I've seen the Henry Milker mentioned several times on various threads. I checked out their website and looked at the UTube video, and we are thinking this might be just what we need with one of our girls who is difficult on the milk stand. But I have a few questions for those of you that have used one before. Does the single Henry Milker work as well as the double? Any downside to the double? How do you wash/sanitize the tube after milking? Since it is a closed system, do you still filter the milk?
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First: Any milking animal must be stripped after the machine is finished - if you don't, milk supply will go down because she is not milked dry.
Regarding the cleaning and filtering, I absolutely agree and emphasize what Rachel said. Again, just because no one has gotten sick does not mean it will not happen in the future. When I was in junior high, an entire family down the road from us died from pickled peppers served at Thanksgiving dinner. Tragically, that batch had the Clostridium botulinum bacteira in it which produced botulism while sitting on the shelf awaiting being opened for dinner and killed them. They had eaten peppers prepared exactly the same way for years with no one ever getting sick. Improperly canned for years and all went fine, until . . .
The thing that concerns me most about what you typed, Jim, is the casual attitude that came across to me the way the words were typed. Simply rinsing anything related to food, but especially milk and meat, is not good hygiene. FYI, milk has proteins that adhere to surfaces and cannot be reliably cleaned by rinsing. Just because something looks clean does not mean it is. All of your equipment *must* be washed with hot soapy water and rinsed thoroughly - there are no shortcuts for this. Your milk must be properly filtered even with a "closed" system - commercial dairies who don't care that much do this, it is required by law and is just good sense. As for the tubes, they should be flushed out after each milking and a bleach water run through them - again, the milk proteins. Some people advocate a mixture of water, bleach and baking soda. When I use a milker, I use bleach water and then clear water to rinse out the bleach water. (And once a day, I used the skinny brush through the lines.)
It concerns me greatly that you have come across as not taking as seriously as it needs to be - I sincerely hope the words as I understood them do not reflect what they seemed to say.
What you, and too many others, don't fully understand is that any lack of thoroughness on anyone's part that results in illness is one more very large weapon in the arsenal of those who want raw milk banned completely; that includes the private ownership of dairy animals. Every one of us who either milks our own animals or uses raw milk from others needs to be super vigilant about the care of our animals and our milk. Because ONE PERSON was careless 20 miles north of where I live, the laws of my state were changed to not allow the "transfer" of raw milk, no selling, no trading, no giving - I cannot legally give my own granddaughters my goat milk at my own table because my granddaughters do not live here. That is quite a burden on everyone in our state because one person was careless - and three children whose families got milk from them almost died and one will have kidney problems the rest of his life.
I certainly do not want to sound harsh because I take this very seriously. Most of all, I do NOT want to lose my right to have dairy animals or use raw milk because someone else does not take the care that most of us to take.
Even commercial milk machines usually need a finish up of hand milking to completely milk out. If you have kids on your dam, and are milk sharing, it's not *as* important, but milk supply is related to demand, so the more milk you can get out, the better.
Sally Knight said:
I love the milker but the only thing I found was that I still needed to finish the girls off by hand. I noticed this more with Elly but she does have smaller udders and that it did not fully milk her out.
I would just like to clarify that "No one has gotten sick" is not a reason to think that things are being done "right." Not properly cleaning milking equipment is serious. While it's not necessary to go overboard, it IS necessary to do it correctly. Hot water is not enough to sanitize milking equipment. It needs to be cleaned with hot, soapy water at the very least. It should be cleaned this way after EACH use. This doesn't mean it has to be a chore! I run hot water into a bowl, put some soap in, and let everything soak submerged for a few min. while I strain my milk into a jar to go into the fridge. Then I finish washing/rinsing the milking equipment I had soaking, and put it up to air dry. It really isn't that time consuming, and I have to do cleaning up of milking pails, jars, strainers, etc. when I hand milk too, so time wise, the system being used doesn't play much into the time used to do it. (clean up)
I think it's also important to clarify that not straining your milk is not a good idea. The milking system is "closed", but there are still areas where hair can get into your jar, and dirt from the udder can also come in with the milk. Straining the milk is not a complicated or "fussy" step. It's necessary to ensure that the milk you put away is as clean as it can be, free of any contaminants that could cause early or expedited degradation of your milk, or worse, bacterial growth of the unfavorable or even deadly kind. Clean and sanitary milk handling has many levels, and even though a person could go a lifetime without anyone getting sick from improper handling, it's really important that people understand that for every step they skip, there are real risks that are increased. I do not think it's good to condone skipping those steps. Especially in this forum.
