The family milk cow has been making its comeback… for good reason! In this episode, Shawn and Beth Dougherty share practical wisdom every beginner needs to hear on choosing the right homestead dairy cow, managing excess milk,, and building a low-input farm that works with nature instead of against it. We also dive into dual-purpose dairy genetics, the value of multi-generational homesteading, and why home-centered living is about far more than simply producing food.
In this episode, we cover:
- Why the family milk cow has long been considered the heart of every homestead
- Honest questions to ask before bringing home a milk cow for your family
- The reality of managing excess milk and why many new cow owners feel overwhelmed
- Unexpected ways surplus milk can fuel the rest of the homestead instead of going to waste
- What experienced homesteaders are looking for now in practical, low-input dairy genetics
- Why multi-generational and community-centered homesteading makes dairy ownership far more sustainable
- Encouragement to stop overthinking the good work in front of you and simply begin
- The deeper cultural and spiritual restoration happening through home-centered living
Thank you to our sponsors!
KubotaUSA.com | Providing the right equipment to keep us moving, shaping, and growing America’s farms, fields, and construction
McMurrayHatchery.com | A wide selection of poultry breeds and supplies to assist you with raising your flock
NewCountryOrganics.com | A trusted source for certified organic, soy-free animal feed and minerals designed to support your entire farm ecosystem
ShareHealthcare.com | A Christian-based, health-sharing community where members come together to cover medical needs
About Shawn & Beth
Shawn and Beth Dougherty have been farming together since the 1980’s, for the last twenty-six years in eastern Ohio, where they manage 90 acres, much of it designated by the state as ‘not suitable for agriculture’.
Using intensive grazing as the primary source of food energy, they raise dairy and beef cows, sheep, farm-fed hogs, and a variety of poultry, producing most of the food, feed and fertility for humans and animals, on the farm. Concerned that farming is so often dependent upon multiple off-farm resources, from feed, fuel and fertilizer to water and electricity, their ongoing project is to identify and test the means by which farming was done for centuries with a minimum of off-farm inputs.
Their research has led them to identify grass conversion, especially the daily conversion of grass into milk by dairy ruminants, as a key to whole-farm sustainability, combined with the integrated nutrient feed-backs that are possible with a community of diverse animal and plant species, domestic and native. They are the authors of The Independent Farmstead, Chelsea Green Press 2016.
Resources Mentioned
Grab your copy of Shawn and Beth’s newest book, One-Cow Revolution: Achieving Food Independence with a Grass-Fed Family Cow
Connect
Shawn & Beth Dougherty | Website
Homesteaders of America | Website | Instagram | Facebook | YouTube | Pinterest
The Family Milk Cow Revival Transcript
Amy Fewell Welcome to the Homesteaders of America Podcast, where we encourage simple living, hard work, natural healthcare, real food, and building an agrarian society. If you’re pioneering your way through modern noise and conveniences, and you’re an advocate for living a more sustainable and quiet life, this podcast is for you. Welcome to this week’s podcast. I’m your host, Amy Fewell, and I’m the founder of the Homesteaders of America organization and annual events. If you’re not familiar with us, we are a resource for homesteading education and online support. And we even host a couple of in-person events each year with our biggest annual event happening right outside the nation’s capital here in Virginia every October. Check us out online at HomesteadersofAmerica.com. Follow us on all of our social media platforms and subscribe to our newsletter so that you can be the first to know about all things HOA (that’s short for Homesteaders of America). Don’t forget that we have an online membership that gives you access to thousands—yes, literally thousands—of hours worth of information and videos. It also gets you discount codes, an HOA decal sticker when you sign up, and access to event tickets before anyone else. All right. Let’s dive into this week’s episode.
Amy Fewell Welcome back to the Homesteaders of America podcast. I have guests this week that most of you probably know. I feel like everyone in the homesteading community should know them, but just in case they don’t, we’ll have them introduce themselves. Welcome to the podcast once again, Shawn and Beth. How are you?
Shawn Dougherty Very good.
Beth Dougherty Hi, Amy. We’re good.
Amy Fewell Good! Okay, introduce yourselves.
Shawn Dougherty We’re Sean and Beth Dougherty. We’re in Toronto, Ohio, and our thrust is a farm that feeds itself—low input. Farms don’t have to cost you a lot of money; there’s a way to do this.
Beth Dougherty A farm that feeds itself, feeds the animals, feeds the soil, feeds the people.
Shawn Dougherty Right, and the dairy cow is the center of that operation.
Beth Dougherty That’s right. A farm that uses energy like ecosystems do—it has sunlight and rainfall, and that’s what it has to get business done with.
