How Much Milk is 2 Gallons a Day?

A WHOLE FREAKING LOT. That's how much.

This is one day's worth of milk from Bridget the Jersey milk cow.
On the sides are two 2-liter jars (no handles). Inside that are two 1.7-liter jars.
In the middle is a 1-liter jar. For those keeping score at home, this is about 8.2 liters.
That's approximately 2.16 gallons that we got. On Sunday.

It doesn't sound like a lot of milk, until you have to start finding room for it in the fridge.

These glass containers work really well for storing milk. Since they fit together so closely, they save a lot of space over round of shorter containers.

The sharp cream line in the jars on the right was from the AM milking.
The PM milking, to the left, had not started to separate when i took this.

Labeling with the date and an AM or PM helps us track her output and
determine which milk is oldest.

We're looking into different storage media, such as round half-gallon Ball jars and 1.4 gallon dispenser-style containers. The dispensers are great, because the cream rises and we just siphon down the skim milk. This works well for clabber and milk kefir, where the cream is unwanted (mold grows on the top of the cream when un-skimmed milk is set to clabber, BTW). It helps us keep the cream more handy for butter making and ice cream. Yay!

This ~2 gallons a day from Bridget is on grass only with her first calf. After a few calves, she'll be cranking out closer to 3, maybe even 4, gallons daily. First calves are almost always the lowest milk output.

I think we need to invest in a larger refrigerator....