HERE if you want to watch the birth).

I’ve documented our journey with our milk cow to help you get started milking your own family milk cow, goat or sheep!

Let me give you the secret to success with a family milk cow, goat or sheep… it’s DESIRE. We’re now in our fourth year milking a family cow, AND WE LOVE IT! 

Elk banished after falling for cow

From Wendy Cox, CP, via The Star.com:

100 MILE HOUSE, B.C.—Somewhere east of this Cariboo community wanders an enormous bull elk, stripped of its six-point antlers and a misplaced attraction for one of Greg Messner’s cows.

The elk, a loner that had been turning up at the century-old 100 Mile Ranch to check out Messner’s herd for three years, was relocated earlier this month for its own safety and for the probity of the cow.

“He stuck around for a couple of days the first year,” said Messner, whose wife has had the ranch in her family for its entire history.

Genetically modified cow to give milk which doesn’t cause allergic reaction

From Ian Sample, in The Guardian:

Click on image above to go to the Guardian story.

“A genetically modified cow whose milk lacks a substance that causes allergic reactions in people has been created by scientists in New Zealand.

In their first year of life, two or three in every hundred infants are allergic to a whey protein in milk called BLG. The researchers engineered the cow, called Daisy, to produce milk that doesn’t contain the protein.

Farmer Brown vs The State of Maine

From Kevin Miller in the Bangor Daily News:

Click image above to go to Bangor Daily News page to watch video.

“EAST BLUE HILL, Maine — Officially, her name is Sprocket. But Dan Brown has a tongue-in-cheek moniker for the 4-year-old cow at the heart of his legal problems with the state of Maine: Troublemaker.

Sprocket, it turns out, isn’t just part of Brown’s dairy operation at Gravelwood Farm, a small family farm on Blue Hill peninsula, but the entire operation. She is responsible for every ounce of milk that makes its way into the Brown family’s coffee and cereal. What the Browns don’t use, in some cases, is sold as bottled milk, butter and cheese made from raw or unpasteurized milk.

Raw milk rally gets a warm reception at legislature in Victoria, British Columbia

This just in from Nadine Ijaz in Victoria:

Victoria, B.C., where MLAs not only come to speak at your rally and pet your cows, but they also post pictures of the proceedings on Facebook. This picture was posted by B.C. MLA Nicholas Simons. It shows the cow Shelby, with MLAs Lana Popham and Jenny Kwan outside the Legislature.

A couple of things – media wise, I believe we were on CTV Victoria on the 5 pm news last night, and I was interviewed yesterday morning by CFAX Victoria radio at 6.22 am, and on CBC Radio One Victoria (‘On the Island’) at 8.20 am.  We have some coverage in today’s Times Colonist in Victoria, on p. 3 I believe (have yet to see it myself).  I am busy with many things today so don’t know how much time I’ll have to try to grab all of these links but thought I’d pass them on.

Training kids in the ways of raw milk

Don’t “have a cow” over raw milk

An editorial from Philly.com

Quoting the initimable Bart Simpson. -- from the Simpsons, via the Interwebs

“About a year ago, after months of investigation complete with undercover purchases, a posse of federal agents made a predawn move on a Pennsylvania farm and discovered a sizable stash of pure, unadulterated . . . milk.

The government’s pursuit of Daniel Allgyer, an Amish dairy farmer in Lancaster County, continued last month with a federal complaint seeking to stop his hustling of unpasteurized milk, which has long been popular among the crunchy set but illegal to sell across state lines. A lawyer for some of Allgyer’s eager customers told The Inquirer, “He is being treated as if he were a drug lord.”

The mystical beauty of working the land

Here’s a review of a recent book from one of the latest in the long tradition of intellectuals reveling in their fresh infatuation with the charms of farming. Hey, don’t laugh; we need a lot more smart people to take up farming if we want to keep the likes of Monsanto from world domination. If this book can move us in that direction, that’s all for the good. From Stephanie P. on The Ethicurean, from a story titled “Getting Plowed: Kristin Kimball’s captivating ‘Dirty Life‘”:

Kristin Kimball on her farm in Essex, N.Y. Photo by Deborah Feingold (via The Ethicurean)

“….A self-described “snobby urban hedonist,” Kristin was lured to a completely different life and culture in a matter of months by a driven man and the appeal of the hard work of growing food. The gentle buffer offered to her in the transition is the brimming generosity of her new community, from the kinds of people she had probably previously assumed didn’t have much to offer anyone, and the enchantment of what good dirt can bring to fruition with your toil.

A lyrical tale of life with a cow

Laura Livingston, writing on Kimberly Hartke’s blog:

“Jenny came to live with us when she was twelve years of age. She was a Jersey, was bred, and had been living on good pasture at her previous home. Jenny was old, though. Her digestive tract had been compromised by a diet supplemented with probably a lot of grain, as was attested to by the large diameter of her cow patties. Jenny was a well behaved family milk cow.

Three of my daughters and I, and one granddaughter, were living off-the-grid. Roughing it, you could say. We did things the hard way, carrying all of our water from the well up the road, except what fell off the roof at our door when it rained.We cooked mostly with wood, and had no cow fences at that time. Jenny had a small enclosure to live in, but I tethered her all day on tall grass and other forages. That meant that Jenny had to learn to walk with a lead. And graze within a small circle.