Amy Fewell Yeah. So specifically, while we’re having you on the podcast this week is to talk about a new book that you guys have coming out, but also to just talk about the topic in general. And so that is about the Homestead Dairy Cow, which you are very well known to speak on. You guys gave me an advanced copy of that book, and now I have the copy in hand. And when I went through it, I’m like, I wish I would have had this book when we first started because you wrote it very plainly. It wasn’t a bunch of fluff; it was very plain and simple to read. And I enjoyed that because if I needed something, and that’s just how I learned, it was straight to the point. So why don’t you kind of talk about that—about the Dairy Cow and about how you guys came about writing this book?
Shawn Dougherty Well, we’ve been doing dairy cows for a long time.
Beth Dougherty 25 years.
Shawn Dougherty Right. And it is the center of our operation. You know, 150 years ago it was the center of every farm. You didn’t have a farm that was sustainable at all without a dairy cow. So as we started speaking early on, we would have to sneak it in the back door because nobody was thinking, I want to get a dairy cow. Now, in 2019 or 2018—somewhere in there—things shifted.
Beth Dougherty Do you remember that, Amy? You came on the scene right when that shifted. You were the catalyst of that shift.
Amy Fewell Yeah, so many people were getting milk cows.
Shawn Dougherty That’s right. When we now speak on dairy cows, our tent is full, as opposed to having just a few people in there. So, it’s really catching, but we really wanted to give them the down and dirty on this is how to find your cow, this is what you need to bring her in, and this is how you milk. I mean, we really do sit at your elbow and we really thought very carefully about trying to make sure that we’ve got all the information in there. And a lot of it came from emails. People email us all the time. And we encourage people to email us when they have an issue. We want to help you. And so that’s how it was written.
Beth Dougherty Yeah, you remember when you got your first cow and you had a million different questions and you’re thinking, I have no background, I have no playbook for this, and we still remember that—even though we got into dairy in 1996 with goats—that feeling of, look, you give me a one-sentence set of instructions and I don’t know what those words mean. Please tease the meaning out for me. And since we’ve worked with beginners for the last 15 years, we sort of feel like, okay, I’ve heard most of the questions there can be. And we wanted to be the grandma and grandpa who don’t live next door to you, but you wish did, who could say, “Oh yeah, I did that a million times. It happens about once a year. Here’s how you deal with it. It’s not a problem.”
Amy Fewell Yeah. I remember when I first got our first milk cow. Of course we have the internet now—which you guys barely had back then getting a milk cow, and it certainly didn’t have all the information it has on it now—and I just remember pouring into these Facebook groups, just overwhelmed. Everyone had a different opinion about what to do here, what the problem is here, and so then I was like, well, I’m not going on Facebook. It’s like Google doctor; you know, your cow’s going to die every time you Google something. So then I started buying books. So I’m buying these health books, I’m buying these cutesy farm cow books, and I’m learning absolutely nothing from them. I’m like, these are not… They’re great books. Don’t get me wrong.
Shawn Dougherty Right, right, there are some really good books out there.
Amy Fewell But they were really overwhelming for me. And I thought, I just need someone to sit down with me and tell me the basics of this. And my grandfather, he was that person before I got cows, but I didn’t get cows until, I think it was like the year after he passed away, so I couldn’t ask him either. And so when I got your book, I’m like, oh man, this was the book that I really wanted when we first started. It’s the book to start with, and then all the other books, you know? Because it’s like you need the first stone to be laid and then build on top of that. And so I’ve really appreciated and loved that book. I was nodding my head throughout the whole thing, like, okay, yeah, because I know that now. You know—the school of hard knocks. You know, one of the things that we’re seeing right now is a lot of people are selling their dairy cows because they’ve discovered they got a dairy cow and they can’t—they don’t know how to manage it well, or maybe the economy is tanking and they can’t afford all the hay to feed it. And so I can’t help but think, you know, if they just had this book—to get the right cow to begin with or whatnot, it might have saved them. So why don’t you kind of walk us through the process? Like, how do people start looking for a good dairy cow? Because most people are looking for, “Oh, that cow is giving us five gallons a day,” and she’s, you know, skin and bones. And that’s not necessarily the homestead dairy cow, right? So why don’t you tell me a little bit about that.
