Merely A Choice

Last night while Penny read to the boys, I cleared a spot in the midst of the kitchen counter chaos (basket of tomatoes, pile of onion peels, jar of sourdough starter, dirtied utensil miscellany, a few things I probably shouldn’t mention, and so on) and churned up a mess of butter. I’ve been on a bit of a butter-making bender; both Apple’s and Pip’s calves are fully weaned, and the volume of milk emerging from our humble little pole barn is awesome to behold. We don’t generally milk two cows concurrently, but this year we’re feeling particularly Taker-ish, and my churning ritual has become a daily affair.

Our butter-making technique is about as low-tech as it gets in this day and age, an almost Luddite-ian process that begins with hand milking and ends with an old hand-crank churn I snagged of Ebay a while back. Prior to the churn, I used our electric food processor and that worked fine, but the noise of the thing set all of us on edge. Truth is, the hand crank model is almost as fast, and  other than the fact that I’ve had to cut all my shirts to accommodate my churn-honed right triceps muscle, there’s little downside to it. And what with the bulging triceps, my “I heart Ozzy” tatt is really something to behold, so there’s that.

To separate the cream, we simply filter the milk into large pots and let them sit overnight in the fridge. I skim it once in the morning and then let it sit again until evening, when I snag a second skim. This works because we milk once-per-day; if we milked 2x/daily, there’d simply be too many cream separating vessels to fit in the fridge, though I suppose the basement is cool enough to suffice. But truth is, 1x/day milking works just fine for us, and as anyone who’s followed a similar protocol knows, cutting the milkings in half results in only a 20-30% decline in the total volume of milk. We’re fortunate to have animals who tolerate 1x/day milking, in part because they’re modest producers to begin with and in part because we don’t push production with grain. Right now, we’re getting somewhere around 4-and-a-half or 5 gallons a day from our two girls combined.

We’ve been milking now for 10 years. We take a three month break every year in the months before our girls are due to calve (“freshen” in dairy farmin’ speak); most commercial farms give their milkers a two month rest period, and ours are robust enough that we could probably do the same, but frankly, a break at the end of winter isn’t the worst thing. It’s not the cold that we mind; it’s that no matter how much bedding we use, the cows are inevitably dirtier in winter than in summer, when they doze on clean, green pasture grass. Because we don’t pasteurize our milk, there’s a particular impetus to keep the ladies clean, and it’s not uncommon for us to spend as much time cleaning as milking.

One of the things I’m just beginning to understand (me being the slow learner I am) is that so many of my favorite tasks on this piece of land involve transforming raw materials into something else. Cream into butter. Trees into lumber and then to shelter. Sap and fire into syrup. Grass into hay. Firewood into heat. Seeds into tomatoes. These are the tasks I almost never tire of, maybe because they never cease to imbue me with the sense that no matter how complicated and convoluted we all try to make our lives, all that complication and convolution is merely a choice.

We just don’t seem inclined to recognize it as such.