Autumn Farm in 2014

In my last post I mentioned that we had been working on a new rawbale chicken brooder house. The reason for this is that this year at Autumn Farm we're hoping to slowly increase the number of chickens we're growing for our community. 

Last year's chicken farming was a bit of an experiment, to see how we liked it, and how well it fit into the community's food needs/desires. Turns out it was a perfect fit on all fronts: We're sold on the farming thing, we're sold on being part of a local, co-operatively-run abattoir (I'm the new chairwoman!), we're sold on feeding our community locally and ethically produced whole food, and local peeps seem happy with Autumn Farm chicken being a regular part of their diet. Pearl was even interviewed as one of the 'Heroes of 2013' by the local ABC radio! Seriously, we were so proud of this, not least of all because of the other awesome people they picked out.

So yeah, we're going to grow a little. Not heaps - we don't want to overwhelm ourselves, and we don't want to over-burden our land: the aim of the game's regeneration, not overgrazing yo! We're just going to cautiously and slowly seek the balance between demand and what we can happily achieve. 

Step one in this journey was constructing a new brooder house. The old brooder house looked alright, but it was way too small and not that easy to work with. It had no insulation, and we found that the chicks had grown out of it by about 2 weeks. As we head into winter, they're going to need to be in the brooder for around 3 weeks, so we knew we had to make something bigger and better to keep those chickies safe and warm.

Day 1 inside the brooder house - it was HOT! So I added a paella-pan chick wading pool for them to drink out of while also cooling their tootsies. Newspaper is laid on the ground for the first couple of days so they can easily find their food and grit, which we scatter on the paper. Though as you can see, there are quite a few chicks already in the feeder, where they will probably stay for the rest of their days. Those little guys sure like to eat...

Being as we are super-keen on the strawbale, we decided to have a go at a rawbale (as in, unrendered) brooder house. The top of the bales are protected from rain by the roof, and the sides perform a bit like thatch, shedding any rain that hits the sides without allowing it to penetrate the bale. We're anticipating the house will last us a couple of years. When it starts to deteriorate, we'll dismantle it and use it as garden mulch. It's 2 courses of bales high (laid on edge), with a panelled recycled tin and laserlite roof, which we can take apart and tilt up as needed for ventilation and temperature control. There's a gas-powered brooder lamp inside to keep the chickies warm. The bales are pinned at the corners with star pickets hammered through the bales and into the ground, and the whole thing is wrapped in chicken wire. So far, it's been great!

A typical morning inside the brooder house. Yep. They're cute.

The chicks seem very happy in their new, spacious home, though they're still happy for some outside adventuring, which is a relief. It's important that they get a taste for grass/weeds/bugs/dirt as soon as possible, so they don't baulk at the prospect of eating heaps of greenery when they're moved out to pasture full time.

Autumn Farm chicks, 4 days old, venturing from their rawbale brooder house for the first time

In another week, they'll be moving into their new and improved moveable pasture house, which is moved every day to make sure they have fresh bedding. These houses are enclosed in electric mesh (the total run is 100 square metres for 130 chooks - a tad better than their 'free range' counterparts, who are currently enjoying about an A4 page per chook of dirt/poo inside a shed), which is moved every 3 days, so they have fresh green pick, and to make sure they don't over-excavate our land in their quest for fresh dust-baths.

It's a labour-intensive way to farm chickens, there's no doubt about it. And there were times (like after spending an hour and a half carrying the chickens to bed one night when they couldn't find the door to their newly-moved house) when I could definitely see the benefits to raising chickens conventional-style, in a shed. But the rest of the time, as we watched them on the grass, hanging out, doing chicken stuff, foraging, flapping etc, and then when we tasted them, we knew that labour-intensive pasture-raising is THE ONLY WAY TO GO.

Which is why we're doing it some more.

Autumn Farm on the radio

Chickens on the grass: It's what pastured poultry is all about

We were recently more than just a little bit excited to be interviewed for ABC South East radio. It was fun, and nice to talk about our adventures in pastured poultry and CSAs. You can probably tell how excited we are by the fact that, as our friend Vickie lovingly put it "Ian can hardly get a word in". What can I say? We're passionate!!

If you're interested, you can listen to the radio interview here.

Oh golly, it's a new farming adventure...