Beth Dougherty Well, maybe we should start with, how do you assess your life and decide whether this is a good move for you? Because I’m going to make the flat-footed statement that using a ruminant to turn grass into dairy is how farms have fueled themselves literally for thousands of years. So there’s one level on which you can say the dairy cow, or the dairy ruminate, is the foundation of your energy harvest on a piece of land to produce food, feed, and fertility. So everybody needs a dairy cow, right? But where are you in your life? First of all, is your family on board? Because this is a new member of the team who is going to require regular conscientious care. You know that feeling—you probably had it, I know we did, and lots of other people have it too—in the first two weeks when you start milking a dairy cow and you think, what have I done? Like, this is a major change to my life. It’s like having a baby, right? No matter how much you’ve prepared, you’re not really prepared for it needing your care twice a day. So I would say the first thing you need is you need buy-in from the family. You don’t need buy-in from the teenagers who might have different thoughts about it. It’s our job as parents to decide where we are going, but I think you need buy-in with your spouse. We tell people, and it’s true, that many, many people keep a dairy cow who have no pasture and they feed it hay. And if you do the math and you say, that $6, 45-pound bale of hay is going to produce me four gallons of milk a day—on average, we’ll make it three over the year—three gallons of a day and a whole lot of really top-quality compost. Three gallons of raw milk—I don’t know what it sells for a gallon in your neck of the woods, but that’s at least $30 worth of milk, butter, cheese, et cetera—for your $6 bale. So economically, it even makes sense, but only if you have the follow-through—not only to milk this animal and clean her stall if she’s inside or whatever, give her the necessary care—but also, use the milk. So you have to be disciplined when it comes in the house. It’s like gardening—you know how many people plant a garden, work all day in it, and then they order Domino’s because they forgot to pick the green beans and get them started ahead of time. So the next question is: Will we have follow through? And that’s not, “Will my family drink two or three gallons of milk a day?”—although if you have a medium-sized family who aren’t allergic to milk, your dairy consumption is going to go way up. This is going to be high quality and you’re going to want to consume it. But it’s also, you know, “Will I process this milk somewhat faithfully so that the good that I’m bringing onto my farm actually goes through the steps it has to go through to deliver the benefits?”
Shawn Dougherty And if I have five children and they’re all under six, that’s going to be hard to do, especially if my husband is not on board. So I do think it’s the right time of your life—that’s what you’re looking for. Is this the time? And 150 years ago to 200 years ago, you had to do it. There really was a need because this is part of how you fed yourself. It’s not necessarily that for us. I mean, we can have other things. I think it would be great if everybody had one.
Beth Dougherty Shawn always says people need to pretend they need to homestead in the beginning because there are options. And so to get into it, you have to make yourself do something the more difficult way. Like, once you’ve eaten a real green bean, you can never go back to Del Monte. And so you force yourself to do it one year, and after that, you’re like, I’m never not going to have a garden because I won’t eat that garbage anymore.
Amy Fewell We’re taking a quick break so that I can tell you a little bit about one of our sponsors. We are honored to have Kubota as one of our sponsors this year. Over the past 50 years, Kubota has evolved from newcomer to neighbor to partner in pursuit of the American Dream. They’ve grown together through community by providing the right equipment to keep us moving, shaping, and growing America’s farms, fields, and construction. Hundreds of millions have been invested here at home, for over 7,000 American workers to fabricate, wield, and assemble with domestic and global parts. 1,000-plus Kubota dealership locations contribute to local economies and invest in the people that have lived there for generations. Constant evolution and innovation keep Kubota forward-looking and focused on working together to build a better future for all of us. You guys know them as the orange tractor in the homesteading and farm world, but we know them as friends and sponsors, as Homesteaders of America conference sponsors this year. Make sure you check them out at KubotaUSA.com.
Amy Fewell Murray McMurray Hatchery. Murray McMurray officially started his chicken business in 1917. He had always been interested in poultry as a young man and particularly enjoyed showing birds at the local and state fairs. He was in the banking business at the time and sold baby chicks through the bank to area farmers and hobbyists. But now, we know Murray McMurray as one of the top homesteader’s choice hatcheries here in the United States. They have all kinds of birds, from show birds to exotic birds to meat birds, because who doesn’t want every kind of chicken or poultry possible? They have ducks and all kinds of options for you. Here at Homesteaders of America, Murray McMurray Hatchery has supported homesteaders for at least the last eight years (or as long as we’ve been around) and beyond, since 1917. Make sure you check them out at McMurrayHatchery.com to get your orders in for the year.
Amy Fewell And I can attest to having little ones. When we got our first dairy cow, it was very manageable, and then we kept having babies and I’m like, wait, I can’t do this. Like, I don’t have the time. Because people don’t understand—like, it takes all day long to make a lot of cheeses and if you’re trying to make cheese, it’ll consume your day. And when you have a crying baby and you’re in the middle of stirring curds, you are not going to stop stirring those curds. You’re just going to shake that baby on your hip until you’re done. So there’s things like that that we all used to know growing up because our grandparents did it and our great grandparents did it, but we are kind of coming into like a culture shock when we get this dairy cow, and we have all this milk. And suddenly we have a fridge full of 30 gallons of milk for the week that we have no idea what to do with. And then you are guilting yourself into feeling bad that you’re dumping it. So one of the ways we found was when I got pregnant was to do a couple of herd shares. Not a lot, but just, you know, we had extra milk, it helped us pay for hay, so that’s how I was able to manage that. And then of course, as our kids got a little bit older, they went through the milk. Like what you said, I mean, they’ll drink three gallons in one day, especially homemade chocolate milk. They will run through that stuff. But still, like even right now—we’ve had cows for a few years, and we’ve had five cows now—and I walked down to the refrigerator this morning and the whole fridge is full of milk and I’m like, how did we get here? I don’t know how we got here because we have two cows, and we’re only milking once a day. It adds up so quickly, so that is wisdom that people should definitely heed to, what you just said.
