butterfat

[knabe]

anyone know how to measure butterfat content at home?

 

[Dero]

You can use a hydromoter to measure total milk solids.

 

[Cattledog]

anyone know how to measure butterfat content at home?

Knabe, I never would have figured you would be asking that question.  You usually have an answer for some of the most off the wall questions on here!

 

[knabe]

Knabe, I never would have figured you would be asking that question.  You usually have an answer for some of the most off the wall questions on here!

every once in a while i just milk the cows for fun and thought it would be interesting to know.  goes back to my desire to have smaller udders that "look" like they have less milk, but have more solids and get away from the epd tom foolery.  hope it strikes up some good comments.

 

[Cattledog]

Knabe, I never would have figured you would be asking that question.  You usually have an answer for some of the most off the wall questions on here!

every once in a while i just milk the cows for fun and thought it would be interesting to know.  goes back to my desire to have smaller udders that "look" like they have less milk, but have more solids and get away from the epd tom foolery.  hope it strikes up some good comments.

Oh man! I just had a conversation with one of my buddies about something like this.  We own a cow together and this entire cow family has smaller udders but they always wean off the biggest calf.  It's almost commical watching people looking at her udder and then her calf.  They just don't get it.  To be honest...at first I didn't either!

 

[simtal]

send samples off to a milk lab, pretty reasonable I think

 

[CAB]

I have 3 cows that you would swear could not raise a calf by looking @ udder size. It has to be fat/solids content. Mark do you have a dairy close by. They could test it for you or get it tested. Chap may pipe in, he deals with many dairies.

 

[Shady Lane]

Knabe, I never would have figured you would be asking that question.  You usually have an answer for some of the most off the wall questions on here!

every once in a while i just milk the cows for fun and thought it would be interesting to know.  goes back to my desire to have smaller udders that "look" like they have less milk, but have more solids and get away from the epd tom foolery.  hope it strikes up some good comments.

I don't think I follow how udder "sixe" is connected to EPD's?

  Milk EPD's are calculated on calf weaning weights?

 

[knabe]

I don't think I follow how udder "size" is connected to EPD's?

  Milk EPD's are calculated on calf weaning weights?

bingo.  if you had two cows and the only diff was a small and big udder with the same weaning size, that would be nice, but for me, there are too many vague factors going into milk epd without know anything about milk fat.  i want to see how correlated it is.

 

[SWMO]

Heck I just finished inputting data on a calf out of a cow that DOES NOT MILK and that has very poor milk epd's -1.  But the bull has decent milk epds and the calf is showing a 13 epd on milk.  GO FIGURE.  I would never sell this bull calf to someone and be able to tell them with a straight face that he will add milk to his females.  I am still in the dark on how they are computing their milk epd's.  The milk epd in the Charolais breed has become meaningless to me.

Back to the butter fat content on cows.  I know that the very best calf raising cows that we ever had could trace their lineage back to just a touch of Jersey somewhere in their ancestry. 

 

[HerefordGuy]

Shady Lane is right, milk epd's are calculated from the weaning weight (the proportion of the weaning weight attributed to the cows milking ability).

 

[Mark H]

If you are keen on measuring butterfat the old Babcock or ether extraction methods are worth a look: http://www.fmmaseattle.com/lab/fat.htm.  Both techniques require handling potentially harmful chemicals so farming it out to a lab may not be such a bad idea.  A cute little play based on the Babock method is at: http://www.wisconsinhistory.org/whspress/oss/pdf/babcocks_invention.pdf
In the old days this was done by a coop dairy as a service to its members to avoid acid burns and ether explosions.  This is where a cooperative effort amoung farmers paid off.