Goat hand milking machine, anybody?

[dwbonfire]

Well to be honest I ordered the dansha manual pump milker, got it, kept saying Id try it out today, then never did. For 3 weeks I didn't have the time to take to mess with it, or be sure it was cleaned correctly after each use. I milk before work and in the evening, and very busy im between! I just never found the time and I started to think it was faster for me to hand milk and not have things to clean after. So I returned it. Maybe in the future if I have more goats to milk I'll consider it again, but I didn't think it was worth the hassle right now. Great people to deal with tho!!

 

[Ridgetop]

None of these pumps is familiar to me but I don't like those hand pump things. They don't look very comfortable and I can't think they would last long. I never used a breast pump when I was nursing, I hand expressed with no problem, and was a stay at home mom after my second baby.

We have had 2 electric milk machines. The first one 20 years ago was from Caprine Supply. It was sort of fragile so we replaced it with a cow milking machine that was adjusted for goats. Ours milked 2 goats at a time and we had a double stanchion. We added another double stanchion eventually so my son who did the milking could strip while the inflations were on the next 2 goats. We were on milk test and milked between 10 and 18 goats daily. We would cull the FFs after a couple months according to udders and conformation ending up with the best dozen or so. Both machines were portable to take to shows. We used an iodine based udder wash on each goat before milking, dairy sanitizer in a pail of water instead of bleach to rinse the inflations between goats and used a teat dip cup with dip after each milker was done. When we dried up for the year I used an end of milking mastitis preventative infusion. We always hand stripped after the inflations were off since it was easier on the teats. Be careful if you use a machine not to let it run after the milk stops flowing. I would rinse the milking equipment in cold water with a special milk soap from Caprine Supply to cut the milkstone, then run the disassembled inflations through the dishwasher. The lines were rinsed with cold water and special soap, then washed in hot soapy water, rinsed and hung to dry. We had very little mastitis in our herd, and used to routinely test once a month for mastitis anyway since we were on milk test.

With only a couple of goats, hand milking is easier because you can massage the udder and often detect any problems before hand. More personal with the goats and a lot less equipment clean up too. I used to run 3 dishwasher loads through every morning before preschool pickup at noon. That was when you could wash and dry a load of dishes in an hour. Now the "energy saver" DWs take 3 hours to do a load!

 

[babsbag]

Now the "energy saver" DWs take 3 hours to do a load!

Isn't that ridiculous. And washing machines take 2 hours.

 

[Ridgetop]

And the manufacturer's have the gall to claim that they are "energy efficient" and "energy savers"! Aaaargh!