Jim Morris said:
I got the double last year. It worked ok but the inserts kept slipping down. I purchased smaller syringes for this year. I will be interested to see how it works. I did usually finish by hand last year because it didn't seem to get all of the milk. Once again, I think it was because the original equipment is too large for my girls. I just through the tubes in boiling water after I rinsed them out. It worked. Towards the end, I would stick a filter in the top of the Ball jar and that worked nicely, in case any hair from around her teats worked loose with the vacuum.
We have been using a Henry milker for the last two years. We did buy the double but we only ever milk on the single as we found the girls did not really like the double.
We purchased the milker as Elly was three years old had kidded but had never been milked!! So they only way to milk was with the Henry. Year one was a battle but by the end she got use to it. Year two/last year was fantastic all the work paid off and we actually got to the stage last year we where able to hand milk her.
I love the milker but the only thing I found was that I still needed to finish the girls off by hand. I noticed this more with Elly but she does have smaller udders and that it did not fully milk her out.
We still filter the milk, make sure you wash the lines straight after use with hot water it stops the fat from staying in the pipes. I also rinse through with a little bleach as well.
I just recently got one. I'm not impressed. I will probably keep it just for my wife to milk the goats for the 1 or 2 days a month I'm out of town but I find it leaves at least 25% of the milk in the udder. For my that's unacceptable and If I'm going to have to milk them out by hand at the end anyways the hassle of additionally cleaning the milker, etc is just not worth it to me. I'm debating sending it back but like you I have a stubborn goat who won't stand for my wife to milk.
I second what Rachel said about straining the milk. You always want to strain your milk when you put it in the storage jar(s) even if you are certain it is "pure." Safety first, always.
And . . . I always use milk filters. They may look alike at a quick glance but they are not. Remember that coffee filters are for keeping the beans/grounds out of the coffee while milk filters are for filtering out impurities. A coffee filter would be better than nothing but not as good; I would use it only in an emergency situation when I had no milk filters and then I would double it. Milk filters are thicker and more dense than coffee filters; I also suspect they are also manufactured under stricter standards.
Yes, I would think in that situation, it would be helpful.
thanks for the input Rachel. I have one doe who is not very patient. She has one teet that is very short, so I have to milk each side separately. She gets impatient when she is done with her grain and is a kicker. If I am not done milking both sides then the battle starts.... more often than not the bucket gets kicked over. I thought that a Henry Milker might help save my milk. What do you think?
Rachel Whetzel at MigMog Acres said:
I don't have a double, but I haven't heard bad things about it, so I assume it works just as well. I like my single, and would buy a double if I were in the market for a new one.
That said, a difficult doe is a difficult doe. A Henry Milker *can* be helpful, but it's not always when the doe is not cooperative. It IS helpful in getting milk from a doe that isn't able to stand well, (I had a doe what had some injury to her back legs during delivery, and she wasn't able to stand well for her kids to nurse right away, and the Henry made it possible to get milk from her without more stress on her back end.)
The only down side I can see to a double is in the instance I mentioned above, where I didn't have easy access to both teats, because my does was laying down, and you have to have both teats in the cups to create the seal you need to get milk with a double vs. a single, but you might be able to create a capping (or it may come with one?) system for using the system on one teat only, and kind of convert it if you needed to.
I used hot soapy water for all my parts, ran hot water through the tubing, and then soaked in a sanitizing solution of bleach water to clean my tubing. The system also comes with a skinny scrub brush to really clean out the tubes.
I still ran all my milk through a strainer, because when you're milking more than one doe, or a doe that produces more milk than the jar you're milking into, you need to open and empty the system, and hair can still get into the jars through the tubes, or between opening and closing the system. I just run my milk through a reusable mesh coffee filter.