6/25/21
1:23 pm Friday
In a previous video we showed our plans to build out a Malay breeding facility at Cascadia Heritage Farm. We want to show you the progress and what we have been learning along the way. In this video we are very excited to be digging out a footing for sand that is one foot deep plus a French drain to keep our sand dry for our M.I.G.H.T, Malay Invigoration Gene Hybridization Team, Project. We show this large footing/ trench for sand and the French drain on the bottom in this video. We will talk more about why we used sand in our chicken coups in the next video. We also show if our ground under our coups gets wet how the French drain will keep our coup areas dry. Our goal is to keep our sand as dry as possible to avoid disease and to aid in easy cleaning of our coups. We also show the treated wood post that will make up the cross fencing for all our coups/ runs. There is a lot of posts, it looks like a forest! We want to have small breeding groups that have runs attached to their coups. This way we can rotate the chickens through these runs to be good land stewards and to help keep healthy and Mighty Malays.
We are working with Alastair for Black Horse Contracting and he and his team are doing a fantastic job! We are working on a building our breeding facility that will allow us to breed thoughtfully and manage the bird’s health and their environment well. We are employing the “heavy use area” concept that we learned about from our local Conservation District. This concept is to avoid making mud in areas that livestock are kept resulting in less disease. We have learned in this process ground material and water management is key.
This breeding facility is surprisingly complicated!!!! Our challenges are that we are farming in a small area, we want our birds to be healthy, we want the land to be healthy, and we want to manage their breeding carefully. This means tons of cross fencing, tons of sand and tons of work! The funny thing is, we also running another breeding project where we do not control the process. The final goal is to take birds from each program to create a healthy, huge, wild, exciting, beautiful Mighty Malay!
We want to encourage hope and appreciation in ourselves and others with this project, wish us luck!
We will keep you posted and show you what happens next.
We at Cascadia Heritage Farm believe we can make a difference and you can too.