Beth Dougherty Do you have a pig, Amy?
Amy Fewell I don’t have a pig. We’ve talked about it, but here’s what I have found: I discovered this last year when I was pregnant and sick and didn’t want a garden. We started dumping our milk on our garden beds. And for my whole life, I had never been able to grow broccoli, cauliflower, and cabbage very well. It just doesn’t do well. When we started pouring our milk on our raised beds with those types of plants, I mean, it’s like we live in the Promised Land. These things are massive. They’re beautiful. They’re healthy. We got so much produce all because we dumped our raw milk on our garden beds last year, and we had people come to our house last spring and they were just in awe of how big these plants were. And so it was kind of like by accident that I discovered this. I mean, I heard of people doing that, but we had so much milk just over and over again. And so I’m just like, “Don’t waste it, pour it on the gardens.” And that’s what we did, and we had the best garden.
Shawn Dougherty And we need to see that that’s not waste.
Amy Fewell Right!
Beth Dougherty Share with people exactly what you were doing. Were you diluting it? Were you pouring it on young plants, older plants, under plants, over plants? Share how that milk was being applied to the garden.
Amy Fewell So, we didn’t dilute it. We just poured it straight into the garden bed, and we poured it on the soil around the plants. Some of them were younger. Actually, we did one batch before we even planted. So we just covered the garden beds and the soil, and we put wood chips on top. And then we planted those young plants—we transplanted them into those garden beds. And for probably a month and a half or more, we were, at least once a week, pouring milk on these garden beds—not on the plant itself, but just around it. And, I mean, they took off. We’ve been in a drought here in Virginia, and we have been doing that this year and every single time we pour milk around those plants, they shoot up like it’s been raining for a week.
Shawn Dougherty That’s fabulous.
Beth Dougherty That’s wonderful.
Amy Fewell Yeah, you’re right. It’s not a waste because you’re using that milk to grow more food.
Beth Dougherty I think, too, if we can all learn to picture the biological energy cycle of the planet and remember: sunlight, green leaves—how do I get it to use that energy for all the things I want to do? Feed people, feed animals, feed the soil. If we can just remember that in 12 hours, sunlight can be turned into energy in forms that I can, in this case, pour onto the soil under my garden plants, and I’m boosting a bunch of things: I’m boosting my vegetables, and I’m boasting my soil life. The only way soil works as a fertile medium, as you know, is if it’s full of living things. And they all have to eat. And the proteins and sugars in milk are super available. It’s also going to—and I bet you found this in your beds, I don’t know if you noticed it—but when you add dairy product to a pile of wood chips, you’re adding nitrogen and moisture, which are going to make them break down faster. So whatever your mulch is, it is also going to be incorporated into your garden bed as fertility faster when you’re using milk in that way.
Amy Fewell Yeah, they are the best beds that we have. We have some beds that we created last year that we haven’t used—we’re going to start using them this year—and the breakdown is non-existent in those beds, but the beds that we poured milk in last year and this year, they are just the richest. I mean, I’d been trying to put compost on them and all kinds of things, but when we started putting that milk on those beds, that’s when we started seeing the soil and the growth that we wanted from those garden beds. We just got some junky topsoil that we had thrown in there, and the difference was incredible when we were throwing that milk on there. So if I can’t keep up with it and I can’t make cheese—I’ve got a 10-month-old, you know—so that’s what we do. We just dump it on our gardens.
Shawn Dougherty It is God’s miracle juice. I mean, it does everything. And anybody who says, “Oh, whole raw milk is not for humans,” I think you’re…
Beth Dougherty You have to blot out about 12,000 years of human history to support that one. We’ve all seen, too—you know, regarding people’s gardens—we’re old, so this is weird to us, but I know a lot of people buy soil. Sure, if you make raised beds, I see where that’s coming from, but they’ll buy soil just to make a garden on the ground. And I bet you’ve run into this, because we have people saying, “I ordered soil. Everything died. I tested my soil and it had no nitrogen in it because it wasn’t really soiled at all. It was fast-broken-down wood chips, and people are selling us a bunch of stuff that isn’t topsoil.” But if you can use milk in the way you’re describing—and guys, you can dilute this down with 10 parts water and it will still have that kind of salutary effect—ff you are applying milk to it, you can make up for the deficiencies in your body and soil. And just a word here: we’re talking about any milk, and we are also talking about whey. So if you have no time and you milk the cow and you go, “I know I’m not going to be able to deal with this,” right? It’s your dog food, it’s your cat food. If you have a calf, it’s calf food. If you a pig, it it’s pig food. It’s chicken food, but it’s also soil food. But if you any time at all, you can park that milk can for 12 hours. It doesn’t have to be refrigerated because cream needs to get a little bit cultured to make butter, so you can just park the milk can somewhere. It doesn’t to fit in the fridge. Skim the cream off the top. Use the skim milk for your animals and your soil. Go ahead and make butter with your cream. Don’t make butter every day, but like, you know, when you’ve accumulated a gallon, make butter. And then put the buttermilk on the gardens too. There’s so many different ways we can apply. I mean, it’s our sunlight turned into proteins, fats and sugars. And there’s so many places on a farm that you can apply those. And then, as you said, it was like looking at the Garden of Eden. It just explodes with life.
