I never had milk cows, but I had dairy goats, basically the same thing but much smaller. I milked 60 goats twice every day, 365 days/year. No vacations, no days off. You have to LOVE having a dairy farm or it'll drive you crazy. I did LOVE it. My wife loved it, except when she wanted to take a trip. There was no way I could get someone else to take over the operation, even for a day. In my case rapidly rising feed prices and milk prices not rising put us out of business. Many dairy farmers (both cow and goat) went out of business in my area (eastern upstate New York) in the past few years.
Beef cows are easier, but you have to have a market before you get into it. Are you gonna sell the meat yourself? Are you gonna sell the cows on the hoof to someone else? Makes a big difference in the way you market them. And in my case, I can't raise any animals that are gonna be butchered. I'm not a vegetarian, but I just can't raise animals to be butchered, so that certainly limited my operation.
