dyslexia wrote:Typical Holstein milk is 2.5% to 3% milk fat (the Jersey, another popular dairy breed, produces about half the volume of milk per cow per day, but at 4 to 4.5% milk fat). European Holstein herds (especially in Denmark and the Netherlands) can produce much higher fats - some as high as 4.6% - even with yields per cow per year of 8,000 litres.
Interesting, to me, is taht dairy milk used to be sold to the market priced by butterfat content and measured by the pound, with the advent of modern production methods the value by $ was changed to simple poundage totally ignoring butterfat content. We had a Brown Swiss that provided us with all of our milk, buttermilk, heavy cream and butter. Often my grandfather and I would make a light lunch out of saltine crackers and fresh churned and salted butter. My mother's favorite was cornbread crumpled into a cold glass of buttermilk.
I'll tell ya what though....cows is dumber than a box of rocks.
This gal I knew in Okeechobee came from a dairy family. She was the one what told me the differnce between Holsteins and Jerseys.
I was so tickled at the way she discribed them as the Holstein being really big (I'm thinking, no sh*t Sherlock, it's a cow) and how they gave watery milk, as opposed to a "petite" little Jersey, who wasn't a big producer, but rich, and how they would blend the milks.
I'm giggling away "A petite little cow"
I'm imagining this little brown Jersey like Elsie on the Bordon bottles, dipping a dainty little foot into a pond of water...then quickly drawing it back squealing "oooooooo....that's coooold...!"
Then, sometime later, I saw a field that had both Holsteins and Jersey standing around together, and I thought...."I'm be damned. Those Jerseys ARE all petite next to those big tanks."
Once we were visiting my husbands friend from back home in Illinois, who raised cows, and I asked him something about how many pounds of milk an average cow of his produced.
Later on he said to my husband privately "Wow...she's SMART" because I knew about the pound thing.
Walter, that is Really interesting about the difference in the fat the same breed can produce.....I learned something new today.
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) . sweet buttermilk soup with sago(the real stuff made from the palm-tree , nice and slippery on your tongue , i can still feel it ! - don't even know if it's still sold) - what a treat it was on a hot summerday !