Milking Honey

We raise a relatively rare breed of cattle, the British White, on our ranch.  It's a breed steeped in mystery and romance - the prized cattle of Celtic druid priests, Irish warrior-queens, and English lords - raised in the wild forest of wild Britain, and later in abbey parks and noble estates.
My daughter chose a pure-bred British White heifer to raise and named her Honey.  Honey had her first, much-anticipated calf in November.   Much anticipated because I had been plotting for years to do something really weird - have a milk cow and milk her by hand everyday (or almost everyday anyway.)
Now, with a month of reality behind the endeavor I have a report to make.
Needless to say it's a wildly anachronistic endeavor - labor-intensive, time-consuming, and "economically inefficient" - I could go to the store and buy the milk for much less than it costs me in time (what is my time worth anyway?), even at Hawaii prices.  But...I've now become completely spoiled by the taste of Honey's milk  such that store-bought milk tastes dead, flat, and almost insulting.
Not that the idyllic experience of milking a cow outside in a grassy field with the cow munching happily on grain is for everyone.  For instance, little bits of udder skin fall into the milk at first, and often a fly drowns in it before you can get it in the house.  These things have to be filtered out.  So, not an activity for people with sanitation anxieties.  Or who haven't spent quite a few years studying bovine motivational techniques, as there is a lot of persuading, convincing, and cajoling involved. And then there is the fact that Honey is not the greatest milk cow, and it seems like Bumblebee, her calf, is always getting to her milk before I do.
Yet I find the whole exercise deeply gratifying - not necessarily a huge success in terms of product, (actually quite pitiful in terms of product, but then I don't need much), but in terms of understanding what milk is and what it was originally before you could buy it in the store, and in terms of understanding what the age-old relationship between cow and human is and has been - in those terms it has been a great success.  Honey and I have become partners.  I lean my head into her flank sometimes and it feels like something humans have done for a long time.  I've watched her more closely than any cow I've ever known, and she has come to recognize her name even from across the pasture.  I've been around cows all my life and I've only now learnt anything about them.  I've drunk milk (and grew up on a dairy) but only now know what it actually is.