High Grove Farm Journal – July 2024

Aug 19, 2024 (Westby, WI)

As the midsummer heat settles in on our farm near Soldiers Grove, Wis., this busy season of haying and working on a big project on the grazing pastures, has been nudging us to find ways as a family to slow down and enjoy summer as best we can.

Welcome to High Grove! Hi, I am Jessica and my family and I love to share about our daily life as Wisconsin dairy farmers. It’s truly a special and unique lifestyle that we’re blessed to live. July has been filled with putting up hay, both at the home farm and on our rented ground, and getting ready to have cow lanes and water lines put into our pastures.

Hauling loads of hay home to wrap and stack for winter feeding is a rewarding task, even though it usually calls for late nights to get it all done!

While the busyness of this season makes it feel like summer will be over too soon, we’re trying to find ways to slow down our days and soak up as much sunshine as we can. Eating homemade fried chicken dinners on Sundays after church – now that our meat birds have been butchered – and enjoying time on the front porch, swimming and going for long walks on the farm is a good reset for us. The boys have been going on long runs as they get in shape for the up coming football season. Attending Vacation Bible Schools at local churches are always a highlight of the summer for the kids, too.

Our baby girl Tulsie is already four months old and what a fun age it is! She’s full of giggles, and every day is a new adventure for her while we get to enjoy watching her discover things like petting the barn cats’ soft fur or dipping her toes in the cool creek for the first time!

But mostly we’ve been working hard! And when you do what you love it’s different, leaving you feeling so tired but so very fulfilled at the end of the day! I’ve been having fun selling my High Grove “From The Farm” boxes, which I just started up this year. They are full of organic produce from my gardens and baked goods, which I make every Friday and sell on Facebook to our local community. It’s been fun to sell my produce again and to do so much baking! Making real, delicious beautiful food is something I truly love to do!

Jessica Rogers has been selling “From the Farm” boxes on Fridays. Follow her on Facebook to get her weekly notification.

Drew hasn’t had much rest with the work load lately, and it’s been a rough month for him although you wouldn’t be able to tell, as he just keeps going like the energizer bunny. It started with him getting sick on the Fourth of July with strange symptoms, which the doctors treated as lymes. He was down from the illness for several days and we’re still not sure if that’s what it was, but after a month of not feeling good and having Bell’s Palsy on the left side of his face, he’s feeling almost completely better and has few symptoms anymore, which we are beyond thankful for!

As that got better, and some days when it really wasn’t, the work load really started to get heavy but he just kept going as all farmers have to. We got hay done at three farms, rye straw done, hosted a pasture walk, perimeter fenced in 40 acres, mowed pastures and did normal daily farming while finalizing and preparing for cow lanes and waterlines to go in – with countless meetings and many hours of office work and field work for that. Whew!

Drew fixing the tractor and our daughter Laney handing him tools when he needs them. So many things broke this month, I should have kept a list of them all! I wonder if it was from the heat?

The cows have been enjoying “green chop” brought to them during this heat instead of them walking out to hot pastures. Green chop is just their fresh forage cut fine and blown into a feeder wagon that is then brought to them where they can eat it. We started bringing them wagon loads a week or more ago when it got hot, and they seem to enjoy it, although when we let them out to graze at night you can tell they’re happy to be back to the normal routine of grazing, which they’ll do more of once it cools off some.

Cows comfortably relax at High Grove Farm while their owners work endlessly to maintain a dairy farming lifestyle.

Thanks for visiting the farm and we hope you are enjoying these beautiful summer days as much as we are!

– Jessica Rogers is a Westby Creamery farmer-owner who is sharing glimpses of farm life with us.