Chickens THRIVE in this Perennial Crop System

fundamentally this is the do evolutionary blueprint of an ecology where chickens evolved over time tinnitus project I'm very excited about the Main Street project we are here I brought my assistant you ready for this study ok looks like we got our hosts coming hey good morning how are you Justin okay clay okay nice meeting you this is my son Jonah Jonah are you first generation in America I'm an immigrant I'm not a I did wasn't born here okay cool so we have worked in racing right why did you come here Oh being US did 100 million dollar question or give me the 100 million dollar answer my wife got a good answer my wife RDI the reason I'm here is because she moved here we met in Guatemala we married for a Malin okay and then she wanted to come to a dealership Minnesota to get a degree in bilingual education and it was too long so here we are not you know I came up and we stayed here before we get started what is your role here I run strategy and system designs and engineering and I am the founder of this system I actually shouldn't say I am because it was really my great grandparents my grandparents my parents and the whole community I grew up with and I just technically was the most interested of all the kids in doing this kind of work and here we are now you know many years later just reinventing that old technology in wisdom and trying to match it with the craziness of the US consumer in demand you know in marketplace the bottom line is that I have all the training that a lot of the people working for Manzano and Cargill and Bayer and all that in fact I started out right out of AG school with with a very large chemical company and I survived two months because fundamentally that just counter to the way I was brought up in my philosophy and and you know like my father said you know what's the point of spending your whole life teaching the kids to to love the earth and care for it even what they do is go and get a degree instead destroying it with a knowledge they were given so that's that's why I do what I do yeah an alternative I cannot wait to see it you're going to go over the system's with us I'm so excited to see these chicken systems that looks absolutely incredible over there thank you very much but you're not alone look at this look at this he's not alone anymore okay everybody is going to be in the film later tell your name what your role here is what you're going to be talking about today Holly Westmoreland I worked on the with them on the design of the farm I'm Julie Wriston I work with Main Street project I came on board about three years ago so my role here is really just to help make the whole system happen I do a lot of the strategy work around the operations I help to lead the acquisition of the farm and right now I'm really focused on the next pieces that need to come together which are financing having other farmers access lands so that they can build coops on their own and being able to use the central farm which you're going to look at as a central hub I'm Lindsay Rabin and I'm from ecological design and I'm working with the Main Street farm project on design and farming systems in the startup and one more heme rocky casillas and I recently joined the Main Street team about nine months ago I help manage the egg layer unit at pink imidazoles which is Main streets first farm and I also help with community outreach and later today I'll be showing you a little bit of how we manage the paddock and will I don't know how much you'll be on this side of the camera because you're also a family man you're always on the other side this is your videographer for this project yes communications director Main Street project so maybe we'll be swapping some finish ah yeah we'll see so this is our egg layer unit we have about 300 chickens the foundational design of the unit is this there is a building so a shelter for them to spend the night there's two paddocks so they can rotate back and forth that rotation is based on how quickly the space regenerates so that the chickens can get forage scratch Claes and all that the third and most important piece is the perennial crop which provides the protection from the Predators also evens out the temperature of the soil our chickens are out here on 110 115 degree days just perfectly fine under the shade of these trees not every perennial crop actually does well with chickens so we have hazelnuts and elderberries as a foundational perennial canopy and perennial crop inside the paddocks but also we tested cherries prunes apples we still have three apple trees back there which we're not doing well at all with the meat birds in fact they were about to die and then we switch those two hens any layers and they take off again this is a prototype unit fundamentally this is the Geo evolutionary blueprint of an ecology where chickens evolves over time they are not pasture and amorphous they eat stuff but if you watch if you see that they can't they also can't survive on pasture because they don't they don't have the ruminants capacity or the larger animal capacity for biomass intake and that's why they always go for the for the bugs for the protein based feeds and all of that a huge part of the food system for the chicken is what we call the worldís sprouting system rocky will demonstrate that later a mix which is the same winter or summer but in the summer we spread the mix in the ground and we let it sprout in the ground when nine our intention is not to produce grass is to produce sprouts and sprouts we know the highest capacity for the highest nutritional capacity is within the first four days after they sprout after that they take more energy to process that they provide the chicken so you don't want to let them grow to cross that point in the winter we still sprout it it sprout the seeds but then we freeze them so we can then feed them in the bulk of the solarium which is at a greenhouse that touch to the men building on the other side where the chickens go out and roam in the winter right there you have all the key components of this now having gone beyond 15% on a standard basis but in the past I raised a flock where I only use 6 pounds out of a traditional 14 12 to 14 pounds of sea so technically we could go up to 50% in some cases but we only did that in a small scale with only 500 meat birds and we want to make sure that we do 1,500 meat birds with the new system before we actually make those claims but the claim we can make is that we have pushed it