Ok, I have to ask......

[babyboy1_mom]

Can I give my chickens milk/buttermilk?

I have been reading up on making butter, using fresh cow's milk. I know nothing about making butter, yet, or buttermilk.

When the cream is removed from the top of the fresh milk, is the milk then called buttermilk? (Growing up, my mom always told us that if we took/ate all of the cream off of the top of the milk, then the milk would be no good and we would have to throw it away.)

If not, then what do I do with the milk after the cream has been removed? (I do not like milk without cream/skim milk.)

Anyway, back to my original question. Can I give my chickens the milk, after I remove the cream? (I read this in a few different places, but cannot find it now and it did not go into details as to what milk was given to the chickens.)

Thanks and any suggestion on making butter are appreciated.

Dorothy

 

[andehens]

When the kids and I used to make butter, we still drank the milk that was left over, but........ you like your cream!
I thought about your question, cause its a great one and gave up and googled it! heres a link and a answer:
http://en.allexperts.com/q/Poultry-Farming-3481/chickens-eating-cheese-milk.htm
"Answer
A small amount of dairy products wont do your hens any harm, but if they're having it regularly it could make them a bit poorly- their bodies aren't made to digest dairy products so milk and stuff will just go straight through them."


Hmmm......Interesting huh! for whatever thats worth!

The way the kids and I made butter was to add a little salt to our cream, put our cream in a tupperware cannister with lid and roll and shake them, it didn't take long and wasn't hard to do!

 

[digitS']

Dorothy, you must have had non-homogenized milk when you were a kid. Wasn’t it great to have cream to whip any time you wanted it

?! And, we could use the churn in the big square jar and in a few minutes, have butter flakes. Filter that into cheese cloth and the liquid remaining could be called - buttermilk.

Usually, it needed to be cultured, or "clabbered" as my grandmother would say. Grandma only drank clabbered milk because she didn't like sweet milk. Maybe it didn't agree with her. So, either buttermilk or the whole milk could be clabbered.

That's what the chickens benefit from. Since they are lactose intolerant, like a lot of us, they don't do too well on homogenized and pasteurized milk. Milk that hasn't been pasteurized will soon clabber if it is kept at room temperature. But, if you are working with milk from the supermarket, you should find some live culture yogurt to stir into it. Keep the milk warm for several hours so that it clabbers and your chickens will benefit from drinking it.

Just skimming the cream off milk leaves "skim milk."

Steve

 

[babyboy1_mom]

Thanks for the answer. I will not be giving my hens any dairy products. I have enough poop to clean up from them. I do not need to add more mess....lol

Dorothy

digitS - We were raised on fresh milk that was purchased from a dairy, but my mother was not one to make butter, cheese, buttermilk and things like that. She used to skim just a little bit of cream off of the top ot the jugs and eat it straight out of the cup, but we were not allowed to skim any cream off of the top of the milk. She used to call milk that the cream was skimmed all of, bluejohn or something like that. I just remember her telling us that we could not take the cream off of the milk because it would make the milk bad and then we would have to throw it out.l

 

[ninjapoodles]

A huge number of people here give their chickens yogurt almost every single day. I know mine LOVE it. I've also given them whey left over from cheesemaking, and whole milk as well, though uncultured dairy only occasionally.

My chickens and turkeys' absolute, #1, all-time favorite treat in the WORLD is mozzarella cheese. Anytime I need to get birds put up before dark, I just go out with a bit of string cheese. They will LEAP at me to get it!

 

[babyboy1_mom]

So, if I were to take all of the cream off of the top of a fresh jug of milk, then the milk could be drank by someone other than myself or used for cooking?

Here I am, quite a few years older, and finding out that my mom told us that story so that she could get all of the cream for herself....LOL

My main point in this question is "What do I do with the milk that has no cream left on top of it?" Mom had me believing that we would get really sick if we drank it or used it to cook with. (The little sneak...lol)

I cannot wait to get me some more fresh milk, so that I can start making butter and all sort of thingsl.

Dorothy

 

[ninjapoodles]

Quote:
I am admittedly ignorant on this topic, as the only raw milk I've ever had is goat's milk (the sales of raw cow's milk is illegal in my state), which doesn't separate, but...if you remove the fat from cow's milk, isn't what's left just skim milk? I mean, skim milk = nonfat milk = milk with no cream. Right?

 

[babyboy1_mom]

I just learned that fact myself....lol digitS just told me that, in an earlier post. I never thought about it being just skim milk.

I just remembered my mother's words, "Don't take that cream off that milk, if you take all the cream off the milk, then it will not be any more good and we will have to throw it away." LOL

BTW, I am ignorant to this topic also, apparently...lol I also know nothing about goats/milk.

 

[ninjapoodles]

Quote:
Do you think that maybe the cream on top formed a kind of "seal" that kept the milk beneath fresher longer? (I have NO basis for this theory, just outright guessing here!)

Once a month, I am lucky enough to get REALLY fresh milk from a dairy in the north part of the state as part of our CSA basket. It comes in glass bottles, in half-gallons. I know that by state law, it MUST be pasteurized, and it doesn't separate into cream on top, so it must also be homogenized, right? But it tastes a thousand times better than what comes from the grocery store, and I don't know why. Anyway, one weird thing about it, is that some thicker stuff "sticks" to the glass bottle wherever the top level of the milk is in the bottle--it's semi-solid, and I always assumed it was fat/cream. This is whole milk, and it's the only way it comes from this particular dairy.

We CAN get cheese made from raw milk here, as long as it has been aged at least 60 days. The whole raw milk law is a big joke, as far as I'm concerned. Obviously the laws against it are not REALLY due to health concerns, otherwise they wouldn't allow on-farm sales of raw goat's milk. I think it's just that the market for goat's milk doesn't threaten the livelihood of "big dairy" the way that the market for FRESH cow's milk might.

 

[digitS']

I think that one good reason for us to have these chickens in our backyards is that they are allowed to enjoy a better and healthier life than they would in a commercial poultry operation.

The same thing could be said for dairy cows. (Hope that BackYardCows.com forum is going great, Rob!

)

Our farm was in southern Oregon where we never had more than an inch or 2 of snow on the ground. Our dairy cows lived lives that allowed them to be on green pasture every single day. We never had more than 40 cows and calves with two pastures totaling 24 acres and a 53 acre hay field. Usually, there were only about 15 adults. Only 3 or 4 were dairy cows.

Life for Daisy, Violet and Reddy wasn't all that bad as they were not sharing a few acres with THOUSANDS of their sisters and a manure lagoon. Those cows spend their days all but standing on top of each other and with their feed brought to them.

Of course, those cows have milk that should be pasteurized. It should probably be irradiated and then blasted into space

!

Steve