BECAUSE I'M BORED!I will now calculate out the proper amount of milk a cow should produce in a year.
According to Wikipedia, cows, depending on breed, can produce between 15,000 liters and 25,000 liters of milk per lactation cycle, which is basically a year. I will assume on the low end, as these are modern cows we are talking about, and have been unnaturally selected for thousands of years to produce the most milk possible. I will also assume, just for simplicity, that milk is exactly as dense as water, because that lets me say that 17,500 liters of milk = 17,500 kg of milk.
Now, I have to adjust for the relative amounts of food that a dwarf will eat in a year.
According to Teh Googles, according to the USDA, the average human eats 530 lbs of food per year, although I'm trying to find a better estimate of medieval peasant eating habits, which are much more lean than modern ones. The best I can find is around 4 lbs of food per day, 3 lbs of which is bread or other vegetable, and 1 lb of which is either meat, eggs, or some kind of dairy, with cheese or eggs being far more common than actual meat.
4 lbs * 365 days in a year / 2.2 to convert to kilograms = 663 kg per year... which has to be wrong.
All the sites I'm looking at for modern people say roughly 200 kg of food in a year (not counting water, but I'm not talking about ale, either). I doubt medieval peasants actually out-ate modern humans, so I'll just go with this.
200 kg / 8 meals a year for a dwarf, and you get 25 kgs per meal per dwarf, just to give a relative amount of food that a cow can produce. This means that we need to translate each milking, which provides 1 food into 1/8th of a dwarf's annual diet, which is the equivalent of 25 kilos of food.
If a cow produces a whopping 17,500 liters of milk annually, that is an astounding 700 milkings per year.
Some of these wikianswers sites tell me that cows can seriously produce 150 lbs of milk (68 kg) in a single day(WTF?!), so yeah, that's about 2.5 servings of cheese per cow per day... using modern cows.
I've gone back, and looked specifically for medieval cattle, and come across
this page, which states that medieval cattle produced about 2.7-4.4 gallons per day, which is 3.9 kg per gallon, so I can estimate about 14 kg per day from medieval cattle. That is 5110 kg per year, divided into 25 kg servings, is 204.4 servings per year.
This means that the final number for a realistic cow milking period is roughly one milking every 1975 (or just make it 2000 for roundness) ticks. I am not sure, however, what scale the milking number is based upon, so this is likely to require an actual milking number of 200, if this is indeed based on every 10 ticks/1 average turn.
KEEP IN MIND, however, that REAL cows have to eat, as well. Cows in DF are 600 kg on average. This means that if you are simply expecting them to graze, each cow will require roughly 1,000 kg of grass per day, or about 6 kg of hay (or other produced crops) plus about 50 kg of water per day.
Incidentally, this means that if we continue to apply the same metric of 25 kg = 1 serving = what a dwarf eats eight times a year, then 6 kg per day translates into feeding a cow 1 unit of food every 4 days. Meaning they eat roughly 11 times more often than a dwarf does. (Or just eat 11 times as much food in one sitting.) Of course, even WITH this, you are producing 204 servings of milk per year for 88 servings of feed (plus lots and lots of water).
Total sidenote:
Amusingly enough, the stuff I'm reading here says that the average peasant actually weighed about 120 lbs, or about 55 kg, as opposed to the 70 kg that DF assumes, with dwarves being a size that implies 60 kg, meaning dwarves are actually bigger than real medieval peasants.
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Topic: Fortress Dwarves: Drink Milk (Read 6028 times)