Posted by Reginaldo Haslett-Marroquin on October 15, 2010
Although we have produced many thousands of meat broilers over the last couple of years as part of our systems design, both at our one acre experimental farm in Northfield and at the 80 acres Cannon Falls prototype farm, we have only scratched the surface of growing heritage breeds under a scalable system, that is about to change.
The first thing is to get to know the birds from a practical standpoint. Heritage breeds need a very different environment, they roam long distances, they eat a lot more bugs, scratch the soil and dig up warms and minerals to supplement their diets in ways that meat broilers can only think of doing.
Managing the environment around animals is the key to raising them in a healthy way, space is only important to the extent that they are not so crowded that they destroy the health of the environment around them. Density then is measured on different factors, outside density (for ecological management purposes), and indoor density (to shelter and protect them). The square footage inside buildings then is only relevant for nighttime shelter as during the day, only a few stay. On the other hand, during winter months, the tighter the space in between them, the better. In fact they get very close to each other on their own to keep themselves warm. Larger buildings are not only counterproductive in free range systems, but also an unnecessary expense. When poultry is raised in confinement, most of the manure is also deposited inside the building, ventilation becomes a need and dust and light control become real problems. In our free range systems, winter facilities have an insulated night shelter, and daytime roaming area under a solarium where an environment is created to replicate spring-like conditions during the coldest months of the winter. On warm winter days, they go outside anyway.
Our heritage breed growing system has just gone through another year of development and we are almost ready to embark in a formal experiment with a new farm in Cannon Falls to scale this up. So far, the best scenario to create the appropriate environment (large ranging areas, lots of bugs, pasture, etc.) for egg and meat (dual purpose) birds is in combination with a cattle operation, so we are taking what we have learned in our experimental space and will scale it to a regular operation and test it in the coming years.
This new stage, will provide us with the data needed to establish the benchmarks to define the relationship between cattle pastures/paddocks, design of buildings for flocks of birds large enough to manage the paddocks, and the mechanization of chores, such as feeding and watering year round, and most importantly, the collection and management of eggs. The environment for the animals is the key to their quality of life, how we do the rest will be up to the systems we can dream up, after all there are engineers, architects and systems experts willing to help with the mechanical aspects of making work on the farms easier, without compromising the principles and energy flows that make them efficient and sustainable in the long run from the stand point of sustaining the family farms and the ecology around them.
Below is a slideshow of the current ranging area where we raised White Rock heritage birds. The paddocks represent a very diverse eco-system and the management of these system is where the keys to healthy birds are (among other things you observe mulched areas from left-over sweet corn stalks for worm production and carbon:nitrogen balance, fruit trees and hazelnuts for shade and protection as well as soil conditioning and micro and macro biological management, and grassy areas for access to bugs, greens and sprouted small grains).
Birds raised this way eat very little regular feed inside their barn and they seem to take long naps during the sunny or warmer parts of the day. But they are hardly inside early and late in the day and during cloudy days, unless laying eggs (notice that the paddocks are also managed so there is no incentive for them to lay eggs somewhere else but their boxes).
We hope this gives you a glimpsed into the principles that define these new farming systems that we are developing, through them we seek to maximize the vocation of farmers, create wealth in rural communities while adding to regional economic competitive advantages, and the maximization of the production capacity of the ecology. Everything we come up with is designed to be scalable so that they can compete effectively in the large scale context of replacing unhealthy food products in the marketplace.
Posted by Reginaldo Haslett-Marroquin on September 20, 2010
Since a story aired on MPR about the work of the Rural Enterprise Center, many regional and local newspapers have picked up and published the story. The Mankato Free Press among the first, the Post Bulletin and the Winona Daily News are some of those we have tracked.
Posted by Reginaldo Haslett-Marroquin on September 15, 2010
At the end of this post is a very short video of Jose Vanegas processing their bean harvest recently just South of Northfield, MN. His wife Maria Sosa (speaking on the background) was bringing the bean bunches and loading the “aporreadero” or beating platform. The beans are hit with a wooden stick (another fellow from El Salvador who was there the day before used two sticks one on each hand and was going at it much faster for many hours), the bean shells that are hit open up and drop down the beans into the tarp below through spaces between the 2×2 boards that the platform is made off.
A Latin American family familiar with cooking black beans in different ways can eat around 75 lbs a year. This amount can be grown in a space of 25 x 50 feet. It takes about two hours to plant it (20 inches between rows and 4 to 6 inches between plants), holes are made with a how or a shallow row is carved in the soil. Beans germinate by the 4th or 5th day. Two to three times of weed removal early in their growth can suffice, once they start flowering they need to be left alone.
90 days later, the beans dry and can be picked. Picking of this small area is done in about 45 minutes to 1 hour. Beating the beans off the shells can be done in about anouther 30 minutes. After shelling, the platform is disassembled and the beans are poured from a bucket into another on a windy day to blow the small shell pieces and dust off, a fan can be used if there is no wind.
After blowing out the dust and shells, the beans are placed on a flat surface and stones and other foreign materials are removed. The beans are ready to be stored, regular paper bags do the job great as they keep light out and moisture and air circulation, very important for keeping the viability of the beans if they are also to be used for seeds.
For many of the families we work with, food security is a primary goal of their farming operations, this simple plan can supply a family with beans for the whole year, but then why settle for a 25×50 space when families can get together and plant a couple of acres and even have some beans to sell. This is the case of the Vanegas family who planted a bit more than an acre and a half and harvested close to 3,000 lbs.
Most of the beans were harvested with a combine, after picked, they were windrowed and combined. The bean beating platform was set-up to teach the kids (many of them) something about how their parents and many generations before them have done things (in fact for over 7,000 years beans have been grown and processed in similar ways across Latin America), machines are useful and can bring benefits, but some families just can’t afford them, lack of access to machines, does not have to interfere with a family’s ability to produce and process their own food if they so desire. And if coming together, like in this case, the harvest from the Vanegas-Sosa family will be enough to provide a key source of fiber, protein, basic amino acids. Although black beans do not supply the full 9 basic amino acids, if combined with a high lysine corn variety and squash (three sisters farming system) for vitamins, a low income family can have a diet far superior than anything they can buy and except for the squash, storing these foods is as simple as setting aside a small corner of the house and keeping it protected.
This system has survived for thousands of years and can survive many thousands more, it is energy efficient and anyone can use and afford it, these and other principles are critical in the process of designing sustainable food and agriculture systems.
From now on, I will link all of the postings as each article comes up. This you will have all of the stories related to The New Ecology of Food and our strategies and planning to develop processes and systems to scale up what works in sustainable agriculture so we can meet market demands, expand the economic frontier for sustainable agriculture products and create an identity for sustainability, one beyond individual claims and labels.
The Rural Enterprise Center is a program of Main Street Project that focuses on enterprise development. Our mission is to strengthen communities by bringing together the support infrastructure, systems, resources and programs that rural entrepreneurs need to succeed. More...
