Herdshare Update; June 2023

Hey guys!

It feels like it’s been quite a while since I’ve reached out with a general update on your dairy ladies, mostly because things had been going great and there wasn’t too much to update you on. But as always, we want to keep you in the loop, and the past couple of weeks have been pretty busy around here.

Typically we would share updates like this just with our current herdshare owners, but because we currently have so many people on our milk waiting list, we wanted to send it out to everyone, so that everyone is in the loop! Transparency, afterall, is always our goal.

We absolutely have to start by giving thanks for our recent rain!! Over the past 2 days, we were blessed with 1.52” of rain here on the farm, and we’re saying thanks for EVERY DROP!!

I believe this spring was the driest since we started milking cows over 7 years ago. During May and June, we usually see our peek grass growth, bringing our peek milk production and a bountiful first cutting of hay.

However, this year’s first cutting of hay yielded less than half what it typically does. And while the cows have been grazing, the grass quality and quantity is just not there. Along with stunted growth, it seems that the grasses have been storing their reserves (sugars) in the roots as a means of self-preservation, meaning that those extra nutrients are not there for the cows to utilize, resulting in lower than average milk production.

Most often in June, the cows are getting so much of their diet from pasture that we will only go through a round bale of hay every week or so. Currently, it takes them about 12 hours to eat a bale of hay in addition to grazing, we’ve had to start feeding our already lacking winter hay supply.

The forecast is calling for a couple more days of potential rain later this week. We’re hopeful that this is just what we need to give our pastures and hayfields a boost for an amazing second half of the growing season!

New Bulk tank!

We’d been keeping our eyes out for a larger bulk tank, when this one came up for sale in Ohio, we wasted no time and made the 6-hour trip down to pick it up the next day! This increases our milk cooling capacity from 33 gallons to over 60 gallons. When production picks back up, we’ll be ready for it! This also allows our milk to cool faster which helps to improve the already long shelf life of our milk. Brent and Connor spent a few hours one night after milking removing the wall to the milk house so that we could swap tanks, so thankful for their ingenuity!

The first week of June we had 2 of the ladies calve, and we welcomed Honky Tonky and Garth to the farm, both the moms and babes are doing great. These are both bull calves that will join our beef herd when they get a little bigger. During labor, poor Georgia (Garth’s momma) suffered a laceration on her udder. While we didn’t see it happen, we have a strong suspicion that one of the boss cows with horns may have inflicted the wound. We immediately consulted with both our veterinarian and our naturopath and put a course of action into place for wound healing. With gentle cleaning and an all-natural activated mineral-based ointment, along with some oral rose hips, the wound is healing beautifully!! (I’ll spare everyone pictures of that, but if you’re like me and would like to see before and after pictures, shoot me an email and I’d be happy to share.)

Honky Tonky & Garth

A sad goodbye

In the middle of June we said goodbye to Sevda. We noticed that she just wasn’t herself and wasn’t eating well, so we had the vet come right out to look at her. (So thankful for our amazing vet, Dr. Busman who is always just a text away) After an extensive exam, he determined that her digestive tract just wasn’t working (we were unable to identify the initial cause). We offered her several rounds of treatment, but she just wasn’t able to pull through. Sevda and her extra inquisitive personality will certainly be missed.

The same weekend that Sevda passed, our gentle giant, Arianna, came down with a case of mastitis. So, her milk is currently being fed exclusively to the calves as she is treated for that. We love that we’re able to source 100% natural botanical and essential oil based udder treatments from Synergy Animal Products! We’re hopeful Ari will be back in business soon!

Amongst all of the cow craziness, we also had an open house celebrating our twins, Caleb and Connor, who graduated from high school with honors. Had a road trip to Kennerdell, PA with Connor for a Rimfire Long Range Shooting Competition, and enjoyed a camping weekend with my parents at Hartwick Pines. We can’t say enough how thankful we are for our amazing farm team that allows us to enjoy these quality family times.

As we were pulling in from our camping trip Sunday afternoon, we got a text from our milker Ryan saying he’d just gotten there for evening milking and the bulk tank was at 75 degrees (should have been less than 40). Brent quickly got to work on the tank, and has it up and running, although we’re still trying to identify the faulty part. Unfortunately we had to dump about 20 gallons of milk from the morning milking, so we had to shuffle some milk around to be sure we had enough for everyone. So if you were asked to pick up your milk a day late or if your milk was bottled a day earlier than typical, this is the cause. Because of this, we will also not have cream for our cream regulars this week, if this is you, please know I will be crediting your account accordingly.

Lower than expected milk production

Several of the things I’ve mentioned above have contributed to us currently having lower milk production than we normally would. We also have 4 cows dry at the moment (this means they are out of the milking line, taking some time off in preparation for their next calf/lactation). While having dry cows means our production is down, it also means more milk is just around the corner! We have 1 cow due to calve tomorrow, one in late July, 3 in August, and 2 in September.

If you are on our milk waiting list, please know we haven’t forgotten you. Just as soon as we have milk available, we will be in contact.

If you are a current herdshare owner, please know that we do our very best to have the highest quality raw milk filling your jars every week. If there are some weeks that your jars are not filled quite to the top, it’s because a factor out of our control has caused supply to be a little low on that day, and we spread that shortage out the best we can. When we’re short milk, we may also be short on cream.

Safety First

Our commitment to producing safe raw milk continues, as does our status as one of just 29 farms recognized worldwide by The Raw Milk Institute (RAWMI) as a RAWMI Listed Farm. RAWMI is an organization that promotes raw milk education to both farmers and consumers and sets standards for safe raw milk. This is a voluntary, free program that we choose to participate in so that we can ensure we’re doing all we can to produce a quality product.

As a Listed farm, we meet quarterly with the RAWMI board and other listed farmers to learn the most current raw milk research and production recommendations. We also review our practices at least annually and provide an updated RAMP (Risk Analysis Management Plan), SSOP (Standard Sanitary Operating Procedures), and CCP (Critical Control Points) for review and posting on their website for everyone to see, if you’d ever like to check that out, you can do so here. We also are required to provide our monthly bacteria counts.

We go a step beyond what is required and test our Coliform Counts and Aerobic Bacteria Counts daily. The monthly average set by RAWMI for exceptional raw milk is a coliform count of fewer than 10 coliforms per ml of raw milk and an aerobic plate count of less than 5,000.

Our May averages were a Coliform Count of 0.03 per ml of milk and an Aerobic count of 64.5 per ml of raw milk! Everyone is always welcome to check out our past 3 months’ averages here as well.

This spring, as we periodically do, we also sent a milk sample to the local lab for testing of e.coli, salmonella, campylobacter, and listeria, these all came back negative. As did our herd testing last fall where we test all cows annually for Johnes, Brucellosis, and Tuberculosis, three zoonotic diseases that could potentially be passed to people via raw milk.

Thank YOU!

If you’ve stuck with me this far, I thank you, I know this was a long update!! But, I think that’s it for now. As always, if you ever have any questions, please don’t hesitate to shoot me an email.

Thank you for choosing us to be your farmers, we appreciate you every day!

xoxo,

Jenny, on behalf of all of us here on the farm

p.s.

I was asked again today what our farm name, Six S Dairy, means, so I thought I’d share that quick.

Back in 2008 when we decided to start farming we were faced with a lot of doubters, people told us we shouldn’t farm, and that we’d never make it, especially as a dairy farm.

When you say “Six S”, it sounds like “Success”. Also, there are 6 of us in our family, Brent and I, and our 4 children, and our last name starts with an “S”.

So that’s how the name Six S Dairy came to be!