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    PLAINVIEW, Minn. – The Millers admit many cows in their herd are special to them; however, there is one cow that tops the list.
    “Everyone likes her because she’s the grandma of the herd,” Melendy Miller said.
    Grandma Cow is one of the nicknames for No. 201. But the 16-year-old cow is best known as Frosty Face. She is the matriarch and herd favorite of the Miller family – Stacy and Julie Miller, who farm together with their daughter, Melendy, and get help from their other children, Mika when she is home on breaks from the University of Wisconsin-River Falls, and Markus, when he is able to get time away from his off-farm landscaping job – on their 80-cow dairy near Plainview.
    “She’s pretty special to us,” Melendy said.
    Frosty Face is a fitting name for the cow whose hair shows the unique blue roan color of her Milking Shorthorn and Holstein lineage. Most cows in the Miller herd are a range of hues.
    “Crossbreeding was something I did for fun for the kids,” Stacy said. “The calves are always interesting. It’s like waiting for Christmas. What color calf are we going to have?”
    That is the question they ask every time they breed Frosty Face. The Millers have bred her to many breeds, including a few beef.
    “Sometimes it takes her a little longer to get bred so then we breed her to beef,” Melendy said. “She’s gotten a lot of breaks because of her color so she’s gotten longer dry periods.”
    However, her most recent pregnancy came after one breeding and resulted in a heifer named Grace born Jan. 1 with the similar blue roan color. About half of her pregnancies have been heifers, so many of Frosty Face decedents fill the Millers’ barn – daughters, granddaughters, great-granddaughters and even a great-great-granddaughter is on the way.
    “She has so many relatives around here,” Melendy said.
    One summer, the Millers also kept one of her bulls as a clean up bull, which means several other animals also carry on the Frosty Face line.
    Her nickname of Grandma Cow also comes from her instinct to mother all calves in the pasture.
    “When it comes to babies, she just takes over,” Melendy said. “If any other cow has a calf, she’s right there. We have had heifers and cows that didn’t want anything to do with their calf so all we had to do was put her in there (with Frosty Face) and she cleans them off and mothers them like her own.”
    Her most recent calving was the start of her 15th lactation, followed shortly by her golden birthday Jan. 16. The Millers describe her milk production as average.
    “She’s one of those cows where she doesn’t hold her milk super great so when she gets toward the end of her lactation, sometimes it’s more worth it to put her out in with the dry cows than it is to keep her milking,” Melendy said. “But she makes us money.”
    The cow’s average production is done only milking in three quarters for the past seven years. After suffering a teat injury, Frosty Face now has a blind quarter.
    “She milks just as good on three as some of our other ones do on four,” Melendy said. “She’s a pretty cool cow.”
    Stacy attributes her longevity to crossbreeding.
    “It makes them tougher and stronger,” he said. “She just seems to have everything clicking, and she doesn’t miss a beat.”
    The Millers have had few cows reach this age in their barn.
    “But normally we do have an older herd,” Mika said.
    According to their DHIA records, the next closest cow in age is 11 years old, and the herd also has a handful of cows 9 years old or more with several spanning the 4- to 9-year-old range.
    Other than her teat injury and occasionally being hard to breed, Frosty Face has not had many other issues.
    “For her age, she shows a lot of youthfulness yet,” Stacy said. “She’s never last from up in the pasture, and she’s usually the first one. She’s like the leader cow.”
    For now, Frosty Face lives in the freestall barn in the winter and on the pasture in the summer with the rest of the herd.
    “But she’s starting to show her age a little bit now,” Melendy said. “Her hips are starting to sag a bit and she’s a little slower to get up, but she’s still going.”
    As Frosty Face grows older, the Millers have decided she is a cow they could not see go to the salesbarn. Instead, the matriarch will live out her days on pasture when she can no longer make milk.
    “She’ll spend her summers basking in the sunshine and standing in the creek,” Melendy said. “A cow can’t ask for much more than that.”

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