Our Farm

Our Farm

Welcome to our dairy herd share.  We are a small family farm run mainly by Christine with the support of her husband, Jared and her three children, Daphne, Cyprus and Florence.  Christine has had farming experience her whole life, but we started milking cows as Cast Iron Farm in 2010.

We love all cows, but we especially love the Brown Swiss breed.  Brown Swiss are big, docile heritage breed cows that produces excellent protein and fat content in their milk.  Aside from their personality, these lovely cows are ideal for our farm, and we have had many Brown Swiss win our hearts over the years. We have some Brown Swiss/Jersey crosses who are lovely as well.

We love operating as a small farm in our community with the opportunity to pamper the cows and calves in the herd share.  The time spent in the barn in the early hours of the day are the best part of the day and in the end, our cows provide us with so many delicious things.

Cows

Penny was born on the farm to Astrid and is a perfect mix of 50/50 Brown Swiss/Jersey.

Ash was born on our farm.  She is the daughter of a past favorite cow we had named Willow.   Ash is quirky and will always be our home grown baby.

Tilly is our resident Jersey.  She is small but mighty!

 Astrid is a very special cow and especially loves to be a mama.

Always remembering our Fancee.  She was the first cow we bought at Cast Iron Farm. We had many wonderful years with this cow and she gave us thousands of pounds of milk and many gorgeous cows.  Fancee was queen of our farm from 2010 to 2018. Dairy cows rarely live to produce as a 12 year old and we are grateful for the years she gave us.

Our Milking Parlor

The milking parlor is where the magic happens.  The cows come into the parlor once per day.  Our parlor was thoughtfully designed with many features that make it easy to milk cows the correct way.  We have hot water set to 150 degrees to clean our equipment in the parlor.  The waste water is taken out of the parlor by a floor drain that leads out into our drain field.  All of the sanitary supplies are lined up and easy to identify.  The milk machine is mounted to the wall of the parlor so that it is in easy view to monitor that it is milking at 11-12 pounds of pressure.  The beautiful concrete pad has grooves in it so that the cows don’t slip on it.  It is also graded so that the water drains fully out of the parlor, with no puddling.  All of the sanitation equipment is in easy reach for the milker to grab at the right time.    The pump is mounted on the wall on the right.  This makes it very easily accessible. All in all, the parlor is a well organized space, that works very well for our goal of milking the herd cows properly.