The Case for Once-a-Day Milking
Protecting the health of the goat as well as the peace of the shepherd.
Hey friend,
It’s easy to get caught up in someone else’s rules of life.
Especially when you’re starting something new, you feel the pressure to follow the pre-determined “rules” that everyone just accepts as fact.
For us, that rule was the old milking schedule:
You must milk twice a day, exactly 12 hours apart.
For our entire first season of milking our goats, we followed that rule to the letter.
But the moment that commitment became an early morning alarm to milk by 5am, and a mandatory rush to get back home from work and prepare for milking by 5pm, our low-stress farm dream started to crumble.
We quickly discovered that balancing a dairy farm while managing day jobs meant our evenings were spent in a blur.
It took a full season of exhaustion to realize something huge:
The twice-a-day rule isn’t actually a farming rule — it’s a commercial maximization template.
It’s a valid system for wholesale volume where the goal is maximum yield to satisfy a demanding market.
But at Shalom Farms, our goal is different.
Our system is built on sustainability, quality, and peace.
Our goal is a life of stewardship — serving the health of our home and the needs of our customers over the demands of the market.
That realization led to a terrifying (but necessary) switch for our second season. We dropped the evening milking entirely and transitioned to Once-a-Day (OAD) instead.
And guess what… we never looked back!
We gained back over 2 hours of critical time every single evening.
That’s over 14 hours a week now spent catching up on admin, finishing projects, or simply enjoying the last of the daylight.
It gave us the gift of rest and “Shalom” for our souls that we value so much.
The Community Corner
If you are feeling overwhelmed or chasing an invisible deadline, we want to gently challenge you:
Look critically at every “must-do” rule you inherited.
If your system is designed to maximize output at the expense of your health and sanity, you’ve likely inherited a template that simply doesn’t fit your life.
You are allowed to build a life-first system, just like we did!
At the end of the day, our metric for success isn’t just volume — it is the health of the goats, the peace of the shepherd, and the quality of the milk.
Did our total milk volume drop? Yes, slightly.
However, the yield was still more than enough for our Herdshare and our seasonal waitlist — and for us, the trade-off was invaluable.
