Herdshare experience

Our experience with a herdshare in Kentucky!


Our family just wrapped up our first experience with a herdshare! A herdshare is a way to buy milk directly from a local farmer—the person pays to cover the cost of owning and boarding a milk cow with a group of local people, and we each get a share of the milk or other products that come from the dairy herd. We hadn’t done this before, so it was a totally new process for us, and we really enjoyed it. It is a huge blessing to be able to get milk from a local farmer, and it really made me feel like a more active participant in our agricultural system.
Here’s what that was like for us!
We met our farmer on a local milk page on social media. She negotiated a price for us, and we started with cream. Our family doesn’t drink or use much milk but we use butter regularly. I like to make my own butter with heavy cream. Cream from the local farmer was a dream!
I drove to her pick up and signed paperwork to buy into the herdshare for six months. I gave her an empty jar, and received our jar of cream. I paid her, and drove home and then in a few hours of reaching room temperature its ready to make butter! It’s such a simple way to buy such a quality product. This dairy is truly amazing.
Making butter is simple. I put room temperature cream in my kitchen aid and mix it til it’s silky, add salt, continue whipping til it turns into butter. It takes less than 15 minutes which is a perfect amount of time for a quick tidy of the house. I wash my butter in ice water, squeeze it out, and put it away. Then I pour the buttermilk into a jar to use later as well. You can also, then, put some butter back into the kitchen aid and whip it, adding herbs, spices, honey—whatever! Can you say yum? It may go bad faster but good food goes bad. You just have to ask yourself “do I care about preservatives going into my body?” If you do, you do; and if you don’t, you don’t. Eat your food accordingly. It is, at least, a less expensive way to eat high quality food.

I eat mozzarella as a snack with balsamic olive oil and spices. However, I thought, “hey, wouldn’t it be cool to try making my own mozzarella?” A lot of people on homesteading pages make their own cheese, and I identify as a kitchen homesteader, so why can’t I do this. So I bought some rennet, bought a gallon of milk from my girl, and made some dang mozzarella!


The first time we tried it, we diluted the rennet (we used a liquid rennet) not knowing, you don’t need to dilute liquid rennet, only capsule. So it didn’t set up like we hoped and didn’t form a firm cheese. It was more like a cream cheese but still yummy.

The second time we tried it, we didn’t dilute the rennet and so the curds separated from the whey and it made a firm, standard mozzarella.


Very cool!


So it was a really fun opportunity for us to be able to try that this past few months! Core homesteading memories!