Courtney Brooke: Hey Andy!

Andy: Hey!

Courtney Brooke: What are you doing?

Andy: Well I’m moving the chickens to a fresh spot.

Courtney Brooke: Oh; good morning chickens! Well, that’s quite a lot of chickens. How many chickens is that?

Andy: Well, we started with a little over a hundred we’ve lost a handful of them so we’re probably around 96.

Courtney Brooke: Wow; fancy chicken house!

Design

Andy: Yeah, this came from a design from Rrobert Plummenden. He’s got a book on chicken shelters and raising pastured poultry.

I did some modifications to it, but the frame is a pretty basic wooden box. It’s a 8×8 wooden square with two cattle panels that you can get from tractor supply -or somewhere like that; bent over a hoop. This one’s maybe a little easier to see…bent over in a hoop and stapled to the side. Then we also took another cattle panel and cut it in half. So, three cattle panels makes this whole chicken shelter closable.

Then four or five 2 x4’s to make the frame. Next, you round the angle braces and all that. Then, the moving part of it, and this is a recent modification, we’ve got some wheels on the end of some metal pieces that then hook on. So it picks it up off the ground now. Leverages it so that then you’re able to lower it once you get it into place. The chickens, theoretically, can’t get out. This was in an uneven spot.

Moving the Coops

Courtney Brooke: So, then one person can move this ?

Andy: Yes, one person mostly can move it. If you have to go uphill (we usually like to start them like that)  get everybody on board to move them uphill. Then, pull them down. But mostly one person can do it.

Courtney Brooke: Wow…

Andy: First, we got to get the feeders and the water. It’s a little bit different than the Joel Salatin style pens. The main thing that I like better about it is that his pens are like ….they stop here.

Courtney Brooke: Right.

Andy: They’re low pens and this one I can get in and out, especially when the chickens get bigger. We actually won’t close it up at night once they get bigger. When they get bigger and we pen them in there before slaughter it’s it just feels better than having them all penned into a low shelter. They got more space in there.

Courtney Brooke: Good morning chickens

Andy: Slowly pull it because there’s always one or two that like to peck at the wheel and see what’s going on. Not quite yet with the program. I haven’t electrified the netting yet either so they’re all getting out.

Courtney Brooke:  So how often do you move it?

Andy: When they’re this small ideally we move it once a day. Once a day or else you get manure build up in one area. We’re trying to spread the manure across the entire field.

<Dog barking>

Courtney Brooke: That’s how you protect the chickens…with the dog.

Andy: All right so then we lower it and the wheels. Old lawn mower wheels really work the best and then you got to be a little crafty to figure out some piece of metal..something that’s laying around the farm. This one I call the ultra light… it’s not necessarily designed to keep them in. It’s more designed for shade and keeping feed dry. So that one is really easy to move.

Raising Broiler Chickens since 2006

Courtney Brooke:  How long have you been farming chickens?

Andy: I’ve been farming chickens…hmm…I actually did our first batch in this field in one of these shelters 15 years ag. I’ve been raising broiler chickens as few as 50 a year, as many as 150 a year, since 2006. I went to a workshop down the road on raising pastured poultry. I picked up this book that had a design in it. Then, I ran with it ….

Courtney Brooke:   All right, thanks for showing it to us!

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Ramona and Julie mixing biodynamic preparation.

[Dear Everybody,]

We had to make a conscious decision to scale back the farm while raising our young children—Forest, going on 5, and Ramona, 2. It hasn’t always been easy to step back from the farm that has been our other baby since 2005. One of the reasons we choose to live in a rural community and help create agricultural land is because we prefer this lifestyle for raising our children (and we think they prefer it, too).

left: Young farm hands Forest and Ramona.

It isn’t always easy to have kids around the farm—hot sun, mechanical equipment, sharp edges—to name a few, but there are many aspects that ARE conducive, and increasingly their awareness is such that they know a good place to stand when the tractor is around, or how to take care of themselves—get a drink of water and play in the shade.

We took a short break from raising pigs but have begun again, in large part so the kids can participate in raising their own food. It’s a delight to watch Forest, the big brother, help his little sister across the road and down the path to the pig pen, each with a bucket of foodscraps for the trough. It’s in these moments that we remember why we are doing this, and how important it is that we keep it up.

 Ramona lends a hand.

Earthaven turns to Andy Bosley for a lot more than farming. He’s a key figure in our Forestry Plan, a gifted facilitator (i.e., cat herder), and has been active in the community’s men’s meetings on and off for years.

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The tasks are many, and the time is scant. The urge to fit it all in flows hard against the need to develop rhythms with the new child.

The ideal vision is just over the edge, glimpsed for moments, bringing that deep sense of place, at other times seeming so distant that it causes deep doubt and despair.

When viewing the individual pieces of my life (parenting, relationship, farming, community, job, etc.), it makes little sense that I ended up in the situation I have.

As a whole, however, it makes complete sense, and I am grateful for the way it has come to be, especially the relationship with my new son and the community of mutual support that I have built up around me.

I’ve taken out my sharp-edged sword in order to cut away the things in life that don’t “pay off,” either energetically or monetarily. In this way, things are much simpler even in the face of the brand new challenge of integrating a child into a life on a farm in an intentional community, while both of us parents work part-time jobs to pay the bills.

Fortunately, it is winter, which allows us a little bit of a break to decide where we will take our farming endeavors next growing season. It will no doubt involve more participation from other folks in the community.

After all, that’s why we chose to start our farm here.

right: Andy and Forest take a much-needed nap.