At some point after we bought our land, we were struck with a sense of responsibility regarding our land. A lot of farms in our area have been subdivided, like ours, into small 'lifestyle' blocks. What this means is that formerly productive parcels of land have been 'taken off the market' with regards to their capacity for feeding the local community (though of course a lot of farms around here are in the business of producing for the export market or for a particular big cheese company). 

With this sense of responsibility in mind, we developed some vague notions of producing a lot of food for ourselves and at least a little bit of food for the wider food community. If everyone produces a bit of food for themselves and some for the community, then we'll have a better chance of developing secure local food networks, and therefore prove to be a little more resilient when the big P.O (that's Peak Oil, in case you're wondering) and when serious climate change comes. It really feels as though the current industrial food system is finite. Not only is it environmentally unsustainable, it's making us sick (think heart disease, cancer, type-2 diabetes, increasing rates of asthma, food allergies and so on and so on), animals are compelled to live miserable lives and it's a system that's providing a terrible living for many primary producers. We know there are better ways to feed ourselves. 

Western end of the brooder house, tiny strawbale Autumn Farm House in the background

We've been supplying our local food co-op with greens for a while now, going to food swaps, and generally bartering veggie goodness for things like art lessons and loaves of amazing sourdough bread, and this has been a nice, if somewhat inconsequential contribution to our local community.

But yesterday, we officially launched into a bit more serious operation, namely raising pastured meat chickens for a small network of locals who have subscribed to our pastured poultry CSA, Autumn Farm.

The chicks' gas-heated brooder house under construction

The pasture raised meat chicken thing came about mostly as a result of reading a lot of  Joel Salatin, and going to visit Taranaki Farm last year, where we met and chatted to the man himself.

And yesterday, after some months of preparations, building works, reading, and volunteering at the local small species abattoir (where our chickens will be processed) we picked up our first lot of 100 day old chicks.

And, I'm sorry to say, they're really really cute.

Yep. They're tiny, cute and fluffy

As I've written before, killing things does not come easily or naturally to me. But it was important for me to know that, if we were going to become meat producers, I'd be able to steward the animals all the way through their lives. So a few months ago I got involved with the abattoir, which is an amazing and unique facility, just down the road from our house. It's a producer-run co-operative, which, as well as processing birds for small, localised growers like us and Symphony Farm, from Tilba, also processes 'home kills' for people who want to raise their own meat but aren't able or don't want to process at home. This is a fantastic local resource, and we feel really happy that our birds will be going through this abattoir. I also feel proud, if somewhat apprehensive, that I'm going to be with them right to the end, not just sending them off to be processed somewhere else.

For us, it feels like this kind of small-scale, grower-controlled production of meat is a sustainable and ethical answer to the question of meat production. Obviously, in an ideal world, people who wanted to eat meat would raise their own animals, and kill it themselves in the paddock where it lived. No stress for the animal, no food miles, and we can guaran-damn-tee you, people would probably eat less meat.

But this system just isn't possible. So the next best option is for localised small (and large) farms to grow meat for their local community.

Inside the brooder house, unloading chickies

So far, the response to Autumn Farm has been amazing. People have been super-keen to get their hands on some locally-grown, pasture-raised chooks, and our first batch of chickens is fully subscribed! These chickens, as well as sustaining our local community, will be naturally fertilising our land, as we move them all around in their movable hoop houses.  The hoop house will be surrounded by electric mesh fencing so that by day, they can scratch around and nibble and do chicken-y things on the grass in the sun and by night, be safely enclosed in their hoop house with the electric fence offering extra protection against the predations of local foxes. 

One of our main objectives (in addition to feeding our community) is to connect people with their food, to talk to them about how it's raised and also how it's killed. It feels as though a lot of the problem with our industrialised food system is the mere fact that people just don't know how their food is produced. We're talking to our customers regularly, sending out an email newsletter and posting updates on facebook. And the chooks, once they're 'done' will be picked up by our customers from the abattoir on the day they're killed. This means that the chickens will be super-fresh, obviously, but it also means that people won't be so divorced from the processes involved with getting their meat to the table. 

Chickens aren't all we have planned for our little farm. Over time we will develop a more integrated system - some sheep, couple of cows, pigs from time to time all within an interlinking system of regenerated bushland, food forests and small scale grain production . Realistically, this is a 10-15 year plan. So we're really just at the start. But for now, we have plenty of grass and we know these chickens will live a happy (albeit brief) life in the sunshine on our grassy bit of hill.