New member intro Kjersti: Rigby, ID

[Guest guest]

My name is Kjersti and I've been reading this group for awhile now but apparently never sent my intro so I apologize for that; I thought I had. My email is customrock2003@... and in Idaho raw milk is illegal to sell for now so we do it through cow shares. There is pending legislation to make it legal but only if you are certified grade A or you have less than 3 cows and apply for exempt status so there are a good amount of people actively fighting that bill as it's extremely cost prohibitive or a small dairy to become grade A, and yet three cows aren't enough to make a living from, not to mention it would require us to be under their thumb so

to speak. Anyway on to my intro:My Husband and I live in Rigby, ID with our two kids ages 4 and 6; on 15 acres and we lease 16 more about 5 miles from here. We have two milking guernsey cows,pastured chickens, horses and we raise bottle calves for beef as well. This next summer we'll be raising pastured turkeys and meat chickens for the first time as well. We discovered raw milk from the co-op we were involved in when we lived in Las Vegas, NV (07-09) but we then moved to Idaho and could not find raw milk anywhere remotely close save for one organic raw milk dairy that was sold out of shares and extremely expensive. So born out of my frustration was our decision to just get our

own milk cow in June of last year; we already had horses so the addition of another hay and pasture eating animal was not a huge adjustment. Our first cow is a six year old Guernsey named Sassy and she's been a wonderful first cow for us. She's currently dry and due the end of March and we hope for a heifer as she's bred to a very nice bull. We started offering cow shares originally to offset our costs but the demand has increased to the point of us adding another cow last December (The 2 yr old daughter of the cow we already had who had just calved in November) and we're considering adding another shortly as we have six people on our waiting list and I get calls almost every week. Not only has

the health of me and my family improved but I hear all the time from our shareholders what a difference the raw milk has made for them also. We make all our own butter, the cheese-making is a work in progress (lol there's a learning curve!), kefir, and various other things and are so pleased we got cows. Our cows graze as much as possible when there's not several feet of snow and they get all long stem hay (most of it we grow ourselves) when there's not grass, and they're fed rolled barley and minerals at milking so we feed no soy products either and their health is great (although Sassy the older one that's dry still needs to gain a good amount of weight despite being on free choice grass hay for the last 3 weeks so if anyone has suggestions for that I'm open to it. She's very "dairy" and milks heavily to the point of still producing 5gal/day when we dried her off so I'm not sure how much she really needs to gain to be in good shape for her

next lactation. Our other cow eating the same milking diet stays borderline too fat so I guess it's a matter of individual differences to a certain extent)Anyway I look forward to getting to know you all better and sharing the passion for raw milk. Thanks,KjerstiI