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.

Milkshare membership. A one-time fee of $10 per ½ gallon jar is your milkshare/herdshare fee. This makes you part owner of Ursula for the year so you can get raw milk.

Schedule your milk pick-up day by phone. Pick up times are 8:00 a.m. to 7:00 p.m.

Pay via Venmo or cash (text Lisa for her Venmo info)

Pick up fresh milk from the dedicated milk fridge on the north side of the annex. 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.

Return empty, clean jars, and lids with gaskets to the lidded container next to next to the fridge. After you return clean jars/lids, we thoroughly sanitize them a second time before refill them with more goodness.

Vivienne thanks you for supporting her dairy cow project!

Ursula is a 4 year-old Jersey 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.

Her favorite treats are pomegranates, 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 usually isn’t feasible for large dairies. They separate the calf right away so they get all the milk and cream and don’t have to manage calves.)

Once Brie reached two months old, she got her own night-time sleeping enclosure right next to her mama, so she doesn’t become overweight or get diarrhea from drinking too much milk. (Dairy cows produce 2-3 times the milk their baby needs but no one told the baby that, so they drink and drink.) If a heifer (girl calf) is 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 at 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 with ORGANIC PELLETS

- Alfalfa hay

- Organic tree forage

- Organic fruits and greens

- Organic dairy pellets

Her milking time treat is alfalfa, aloe leaves for an immune boost plus, fresh fruit and greens in season.

Fruit provides vital micro-nutrients and energy for milk production. This is how farmers used to do it; their cow turned their grass + orchard’s fallen fruit into milk or meat. That’s ruminant magic at work.

At breakfast and dinner, she gets 3-6ish pounds of organic non-GMO cracked corn, and organic dairy ration which is primarily pelletized whole grains, minerals, vitamins, and a touch of molasses. We use this modest amount of organic dairy feed as medium for mixing in her vitamin and probiotic supplements (mostly sunflower and flax seeds, vitamin A, E, and selenium) 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.

Free of antibiotics, artificial hormones.  We don’t useantibiotics unless they are medically necessary. 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 teat dip & 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 stainless steel canister through two 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, homogenization plus the ultra-high heat of pasteurization, makes commercial milk a highly processed food.

Chefs 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, raw 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 is 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.

A2/A2 BETA CASEIN PROTEINS

Ursula has been DNA tested by UC Davis Veterinary Genetics Lab. She is A2/A2.

This is what her UC Davis report says: Based on the aminoacid present in position 67 these variants can be classified into 2 groups - A1 and A2. Variants in the A1-group (Histidine) are A1, B, C, F and G. Variants in the A2-group (Proline) are A2, A3, D, E, H1, H2, I, K and L. The levels of bioactive peptide beta-casomorphin 7 (BCM7) produced from the metabolism of beta casein is several-fold higher for variants in the A1 group than in the A2 group. Higher levels of BCM7 have been associated with negative health effects in humans. Relative to levels of BCM7 production, variants within each group behave similarly but may differ in other properties.

To read the latest research summary of the impact of A2 variant vs. A1 variant on human health, visit this link: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10806982/table/Tab1/

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 7 days, especially if we haven’t opened the jar yet.

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. Thus your milkshare fee is your partial-ownership stake in this sweet cow so you can get milk from your cow!