Drying up the cows

We are now drying up Buttercup and Bluebell having weaned their calves 6 weeks ago. This takes some time as they have been so highly bred to produce lots of milk.
They need some time off to put on a bit of weight and we need some time off to do other things.
We also need to remove the weight gain effect of drinking half a liter of basically cream every lunch time along with lots of cheese, clotted cream, sour cream etc.
We will now milk every other day, then stop in about a week or ten days.

Having been doing it for over a month it feels strange having a day off it - it isn’t so much the milking that takes the time as finding uses for 8 liters of milk a day (hence the various cheese experiments).
Various friends have enjoyed it too. Here are Gary and Martine giving it a go.

You can see dairy cows have a very different build to the chunky beef cows around here. Buttercup is thin, but not unhealthily so, she should gain quite a bit of weight once she is not producing 4 liters of creamy milk everyday - that has to take a lot of grass!

We are thinking of a beef/dairy cross for their next calves - however we need to think about it, as they can sometimes have a less sweet nature.