Is Calf Sharing Right for your Homestead?

Wednesday, July 12, 2023 was a milestone day! Hazel had a baby girl!

Hazel is our second dairy cow and the first to calve on our property! I’ve been on babywatch for days now, looking for signs of her going into labour. This is a moment we didn’t want to miss.

Merry, our first Jersey, came to us with her calf, Maverick, who was only a few days old. Merry taught us a lot about milking a cow (she was so patient with us) and about caring for a milk cow (totally different than a beef cow!)

We loved having raw milk so much we decided to get Merry a sister: Hazel. Hazel was originally named Evonne, but Wayne decided that Hazel suited her better. She is a purebred Jersey (with papers) and she was born April 2017. She came to us from a commercial dairy in Red Deer County. So, she’s done this calving thing before. This is her 5th calf, in fact!

What is new for Hazel this time is that she has the responsibility of raising her calf. In most dairies, the calves are removed from the cows right away and the farmer takes care of the babies so that mama can become a career woman and focus on producing milk. So for Hazel, caring for a calf will be a whole new experience! I am hoping and praying that her mothering instinct will kick in.

Hazel and baby will be out on pasture together during the day and the calf can feed on demand. At night, we will separate them while keeping them close enough that their noses can still touch and they can hear and smell each other. And in the morning, after being separated for about 12 hours, we milk Hazel and we get to keep all that milk. The homesteading world calls this calf sharing (but really should be called cow sharing, because you’re sharing the cow, not the calf.)

The benefits to calf sharing are that it gives us the freedom of only milking once a day and we don’t have to bottle feed the baby. It is also means that if we don’t quite milk out all the milk in the morning, the calf will clean it up for us, eliminating the risk of mastitis. So it is a win/win/win for us, mama, and babe.

We calf shared with Merry and Maverick until Mavey was 8 months old. One downside to calf sharing is at weaning time. It was so hard to separate the two of them. I cried. They bawled. Fortunately, a kind neighbour took Maverick to his house and he is living happily over there.

The other downside is you get less milk. But God has created the milk cow with abundance in mind. There’s more than enough milk for us and the calf.

Hazel’s baby girl arrived at 6:30 pm on Wednesday, July 12. I was present for the whole thing, which went quite fast. Hazel took to being a mama right away and was licking the baby (for like an hour) and then baby’s instinct to suckle kicked in and she was up on her wobbly little legs looking for milk.

It is a dairy tradition to name the calves using the same letter as the mom. So, we named the little girl Hershey (kisses) because of her lovely chocolate coat. Hazel was bred to an Angus bull, so baby is part beef cow, part Jersey.

We look forward to watching our sweet little Hershey grow up on our pasture. I am so privileged to be living on our farm and witnessing these miracles of life.