that far and the birds grew to the same size to the same specs as any other bird we have grown I mean this is what Reggie was talking about where every day we give them 25 pounds of soaks grain okay so this is to supplement their diet the feed concentrates that we give them in the morning and they love this stuff been soaked for a few days okay [Music] [Applause] oh man they're loving you right now yeah they love it this is all you see them justice so great and the forward areas all right in addition to the feed concentrate they look of them in the morning so so pound of brown feed okay 25 pounds of silk grain okay and whatever they can find on their own okay nice a solariums you guys notice this I am make a cold in Minnesota I call this again in the winter - fold - 26 yeah we're talking here - 30 Oh - 30 so the chickens are happy in there though - agree now it gives them a nice nice terrain so they don't go crazy cooped up all winter because there's two feet of snow they're not going to come outside that's right oh here we go we mix in our feed yep you like Reggie was showing you in the other product that product is green because the the chickens weren't there they were in this other paddock and now that we switched them so they spend about a week in each one now that we switched them we need to distribute the grain again to help it replenish while they stay there all week and so in about a week or so this will be a green carpet again and then we'll move them and do the same thing for the other product so it's just a constant rotation to keep the land healthy and keep them in an area where they have plenty of food Oh God wheat we've got oats which is the longer seed and then we've got forage P and luckily we ran out of sorghum but we normally add sorghum okay do you know the percentages Bluebird knows hey Wilbur you have an out here buddy that good mix for both grains for the hens around 34 35 percent of corn okay 30 percent of weight the other things is around the five percent but with the entrances of sunflower seeds and the rest is out and peak okay yeah it's a good core good mix for pence this is 25 percent of their diet the other 75% is a commercially yeah okay connection and then they can get all a one off the porridge you're going to mix this up you mix it up you're going to now put it in a bucket and soak it it's supposed to rain today so the rain will soak it for right here in place yeah okay that's smart so you want to help me I'll spread it today and then hopefully the grain that we get or the rain that we get later will help it sprout faster through the buckets we do soak it ourselves but if we if we get this wet it'll be harder to carry and to spread out there it won't spread like it won't distribute evenly like we want it to so we'll let the rain take care of that part for us let's fill this bucket and walk around and spread it [Music] back into trust area and real communities are all about what is the Main Street project insuk project is a organization that was founded to really create pathways for people to experience real wealth in their community by that we mean keeping the wealth in the community and having more security and food and other ways in which you can really have a sustainable livelihood cool what are your goals here well we work primarily with Latino farmers but our goal here in this farm is to really provide a hub for the region so that other people can learn about the kind of practices in agriculture that we really think are tied to the wealth of real communities you look like somebody with a plan so we're in Midwest agriculture right now which means it's been in corn soybeans for probably over 15 years soil extremely depleted and there's some common features here that you know we have buffers you know along the edges which kind of chemical drift buffers is number of wetlands here that we're going to be recreating to help manage the water and remediate the water what are the buffers what like what are the actual species yeah we start out a lot with using hybrid poplar and Willow because they're very fast-growing and they're also pretty towering a chemical drift and then we start supplementing it with other things such as there's you know some oak some hazel some lilac but we have the coupe's position kind of a knoll here seven - yeah there's five here and then there's two back there and we've got an alley cropping system which you can kind of see go going through here which is alley crops of three rows of hazel three row of elderberry and another 30-foot strip that can rotate between small grains or asparagus or vegetables are these this kind of systems that Ricky is already doing that we already seen absolutely absolutely well you got to see this view guys check this view out what is out there right now what is currently the green over there on the left what's currently there right we okay what's currently right here down the middle in the the brown right as our first cover cases and then what looks like corn is a circumstan and that's over there on the right yep until Dan grass is a huge soil builder which this is very depleted soil what is it going to begin to start looking like it will begin to start looking like a savanna we're based on savanna design and it's drought proofed flood proofed and so when excess water comes in we're able to slow it through without ruining our crops and we go into a drought we're able to facilitate water to our crops of fruits and nuts integrated with poultry so if I come here in ten years what am I going to look out there and see where you can see some wetlands in a few places where the water is being held and cleaned and remediated and you're going to see on contour hazelnuts elderberry alleys for grazing alleys forage annual crop yes sprouts so we're building some regenerating the land and showing a demonstration of how quickly you can switch over from conventional agriculture to a regenerative soil building agriculture well you're going to have to send me some video this in five years it's in five years yeah yeah definitely thank you guys so much for this wonderful cure I'm so encouraged by what you're doing keep on doing on [Music] [Music] that's a wrap one more of these guys Main Street project org I'll leave the link down in the description [Music]

Channel: Justin Rhodes

Views: 131,084

Rating: 4.9184623 out of 5

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Id: evNaNqHkqxY

Length: 16min 8sec (968 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 19 2017