Amy Fewell Yeah, it’s incredible to see it. And those are things people won’t learn unless they either accidentally figure it out or they listen to a conversation like this or read a book like you guys have. So, okay, let’s move into the next step: you’ve discussed, “Are you ready for a cow?” What’s the next up after that?
Shawn Dougherty Well, I think people’s expectations ought to be toned down a little bit. First of all, know that the cow you find first off is not your forever cow. Don’t think it’s your forever cow. We hear over and over and over again, “My first cow was a disaster,” “My first cow was hard,” “My first cow…”
Beth Dougherty Or, “My first cow just wasn’t perfect.” I don’t want people to get a picture that their first cow is a mess, but only you buy a cow thinking, Bessie and I will be together for 15 years, right? And three years later, you trade up for Bossy because Bessy wasn’t perfect.
Shawn Dougherty Right. And then the finding of it—we do have in the book 15 or 16 things to look for with your cow. So that would really help you. The other thing we find is that people say, “When I go there and I had my 15 questions, the people I was buying from went, ‘How do you know so much about what to ask for?'” So it’s a good thing, but you definitely don’t want to buy sight unseen. You need to go see this cow, and you need to talk to the owner. And what you’re really hoping for is I’m getting a cow, but I’m also getting maybe a mentor. Someone who has been raising cows. We really recommend that the best person to buy from is someone who’s already farming just the way you want to farm. That’s where you want to start. And you do want to spend some time getting your farm ready. You want to have some sort of a corral area where you can hold that cow for sure, and then you’ve got to have some fences. But we also walk people through all the things you don’t necessarily have to have. People who are waiting for all their equipment to be there and perfect and everything, that they may never get a cow.
Beth Dougherty I want to dive into the question of the cow herself a little bit too. Sixteen years into teaching and speaking on the dairy cow… You know, back in the early years, you were just hoping they’d even consider a dairy cow. And HOA really is, for me, the pivot moment—not because of you, because you were there at the moment when God started calling. The inception of this particular homestead organization is the pivot point in this country where Christians—started as a trickle and then blew up into a fire hose very quickly—began hearing God say, “I think you should reread Genesis chapter one and consider making that part of your life. I really did call my humans to interact with my creation and grow their own food and keep a garden.” And people have responded to that. And so now a lot of people have cows. And as more and more people were getting cows, we were getting a clearer and clearer picture of what that looks like for them. And if you have no background in farming and in dairy, as most of us—including us—don’t, one of the things that you’re better off not doing is buying a highly bred, extra-needs dairy cow. Dairy breeds didn’t even exist. People did not breed for dairy alone until the late 1800s. And this idea of the very skinny cow that produces tons and tons of milk is a commercial ideal, not a homestead ideal. But when you buy a cow that’s coming from conventional commercial lines, you’re liable to get a cow that has a boutique belly and needs a nutritionist. And yeah, sure, at some point you think, oh, I’d love to have five gallons a day from that cow. If you get five gallons today out of a 900 pound cow, you’re using a lot of her personal resources, and she’s probably going to need assistance. So more and more, when I look at the homesteader who’s just getting into dairy, I think: we homesteaders need to be thinking about non-conventional dairy cows now. They used to be conventional—150 years ago, if you bought a Dexter, she was going to produce decent amounts of milk while maintaining decent body condition on whatever was growing out there. And you can still do that. Don’t assume because you buy Dexter that that’s what you’re going to get, because very few people have been milking Dexters for the last 100 years, so that’s not a trait that’s been carefully maintained. But, you know, like, up the road at Twin Pines, they milk Jersey-Limousin crosses. That’s a dairy-beef cross that produces great beef, produces adequate milk, they’ll lactate for long enough, you know? She’s got cows up there that she’s been milking for two years before she rebreeds. They’re just a good cross, and they don’t need a nutritionist. They live on just grass and hay. And so I think for today, HOA’s been out there, the Christian homesteading movement—the explosion, regardless of Christian or not—has been going on long enough that there are now homesteads that, on average, every second year, have a heifer to sell. You know, all that cute mini Jersey stuff is all very well if you know what you’re doing. But if you’re just trying to get your hand on a cow that’s lactating and will hold still while you squeeze her, the parameters are pretty broad, and consider getting something that’s not straight dairy.
