# Bringing a doe back into milk?



## Goat Song (May 4, 2011)

So I have officially been trying to dry my Sannen/ La Mancha doe up for 9 months, and she WILL NOT dry up!!! I've hit the point where I only have to milk her out every 1-2 months, and each time I get about a quart of milk from her. So my question is: can I turn around and try to bring her back into milk? I'm only milking out one side, as that's the one that fills up the most. I don't know if the other side is dry or not... It seems that if it was dry, then bringing the other side back into production might cause it to become lopsided... She's not on grain, or on a high protein hay right now. She's just a super heavy milker that knows how to pump it out! LOL. 

I just figure that if I'm going to go to all this trouble to try and dry her up, then I might as well just be milking her and feeding the milk to my goat kids!


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## xymenah (Jul 1, 2011)

My doe Beep is like this. She will NOT dry up. I was milking her out every two months and getting three quarters of a gallon. So I decided to milk her out every day to see if she would come back into milk better. Nope didn't work. So I don't think it would work but you could try.


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## DavyHollow (Jul 14, 2011)

feasably you could, but Im just not sure how to go about it.
I've heard of goats who don't need to be bred again who continue into milking after being "dried". I guess you'd just have to slowly milk her again, at least once a week then slowly increase the days and the numbers of times per day.


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## keren (Oct 26, 2008)

My girl Violet is like this ... but she came into milk spontaneously without being bred. She milked 'properly' for about a month, then it dropped off slowly (it was never her full amount but enough to need to milk her twice daily). I had the same thought as you when I was milking her every two days and I got a new kid, but nope even twice daily milking didnt bring the yield back up. I now havent milked her for a couple months. For the first few weeks her udder got quite full but it has absorbed the majority of it - there's maybe a couple of cups in each side atm I am trying to figure out whether to empty it as I have seen that work sometimes with other does - you empty it and they never produce more - but I'm trying to figure out whether to do that or just leave it in the hopes that she will absorb the rest.


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## TheMixedBag (Oct 16, 2010)

I don't know that it works all the time, but I brought my nubian doe from a cup to a half gallon in a few months by stripping her out 4-5 times a day, every day. She was a ff who had ben left to dry off for a week and at first I couldn't even get a cup out if her. Her udder was almost flush with her belly. But by july, I had her producing fairly decently, and she dried off fairly quickly in october when she was bred.


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