Milking questions for the experienced milkers

[countrykids]

We've found that the milk doesn't taste "right" until two weeks out from kidding. If I have to milk before that, it goes in the freezer for possible orphans or it gets fed to the cats.
I worry more about dangerous bacteria on the lettuce and spinach that I buy from the store than I do about raw milk. I have never pasteurized it from any source and we owned milk shares before having goats and I've also traded with other goat people for milk - never had a problem and I don't like the taste of it after it has been heated. That's just me - I know there are risks, but people have gotten sick from pasteurized milk as well and I don't feel that there are anymore risks than there are with eating anything else.
I did have someone give me some milk once in a plastic jug and she used plastic funnels - other things didn't look up to standards of what I would consider to be sanitary when storing and handling milk for human consumption, so I just used it for cooking - we had quite a few pancake suppers that week!
Side note: just saw a ticker at the bottom of the tv that said that 16 people have died in Europe from e.coli contaminated veggies. That concerns me more than my own raw milk.
I agree that past. goats millk from your farm would still be healthier than milk from the store. It's a personal choice and one you need to feel comfortable with. I'll admit, when we started with raw milk my children were tiny and I was looking out for signs of food poisoning and was a little paranoid at first. After a few weeks and no one got sick, I really didn't think about it again.
Like others have said, if the foot goes in the pail, the milk goes to the cats/dogs.

 

[helmstead]

Another great way to avoid the foot in the bucket is to milk with one of those "splatter guards" over your bowl (the mesh variety - those things smart people use to sautee and pan fry so oil, tomato sauce, etc isn't spattered all over their stoves - I say smart people because I never use one LOL).

It will stop the hoof going in, as well as hair, flies, etc.

OR you can rubber band cheesecloth over the top of your jar/small bucket.

 

[Ariel301]

I have one of the mini sized milk filters that looks like a metal bowl with the filter at the bottom, and I found it fits perfectly on top of a 2 quart milking bucket. It filters the milk as it goes in, saving time and keeping the milk more sanitary.

I don't have any kicky milkers anymore, but the accidental foot in the bucket does happen every once in a while. Milk that isn't really the best to consume for reasons like that, or something else got into it by accident, or one of the goats snuck a mouthful out of the bucket when I wasn't looking...either get fed to the bottle babies if I've got any, or I freeze it and use it for soap making.

Pasteurized milk lacks the natural probiotics of raw milk, and the calcium becomes very difficult for the body to absorb. Pasteurized milk consumption can cause diabetes and osteoporosis. When my grandma was diagnosed with osteoporosis, the doctor told her she absolutely had to stop consuming dairy products, because they can actually cause you to lose calcium. (of course, being a mainstream doctor, he wasn't going to push raw dairy as an alternative). I've actually seen the USDA's numbers on how many people become ill/die per year from pasteurized milk, and it's a lot. I was supposedly lactose intolerant--until I got goats and went to raw milk. No pasteurized for me, thank you.