Amy Fewell If you’re raising animals—chickens, cows, goats, or anything in between—then you already know what you feed them matters. That’s why I want to tell you about our podcast sponsor, New Country Organics. They’re a trusted source for certified organic, soy-free animal feed, minerals, and homestead supplies designed to support not just your animals, but your entire farm ecosystem. What sets them apart is their commitment to real, whole ingredients—no cheap fillers and no least-cost formulations, just nutrient-dense organic grains sourced right here in North America, blended with purpose and consistency. Because at the end of the day, healthier animals mean healthier food for your family and a stronger, more sustainable homestead. Whether you’re just starting out or you’ve been doing this for years, this is one of those foundational choices that truly makes a difference. So, if you’re ready to take your feed and your farm to the next level, head over to NewCountryOrganics.com and start feeding your animals the way nature intended.
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Amy Fewell Yeah. We, of course, found this out in our journey. We actually have a wait list of people who want heifer calves from us. And we don’t do sexed semen. You know, we have to AI. We have had situations where a cow has come to us already bred by an Angus or something, and people want those calves. They want the beef jersey mix. That’s why one of the reasons this year we decided to… In the past, I’ve done a grass-fed Jersey sire for AI for our cows, and that’s worked out great. We got a pretty incredible Jersey heifer. She is fat as fat can be. And her mom is grass fed from the Furman Farm. But this year I decided to do crosses. And so I found this farm out west who does like native grassland Milking Shorthorn. They’re so pretty. They’re like the red and the roan and all of that. And so we have been using that this year. I’m excited to kind of see what comes out of that because they’ve been bred and consistently bred for dual purpose. And you know, here in Virginia, you have Shorthorn, and they’re just beef only. That’s just the way they are. But out there, this farm has specifically bred them and kept the breedings for dual purpose—what they were intended for. So, have a really skinny Jersey out here and I’m like, we’re going to breed you to this and see how your calf does. I think that’s one of the cool parts about having cows, and any animal on the homestead, really, is you get to play around with genetics and create the animal that you want. And we had a deal a couple of years ago where we got two cows basically for the price of one, and then I figured out why. We did buy them sight unseen, which really wouldn’t have mattered because they were beautiful cows, they were very healthy, but the one was a race car. I mean, she could not eat enough and keep any weight on her. And in her first year, she really didn’t even produce a whole, whole lot. But I knew once her second lactation came it was going to be different. So I ended up selling her and I did try to tell the people, “She’s a race car, she needs lots of groceries. That’s just how she is.” And, she did—she came into her second lactation, she was creating a bunch of milk, and my guess is she wasn’t strong enough and passed away. She was only three years old. And so it’s just so important to make sure what you’re getting. It’s so easy for us to see those pretty Jersey cows on commercial farms who are getting fed silage all day long, because they have an unhealthy amount of it, but that just doesn’t work on the homestead.
Beth Dougherty Right. And that has huge udders and we think, well, you know, that’s the business end. That should be big like that. And we can’t overemphasize to people enough: you want this work for the whole farm. You said, “They’ve been consistently breeding for dual purpose,” and that’s what people need to inquire about. If you’re going to buy a dual-purpose animal, find out: have they been milking animals? If they haven’t been milking them, they have no idea how much milk they produce, or at least a minimal idea of how much milk they produce for how long. And you want to make sure that those dual-purpose animals have been being milked. But the dual-purpose animals haven’t been tinkered with to make them do what your race car cow was doing. And that’s another pitfall for the new cow owner. If you get one of those, if you’re not a cow nutritionist, even if you offer her a lot, as soon as you’ve got one of those cows that has the metabolic tendency to produce a lot of milk, she’s also got about metabolic needs, which you can’t see, that were never met with grass alone.
Shawn Dougherty We’ve been crossing our Jerseys through a Dexter bull, and we’ve been very happy with what we’re getting.
Beth Dougherty People call that a Belfair, and I always feel like I need to stand up at some point and say, “Keep in mind, everybody, a Belfair is a cross, not a breed. They can be great animals, but you can’t breed two Belfair and get a Belfair. That’s how breeding works. So just bear in mind: this is a cross and you can’t perpetuate it except for by crossing again.
Shawn Dougherty One thing that I would like to mention is that once you’ve got your cow, now you’ve got to feed that cow, and we are all about all grass, but that means rotational grazing. And we’re very excited—the next book is entitled Micrograzing. That will be coming out in November. We finished it, but it comes out in November, and then Chelsea Green—these are all Chelsea green—wants us to do a milk book, and we’ve just submitted that outline. So they’re talking about, every year, us doing another book on the deep dive into homesteading.
Beth Dougherty As long as we have anything to say.
