Milk Share

Text Lisa and Vivienne to be part of our milk share and place your order.

Price $8 per ½ gallon, $16 per gallon. If you get 2 or more gallons a week, it’s $15 per gallon.

Jar deposit & milk-share membership. Your one-time glass jar and lids deposit of $7 per jar is also your herd-share membership. This makes you part owner of Ursula so you can get raw milk. (Raw milk on-farm sales in CA are mostly prohibited so you need to have an ownership stake in this cow to get raw milk.)

Pay via Venmo (text Lisa for her Venmo info)

Pick up fresh milk from the dedicated milk fridge on the north side of the annex. Your milk will be labelled with your name on a tag. Bring an insulated bag or chest with a dish towel to cushion jars while you transport your milk home. All milk (raw and pasteurized) should stay below 40 degrees. Pick up milk any day 8:30 a.m. to 6:30 p.m. except Sunday.

Return empty, clean jars and lids to the milk crate next to next to the fridge. We recommend you hand wash your jars to get off the cream that wants to stick to the sides. We will thoroughly sanitize them here then refill them with more goodness.

Vivienne thanks you for supporting her dairy cow project!

Ursula is a 4 year-old Jersey/Brown Swiss cross dairy cow. She came to us pregnant by a Jersey bull. We selected her for her incredible temperament. She likes people and is mellow and inquisitive. We think that she may have some Brown Swiss dairy cow in her ancestry which may contribute to her zen demeanor and her large size. She’s about 4 inches taller than the biggest Jerseys!

Her favorite treats are grape and banana leaves.

Her baby, Brie, was born Friday, October 18th at 9:40 a.m. She weighed 62 pounds and was very sleepy. Brie now does zoomies in her corral and likes under the chin scratches from humans and licks from her mama.

We keep baby with her mama. This makes for a happy cow and a well adjusted calf who learns how to be a bovine from her mom. (This isn’t feasible for large dairies. They sell the calf right away so they get all the milk and cream and don’t have to manage calves.)

Now that Brie is nearly two months old, she sleeps near her mama in her own enclosure at night so that she doesn’t get sick from drinking too much milk (dairy cows produce 2-3 times what their baby needs) and so she doesn’t get fat. If she’s over fed as a calf, she’ll have fat deposits in her mammary glands that will interfere with her own adult milk production when she’s a family milk cow down the road.

Our practice of keeping baby and mama together during the day does mean that the humans get less cream at the top of their milk jar, because as long as Ursula knows her baby is nursing, she saves the best for her baby. That’s a good mama. When she has weaned her calf in six to eight months, we’ll get more of the creamy hind milk so there will be nearly double the cream in every jar.

Ursula gets the best foods so you can get the best too.

GRASS-BASED AND ORGANIC

Her diet is grass-based and primarily organic.

- No or low-spray alfalfa,

- Organic tree forage,

- Organic fruits and greens,

- Organic dairy ration (3-10 pounds /day depending upon her needs)

She eats no or low-spray alfalfa (pictured above) for its high protein and calcium content to support her milk production. Occasionally she snacks on low-spray oat hay grown by FFA students at El Capitan HS

We supplement her hay with tree forage from our organic property for a variety of micro-nutrients. She especially likes loquat, grape, mulberry, banyan, Morton Bay fig, persimmon, and bamboo leaves. In spring she’ll be able to graze a micro-pasture of grasses and clovers.

Her milking time treat is alfalfa and fresh fruit and greens in season. Currently she’s getting fresh tree forage, pomegranates, pineapple guava and some aloe leaves for immune boost.

After milking time and in the evening, she gets 3-6ish pounds of organic dairy ration which is primarily rolled whole grains, with a touch of molasses and minerals. We use this modest amount of organic dairy feed as medium for mixing in her vitamin and probiotic supplements to ensure excellent health and to make sure she gets the energy needed to support her milk production. This makes her a mostly grass-fed cow.

For comparison purposes, while Ursula gets 3-12 pounds of organic dairy grains, most commercial cows her size get 15-25 pounds of grain or more each day during lactation.

We strive to feed her natural feeds to maintain her health and weight while enabling her to produce nutrient dense milk for her baby and us. Many dairy cows need supplemental grains because they cannot physically eat enough hay in a day to support the amount of milk they are producing. If Ursula needs more grain to maintain her weight (body conditioning) we will absolutely give that to her in order to maintain her optimum health. (When she first came to us she was under weight and we managed to get her weight up in just six weeks before she calved.) These small grain portions do not significantly impact the ratio of omega 3 and omega 6 fatty acids in her milk.

CREAM ON THE TOP

At least two inches of cream are on the top of every bottle of milk. Read on for more information about rich Jersey milk.

