Turning Beef Plans into Butter Dreams: Meet May Belle the Milk Cow

Each year, hubby and I buy either half a cow or a whole one from a local ranch to fill our freezer with farm-raised beef for the year. It’s one of my favorite perks of rural life—knowing exactly where our meat comes from, and being able to wander out to the freezer, pull out whatever cut sounds good, and (my very favorite part) avoiding the grocery store.

Lately, though, we’ve been tossing the idea around about taking it a step further.

Instead of buying someone else’s steer, why not raise our own? We’ve got the pasture space and the fencing, so why not? (Famous last words of every aspiring homesteader.) It just seemed logical: raise one ourselves, cut out the middleman, save some money, and have complete control over how the animal was raised and fed.

Then, as these things tend to go, our bright idea snowballed.

“If we’re going to raise one,” said hubby, “why not get a pregnant cow instead?”

That way we could keep her as a milk cow, raise her calf for the freezer each year, and enjoy the added bonus of fresh milk, butter, cheese, yogurt, and ice cream. And maybe we could even sell some. You know, just casually adding dairy operation to our list of homestead-ish experiments, as one does.

And wouldn’t you know it—just when we decided this was something we’d do someday, the universe (and Facebook Marketplace) said, “How about today?”

Meet May Belle.

She’s a three-year-old Jersey cross, with the sweetest face and the gentlest eyes you’ve ever seen. She’s due to calve in just a few weeks, which means this little daydream of ours suddenly got very real, very fast.

May Belle came from a small family dairy operation a few hours west of us. The folks who owned her adored her and kept her as long as they could, even after deciding to close down their dairy program. They told us she was their favorite—sweet, steady, and affectionate—and they’d hoped to keep her forever. But life and logistics had other plans, and eventually they had to let her go.

That's where we came in.

We loaded her up, brought her home, and introduced her to her new pasture (and her curious new neighbors, some of who were not very welcoming, but that's another story). She’s settled in beautifully and so far has been nothing but calm and gentle. But I'm not going to lie - I'm still afraid of her horns. While they're much smaller than the yaks', they're still really pointy.

So anyway, here we are: the new owners of a pregnant dairy cow about to give birth and absolutely no idea what we’re doing. Yay!