Shawn Dougherty That’s right. That’s right.
Beth Dougherty We’re hoping the milk book—which doesn’t come out until 2027—is really going to help people see what an indispensable and universal energy source milk is on the homestead. For all of time, we’ve only had leaves to work with, and we can’t digest them. So we constantly have to figure out how we are going to convert plant matter into forms we can use, and ruminants are direct. Pigs and chickens can be pastured, right? We can say, “I pastured it,” but it tells you more about where they live than what they eat. And only a ruminant can take your actual leaf matter and cellulose and turn it into energy you can use.
Amy Fewell Yeah, it’s amazing. You know, dairy cows are just really amazing, and they’re so resourceful on the homestead. Like you said, every homestead should have one, right? Of course, you know, don’t get one if you really don’t want one, but we really have found that once we found systems that worked for us, it doesn’t take very long to do cows. I mean, especially with us, at some point with all of our cows, we start milking once a day. And it’s just easier. And so it might take us 20 minutes or less in the morning to milk two cows, and then really the big part of it is just if you’re rotating them and you’re moving around, that might take a little bit of time—
Beth Dougherty But not very long most days.
Amy Fewell Yeah, not very long at all. Of course it depends on your property. And then the processing of the milk—I feel like that takes longer than anything else. And so what you said in the beginning is really true: do you have the time to walk through that?
Beth Dougherty One thing, this might be a good moment for us all to sort of dive into the manpower question, and something I know all three of us have noticed, is that since three or four years ago, we’ve seen more and more multi-generational farmsteads or multifamily farmsteads popping up. In 2015, if somebody had said to us, “Oh, my neighbors and I are going to share a cow,” we would have looked at each other and thought, oh, this is not a good picture, because in 2015, if you could find somebody who said, “Yeah, yeah. I’ll help you with your dairy cow,” chances are they were not going to. There weren’t that many people thinking seriously about a dairy cow or even about home food production. I don’t think COVID brought this about. I think the Holy Spirit did, but there are a lot of people since COVID who are taking it seriously. And we see more and more examples of highly functional multifamily or multi-generational homesteads. Grandma, Grandpa, five brothers and sisters, their spouses and their kids on 100 acres on a riverbank in Tennessee. That’s a real example. I don’t know the people, I’ve just met them. I couldn’t tell you their names, but I remember meeting them. And they started out as, like, accountants in Boston or something. And the thing about it… Now, you just said you’re milking two, and it’s about 20 minutes. That’s because however long it takes you to deal with one cow, if you add another cow, it only takes you a little bit longer since most of those steps you don’t have to repeat. And a high-producing dairy cow—like high-producing for a homestead cow, we’ll say she averages two and a half gallons a day over the course of 10 months—is still probably producing more milk… It’s not more milk than we would use or you would use on your homestead, but the beginner who doesn’t already have patterns of milk use has a lot of milk that they’re not up to speed with dealing with. And that’s when the multifamily or the multi-generational family setting is so valuable. You have little babies. Think how much it would help if you had family around you who were in different seasons, different people are managing that cow. As you have more people sharing in the blessings and the burden of a cow or a couple of cows, everybody’s job gets much lighter. I wish all my daughters-in-law lived close, because there’s usually at least three of us that can manage a dairy cow. But then there’s like eight of us Dougherty women, and we all need milk. But a lot of them don’t have… My daughter-in-law Jess presently has a three-week-old child. She needs somebody else to milk if she’s going to have milk. And that’s a piece of the homestead puzzle that I think we’re going to see fall into place, and on top of helping everybody and all the other ways, it will help women manage their dairy cows.
Amy Fewell Absolutely. And going back to what we were talking about before we started recording—it’s the basis of homestead economics, right? Like, how are we helping others? How is the family growing together? And we are seeing this more, and this is not a new thing. This is a very old thing. I mean, we see that in the Bible, we see it throughout history. I mean, this new concept of your child turns 18 and you kick them out of the house and they go live their own life—that’s new. And so this whole generational homesteading idea, which we’re seeing a lot more of, it’s not just a good idea—it’s very healing for people who have never experienced that before. Like for me, that wasn’t even on my parents’ radar, but I got married when I was 18. I ran right into marriage and I did the whole American dream thing. But for me to raise my kids this way—and they’re involved in milking, and they’re involved in homesteading, and they’re involved in all these things—it’s giving them the skills and the ideology that this is how it’s supposed to be. I have this conversation with our older kids all the time: when a woman is having more babies, the older kids help. That’s just what happens. But in American society, especially from the 1950s, you know, housewife theory is that mom is still just taking care of everyone. You know, the kids shouldn’t have to take care of themselves or help at all. But on a homestead, that doesn’t work. Everyone is working. Everyone has a job. And if they can carry that into their marriages, and with their kids, we truly change a society and a culture in this way of living. And I think much of this movement hasn’t grasped that yet. Like what you’re doing on your farm and your homestead and how you’re raising your family—it will completely change the culture in 10, 20, 30 years from now, because they lived a different way. And you might say, “Well, there’s just, you know, so many who don’t live this way,” but man, we’re seeing second and third generation homesteaders just in the last 10 years from starting HOA. I mean, we have these people’s kids and these people’s grandkids from the first few years coming to Homesteaders of America and learning and building on what their parents and grandparents taught them. And so it’s growing. You think, if you have five kids and those five kids live this way of life, that’s more than what the standard American family is having. They’re having one or two kids, you know, and so eventually the math maths at some point. And so I love that you guys wrote this book. You’ve centered it around the family milk cow and the family can be centered around a family milk cow for multiple different purposes. So we won’t give away all of your secrets in your book. Obviously we want people to go find those 15 bullet points of what they should take with them, and we want people to purchase it. And it’s a very easy book to read. I think I read it in like one or two nights because it’s just very easy to consume. And so we’ll link all of that in the show notes below. But this final last few minutes, I always give our guests the option to just share whatever is on your heart. It can be about cows, it can be about homesteading, it could be about something completely different. What would you share with our audience? Right now, if you could just say anything to them, what would it be?