Long-time member Andy Bosley and his partner Julie McMahan run Yellowroot Farm, a biodynamic and organic farm with pastured poultry and pork and a CSA. They live, farm and work at or near Earthaven.

The post Becoming a Father appeared first on Earthaven Ecovillage.

Yellowroot Farm in the Hut Hamlet is up and running again, with seedings for what will become lush and vibrant biodynamic vegetables. (See “Yellowroot CSA Begins Second Year”)

In late April, Cailen Campbell’s goats, April and Luna, had their kids, and now moms and kids are sharing a pen in front of the Tribal Condo in the Hut Hamlet. Cailen, Lee, and Mihaly rotate the grazing of their animals at various sites around Earthaven, including the Village Green, the fallow side of Yellowroot Farm, and the “New Lumberyard” site near Gateway Field.

Recently a crew of loggers and farmers, including Brian Love, Mike Odel, Chris Farmer, Mihaly, Cailen, and work exchangers Galen Ballantine, Drew Hoffman, and Bruce Johnston, further cleared the New Lumberyard site and prepared it for grazing. The logs from the trees that were felled were milled as lumber for the Pokeberry Hill duplex at Village Terraces (see “New Buildings”), and the stumps were left in the ground. The pasture was fertilized with organic fertilizers and planted in perennial grasses and clovers. This one-acre site (called the “New Lumberyard” because it once was going to be a lumberyard), is ideal for grazing rather than crop cultivation because it’s on a slope and too steep for a tractor, has stumps, and is north-facing.

Last spring, Brian Love and Chris Farmer (known as “Farmer”) started their four-acre integrated-agriculture project, Gateway Field, by clearing four acres of forest, adding organic soil amendments, and growing and tilling under two “green manure” cover crops. Their next step is a grass rotational pasturage system with Icelandic sheep, and probably endangered heirloom breed turkeys and chickens. This requires a sturdy fence to protect livestock and provide a fixed point for attaching lightweight moveable fencing for when the animals are sequentially moved around the field in the rotational grazing system. This spring, with the help of Mike, Bruce, Galen, and others, Brian and Farmer built a 2220 ft fence around their field, using woven wire fencing attached to charred locust posts every 15 feet. They’ll soon add two electrified wires around the perimeter to complete the fence, and, perhaps as early as November, will bring in their small herd of sheep.

Last fall, Michaeljon Drouin and Andy Bosley converted an existing pond along Rosy Branch Road, just uphill from the hydro station, into a trout pond. They built up the dam so the pond would hold more water, and ran more water into it from nearby Rosy Branch Creek. “Trout need cool, aerated water to survive,” Andy says, “and raising the water level and increasing the pond size meant we could grow more trout in the pond.” In late March of this year Michaeljon and Andy stocked the pond with 200 3-to-5-inch rainbow trout purchased from a regional trout breeder. “By April some of the largest trout sited were already 7 to 8 inches long!” Andy reports. The plan is to begin harvesting the trout when the biggest ones are about 12 inches long, perhaps by mid-July. The trout will be sold to Earthaven members and neighbors, and Michaeljon and Andy will experiment with making smoked fish for longer-term preservation.

Michaeljon and Andy are currently arranging with the Forestry and Agriculture committee to create a second larger pond downhill from the first, in order to expand their aquaculture operation.

The post Agriculture is Blooming! appeared first on Earthaven Ecovillage.

Over the years Earthaven has tried to prioritize agriculture, and to provide ways for skilled folks to be able to be at Earthaven even if they hadn’t amassed savings. First site option 3 was created. It allowed a few people to be here, but it just delayed their inevitable need to pay for their site. They were also busy trying to get ahead in order to pay those delayed fees, while still doing the huge work of being here. It was very much like running on a conveyor belt going in one direction, while trying to move forward an actual mile in the opposite direction. Most people were making progress, but at a dauntingly slow rate.

Then council made it possible for a farmer to pay for the equivalent of one site with leaps accepted for food farmed on the land. Sadly, almost none of that exchange was acted upon. Their was only one field cleared, and no one really had the time to farm. They were still busy running in place. We needed a way for people to get their livelihood from making agriculture happen here. It had to happen in a specific order, that was the key to the riddle we had yet to solve. So, we made logging trade-able for a site payment. But, the riddle still had folks running in place.

When the Sweat Equity proposals were passed, we were made aware that all the pieces of the puzzle must be present at once and in large enough quantity to accomplish a truly progressive and substantial difference. Also, a large part of the riddle was getting facilitators to ensure that each agricultural project was taken to completion, so that part of it wouldn’t get cleared only to start growing back toward forest in a few years. Praise be, Farmer and Brian took on the Gateway project. They brought all the pieces through council. Their hard work and brilliant minds seem to have gone a long way to solving the riddle of how to make Sweat Equity at Earthaven translate skilled people without savings, into the members and agriculture that we need.

But they did not do it by themselves. In fact, isn’t that the point? It takes all the pieces present at the same time and in large enough quantity. Again we get to acknowledge that our community is developing, and limited by that development very much like a child. We wanted to walk long before we could. Then we took our first steps and fell down quite a few times, acquiring a few bruises and scratches. Now we are finally able to run some.

You may ask, but who are the people actually doing the Sweat Equity, aren’t we talking about new members? Yes we are! One of the people working on the Gateway project to pay his membership, is Joe Dofflemyer, pictured here in the act of Sweat while making it look zen. Also working on the project to pay off their membership fees are Dan Penny and Cailen Campbell. Andy Bosley and Robert Carran are working toward paying off their site fees along with Farmer and Brian. And soon maybe we will be able to buy our food with leaps!

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