Free of antibiotics, artificial hormones.  We don’t useantibiotics unless they are medically necessary nor hormones to stimulate production. We vaccinate against common cattle diseases and deworm once a year and of course provide medical care as needed. For example if our cow has an udder infection that doesn’t respond to regular treatment, we would, of course, give her antibiotics to heal properly.  Milk would not be provided then.

Raw. Unpasteurized for a natural product. Pasteurization yields a highly processed sterile but dead milk. Raw milk has natural lactase and other enzymes to easy digestion (how nice of the cow to provide that in her milk!), live beneficial bacteria for our gut microbiome. Families are welcome to pasteurize their own milk at home if desired.

OUR MILKING PRACTICES

Clean. We use the best practices for udder cleanliness and health. Her teats are scrupulously cleaned with non-NPE dairy wipes prior to machine milking. We use a stainless-steel milk canister, food-grade silicone inflations and hoses to machine milk ensuring milk enters a closed system. This means no dust floating into an open milking bucket nor human hands touching the teat or milk. The machine is carefully cleaned immediately after every milking using a three-stage rinse, clean, sanitize procedure.

Filtered. We pour milk directly from the milking machine through commercial-grade sterile filters into sanitized glass jars.

Glass not plastic. Milk is stored in 1/2 gallon sanitized glass jars. 

Rapidly chilled. Milk jars are then placed in a dedicated milk fridge in an ice water bath. The ice water bath ensures much faster cooling. This is critical because the milk comes out of the cow at her body temperature of 100 degrees Fahrenheit and needs to get to below 40 degrees as fast as possible, under two hours.

Whole & not homogenized. The cream naturally floats to the top. Scoop it to make whipped cream, butter, ice cream, add to yogurt, desserts, drinks. What is left is skim milk after you skim the cream. Or just shake the bottle and pour for temporarily distributed cream within the milk for whole milk.

Homogenized commercial milk, in contrast, has been forced through tiny screens at high pressure to break up the fat globules to evenly disperse the fat throughout the milk. Ironically, this plus the ultra-high heat of pasteurization, makes commercial milk a highly processed food.

MORE OF ALL THE GOOD STUFF

Cooks love Jersey milk because it has more of all the good stuff than milk from other dairy breeds of cows.

Jersey milk, compared to milk from Holsteins (the big black and white cows) has

18% more protein,

20% more calcium,

25% more butterfat.

CREAM!

That thick line at the top of your milk jar is the cream line. The longer the milk sits in the jar, the more cream separates out. Natural cream is not as viscous as pasteurized cream. The high heat treatment that is pasteurization changes the viscosity, among other things.

Here’s what the percentage of butterfat in cream is after standing or rising for 12, 24, and 36 hours:

12 hours - 18-20% butterfat.Often called cereal or coffee cream. (For comparison purposes, half and half is half cream and half milk and it 12% butter fat)

24 hours - 32% butterfat. Often called light cream. Cream needs a minimum of 30% to whip well.

36 hours - 40% or more butterfat. Called heavy whipping cream.

To whip your cream, it must be COLD and it must have been chilled to 40 degrees Fahrenheit for at least 24 hours. Chill your mixer bowl, and the beater first and whip the cream straight from the fridge.

You can scoop this cream off the top to make butter, ice cream, pour it in your dirty soda or tea, or whip it to make whipped cream. What’s left after you skim the cream off the top is skim milk. Or shake the bottle up to temporarily distribute the cream throughout the milk for whole milk.

After Ursula weans her calf late spring there will be significantly more cream in each jar. She’s saving her cream, the hind milk, for her baby.

BETA CASEIN PROTEINS

We are in the process of testing Ursula to see what kind of proteins are in her milk. This is her beta casein profile.. Most Jerseys and Brown Swiss are A2/A2, some are A2/A1, others are A1/A1. We are sending DNA samples to UC Davis’s lab for testing. When we know the results, we’ll post them here and let milk-share owners know.

1. Transporting your milk home: bring an insulated grocery bag or small ice chest to keep milk cold. Include a few dish towels to wrap around the bottle so they don’t break or packing bubbles or crumpled newspaper.

2. Use or freeze your milk ideally within three to four days, although we’ve kept raw milk for up to 6 days.

3. Don’t leave milk sitting out. It should always be refrigerated unless you are following a recipe for yogurt or cream cheese that requires incubation.

4. Cream: shake up the bottle to evenly distribute the cream or skim it for whipping cream, butter, or to freeze for later to make ice cream when you have a big stash of it!

5. Raw milk freezes fine. Leave at least two inches of head space in the jar otherwise it will crack when the milk expands or transfer to smaller containers.

6. You can pasteurize your milk easily at home if you want to. Heat milk in a non-reactive pot to 161 degrees Fahrenheit for 15 seconds or 145 for 30 minutes.

CA law generally prohibits the sale of raw milk. Your jar deposit also makes you part owner of Ursula. Meaning you’re getting milk from your cow that we care for.