Around the Farm Table

[birds chirping] - Inga Witscher: Hi, everybody.

Welcome to the farm.

As a farmer myself, I love seeing young women going into dairy farming.

Recently, I met an amazing young woman named Kalee Schaefer, who has taken on the task of managing a herd of brown Swiss at the Wegmueller Dairy Farm in Monroe, Wisconsin.

[folksy music] As farm owners Dan and Ashley Wegmueller branched out to open up their farm to agriculture tourism and equestrian activities, they hired Kalee to take the lead in managing their dairy herd.

Hello, everybody.

I'm here with Kalee Schaefer in Monroe, Wisconsin, at Wegmueller's Dairy.

I wanted to come down here and find out a little bit more about why a young woman such as yourself is interested in farming.

– Kalee Schaefer: So, I have always farmed.

My father and-- Well, I should start with my family did not own a dairy farm.

We did not farm our own animals or anything like that.

We would relief milk for people and some farmers would go on vacation and then, my dad would go and milk and I started going with him.

So, I took over "the family business," I would call it, and then I just fell in love with it.

I tried to take a step back off the farm the year after I graduated high school.

I took an off-farm job.

It wasn't for me; I'm back.

I've worked at a lot of different farms and this small style of farming is the way that I like it.

So, here I am.

- Well, so what are your daily duties here at the farm?

- So I start my mornings with checking for babies.

That's like the most important part of my whole job.

And then, I milk the cows and feed the calves.

And then, I do day-to-day stuff like scraping out pens and cleaning up calf pods and just regular farm chores, doing field work if I need to.

And keeping things clean and tidy and neat and healthy and fed, basically.

And then, I finish my night with another round of milking and calf-feeding.

– Inga Witscher: Where do you see yourself in another 20 years?

- My main goals for this are just to better the genetics of this current herd, as well as my new herd of Holsteins.

And I just want to keep doing what I'm doing and ultimately just making myself a beautiful group of cows.

- What's your favorite part about working with the cows?

- My favorite part would be the decision making with everything.

I get to decide who the baby daddies are going to be, essentially, and make some beautiful calves, and do my thing with that.

So I would say that my favorite part, though, is just.

Right after bedding the animals up and getting them all scraped and cleaned out, just walking by and seeing them all laying down and happy and fed and just doing their thing.

- And you show a little bit, too, right?

- Yeah, I actually just attended our county fair and we got a junior grand champion with our fall yearling.

And we are on the way to Expo after that.

- I'm so excited for you.

I'm definitely going to make it down for the Brown Swiss Show.

- I'll be watching for you, yeah.

- Well, it's so exciting to see your journey and I can't wait to follow along with it.

- Thank you.

- And I hope you gather with us next time Around the Farm Table.

I'm your host, Inga Witscher.

[gentle guitar]