Shawn Dougherty You know, the thing that I just love is this whole way of living is the way that I really believe God wants us to live. And if you would believe that God is a good God, that God loves us, and that he has put us in an environment and given us… This all works!
Beth Dougherty We have everything we need.
Shawn Dougherty That’s right, and if you will just jump in and really say, “I want to live the way God wants us to live”—we can’t think of another way.
Beth Dougherty And I would stick on to the end of that. What I was thinking is so often we see a thing that might be good to do—I know I do this way too often—and instead of going and doing it, we start calculating: “Do I have time?” “Wait, nobody else is doing that; what’s going to happen?” We need to begin to respond to the Holy Spirit as he calls us. We don’t want to be the person who puts their hand to the plow and then looks back. We don’t want to be the person who says, “Oh, well, I’m not sure that if I use this talent, I’ll make a profit. So I’ll bury it in a napkin and make nothing good of it.” Shawn, when he signs a book, writes “Farm with reckless abandon.” He also says the same thing to young married couples, like “Parent and have families with reckless abandon.” And I think we need—not in everything, but when we’ve identified the good—to just go do it. And it’s our experience—from a lot of years of being crazy enough to do something for which we had no playbook—we just want to say, “God honors people when they trust him.” Even dummies who make tons of mistakes the way we have get somewhere good by doing the good thing in front of them and not worrying too much about the future.
Amy Fewell My husband shared a quote with me a couple weeks ago, and it kind of goes along with what you’re saying. I don’t remember where he heard it from, but it really resonated with him and it resonated with me, and it’s been brought to my memory right now. And the quote went something like: “In the Old Testament, God said, ‘No, no, no,’ until he said, ‘Yes.’ But in the New Testament, God says, ‘Yes, yes, yes,’ until He says, ‘No.'” And what you said is just when you see a good thing, you just go for it. Until God says “No.” Until God says, “No, let’s move this a little bit, let’s tweak this a bit, let us refine this a little bit.” And so I feel like that’s like my homesteading mantra now: like, “Yes, yes, yes,” until God says “No.” Because we have limited time here and the restoration of all things: the restoration of the earth, the restoration of the family, all of these things. And so, I love that. I hope that more people, when they listen to this, they realize that homesteading is so much more than gardening and just growing your food—it’s truly going back to stewarding the earth and stewarding your family and stewarding your life, and that’s what this movement is all about.
Beth Dougherty That’s right. It’s about the original design.
Amy Fewell Yeah, yeah. All right, guys. Well, thank you for joining me this week.
Shawn Dougherty That was such a delight.
Amy Fewell I know that we could talk forever about all kinds of things.
Beth Dougherty One of these days we’ll make that time.
Amy Fewell Right. We should just have a conference where we’re just talking, right?
Beth Dougherty Wouldn’t that be fun?
Amy Fewell But thank you guys for joining me. You guys who are listening, check out all the information in the show notes. If you guys are coming to the May or October event, Shawn and Beth will be at both of those. We are working on a couple of other events for this year and next year that you guys want to stay tuned to. So make sure you’re subscribing—to our newsletter and all those things. And until next time, happy homesteading.
Amy Fewell Hey, thanks for taking the time to listen to this week’s Homesteaders of America episode. We really enjoyed having you here. We welcome questions and you can find the transcript and all the show notes below or on our Homesteaders of America blog post that we have up for this podcast episode. Don’t forget to join us online with a membership or just to read blog posts and find out more information about our events at HomesteadersofAmerica.com. We also have a YouTube channel and follow us on all of our social media accounts to find out more about homesteading during this time in American history. All right, have a great day and happy homesteading.
