Prink’s Farm Gets Ready for Free Range Poultry Production

Posted by Reginaldo Haslett-Marroquin on August 19, 2009

I visited Prink’s Farm yesterday as they get ready to deploy their first free range poultry production unit. Todd Prink who also runs IEA Wealth Management in downtown Canon Falls, dedicated half an acre for a free range poultry training site at his farm just East of the city, and has set aside 8 acres as part of a partnership aimed at launching Eladio Carpio-de-Evans and another family as producer.

Eladio will continue to build productive units for a total of 8 in 4 of the 8 acres set aside. While this is happening, another family will be trained at the unit currently under construction. This unit is designed to train families on free range poultry production, once the training facilities are fully built, there will be opportunities for families to train on one or two of up to 12 different farming enterprises through these small scale units.

This training unit is being built with financing support from the Southern Minnesota Initiative Foundation, contributions by Prink’s Farm, and Robert Fales of Cannon River Machines. This is the second training unit to be deployed and the first fully operational free range poultry farm under deployment. In order to make this production units compatible with small scale agriculture systems, with the economic conditions of Latino families in our region, and with the needs of established farmers to test our system at a low risk, we have designed buildings, pasture paddocks, management processes and applied agronomical sciences that maximizes the return per area of production but can start with as little as half an acre.