After trying just about everything I could think of to make the goat milk work, I finally had to admit something to myself: maybe the problem wasn't what I was doing with the milk. Maybe it was the milk itself.
I love my goats, and there was absolutely nothing wrong with their milk. But I had learned the hard way that goat milk was a niche market. I could make soap, cheese, freeze it, sell some of it, and still somehow end up with more milk than I knew what to do with.
I wasn't ready to give up on the dairy dream, though. If anything, I was more determined than ever to figure out how to make it work.
Around that same time, Brent and I had decided to build a 70-foot shop. One end would be his welding shop, and the other would be my space where I could finally have everything set up for milk and whatever this little dairy dream eventually became. I could reclaim my kitchen!
We thought we had a plan. Then one day, I was scrolling through Craigslist.
And there she was.
An A2/A2 jersey cow for sale.
She as a first-stage heifer, only a little over a year old.
I had absolutely no idea what any of that meant! So naturally, I started Googling.
First, I googled what A2/A2 means, then what does first-stage mean. And somewhere between on Google search and the next, a new idea started forming. I started doing the math.
Goat milk had proven difficult to market. It was wonderful milk, and there were people who loved it, but it was just so hard to sell. I had tried the milk, the soap, the cheese and no matter what I did, I kept ending up with more milk than I knew what to do with.
But cow's milk? That was different.
People already knew what to do with cow's milk. They drank it, the cooked with it, they made butter, cheese, ice cream, yogurt - you could use it right down to the last drop.
And this wasn't just any cow. She was an A2/A2 jersey. The wheels started turning.
What if I sold all the goats and bought the cow? I talked to Brent about it.
Now, Brent is normally pretty good about going along with my ideas, but this one made him nervous.
Did we have enough room for a cow? Did we have everything we needed to take care of one? And there was one other tiny detail: I had never owned a cow in my life.
But I am, unfortunately - or fortunately, depending on how you look at it - a tragically optimistic person.
In my mind, the logic was pretty simple. I can handle a goat. A cow is basically just a bigger goat. Right? What's the worst that could happen?
So we sold the goats. And we bought the cow.
We didn't even own a livestock trailer, so we borrowed one from a friend and drove more than an hour and a half one way to go get her.
The couple we bought her from couldn't have been nicer. I wouldn't find out until later that they knew immediately just how green I was when it came to the bovine species. Thankfully, the sold us the cow anyways.
And somewhere in that transaction, we made a couple of good friends too!
So what's in a name right? I wanted to name her something nice. So we went with Matilda, Tilly for short.
And according to everything we knew, Tilly wasn't supposed to have her calf until the end of September.
It was only May, we had months!
Months to learn. Months to prepare. Months to figure out exactly what we were doing before I suddenly had a fresh jersey cow that needed to be milked twice a day.
Plenty of time! Or so we thought....
One July morning, I was making coffee when I happened to look out the office window. There was something out there. A big dog maybe? For a second, I couldn't quite figure out what I was looking at.
Then it registered. It was a calf.
Sometime in the middle of the night, while we were peacefully sleeping and believing we still have until September to figure out how to become dairy-cow people, Tilly had decided otherwise.
She had calved.
In July.....not September.....
And just like that, my months of preparation disappeared overnight. Apparently I was about to learn how to milk a cow!
Looking back now, it's funny how certain we were that we had time.
We had a plan. We had months to prepare. We had already decided how we thought this next chapter was going to unfold.
But homesteading has a way of reminding you that your plans are rarely the final plans.
I didn't know how to milk a cow. I didn't know exactly what I was doing. And I certainly didn't know where this one decision - to sell the goats and take a change on a jersey cow - was eventually going to lead us.
I just knew it was time to figure it out. There's a verse that feels almost written for this part of our story:
"In their hearts humans plan their course, but the LORD establishes their steps." Proverbs 16:9.
We thought we were buying a cow. Looking back, I think God was establishing the next step. And apparently, He decided September was too long to wait.