

Colonel's Blog, Earthdate 28 Dec 2022...
Hey Ya'll!!
Happy Wednesday from Free Missouri! Our major farm project yesterday, shipping our first orders through the postal system, was successful. At least the first part was a success, we now trust the USPS will follow through with their end of the deal. It still took us a couple of hours to get everything together from the shipping label generation, to printing the label, packaging the pork, ensuring the correct verbiage was on the outside of the package, and finally driving it to town to the post office. We will absolutely find efficiencies as we get more practice. Today's main farm project is to remove the straw from the bird's chick-shaws as the temperatures will be above freezing for the next few weeks. This allows the poop to fall through the wire mesh floors instead of building up on the inside.
As promised, I included a couple of pictures of the milking process. The top pic shows Betty on the right and Happy and I on the left. As you can see from Betty's bulging belly, we are still waiting for her to have her calf. The bottom pic shows Happy enjoying her treats while I feverishly try to get as much milk as possible before she finishes her snack and starts to get restless. I'm sure you can imagine what it is like in my position when the near 1,000 pound cow starts to get restless! I have the milk pail sitting inside a 5 gallon bucket to stabilize it and to lift it off the ground a bit. We both continue to get better. We chose our Jerseys because they have special genetics, A2A2 milk protein. It turns out that many folks are sensitive to the A1 protein found in most dairy products. Our family is fortunately not sensitive to the A1 protein, but since many are, we chose A2A2 genetics. They were both bred to an A2A2 Jersey bull so Betty's calf will also be A2A2. They both also have amazing casein scores. Casein proteins are a crucial component in cheese and are the foundation of curds, the key to making cheese. What these special genetics and high casein scores will allow us to do, from a farm perspective, is to make all kinds of milk products, to include cheese, that folks can enjoy that cannot normally tolerate milk products. Currently the plan is for the milk products to be on-farm use only...from our household to a supplement for the hogs and birds. That said, we see a future farm enterprise for our milk and milk products.
Cheers! Rich & Shelley
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