Meet Golden
Meet Golden “Big Cow”, our Holstein cow. Holstein’s originate from Dutch provinces, the Dutch breeders bred and oversaw the development of the breed with the goal of obtaining animals that could best use grass, the area’s most abundant resource and over the centuries, the result was a high-producing, black and white dairy cow.
In Europe, the breed is used for milk in the north, and meat in the south. Since 1945, European national development has led to cattle breeding and dairy products becoming increasingly regionalized. More than 80% of dairy production is north of a line joining Bordeaux and Venice, which also has more than 60% of the total cattle. This change led to the need for specialized animals for dairy (and beef) production. Until this time, milk and beef had been produced from dual-purpose animals. The breeds, national derivatives of the Dutch Friesian, had become very different animals from those developed by breeders in the United States, who used Holsteins only for dairy production.
Breakfast, In the morning we bring Golden in from the field and she will have a basket full of hay and then a bucket of pellets, like the ones you can buy from the shop to feed our animals. But be warned if you feed Golden, you will need to wash your hands after, she’s a bit slobbery.
She is also a very destructive cow, at the beginning of the year (2017) she went on a wander and sat in the boy’s toilets, and as she is a bit on the big side, she couldn’t get back out so we had to cut the wall down for her!
