7/31/21
11:42 am Saturday
Progress! Automatic Watering System In Coops For M.I.G.H.T Project/ Malay Chicken Breeding Facility!
In a previous video we showed major progress in building coops, gates, fencing, heavy use areas, chicken runs off from the coops, and foldable roosts in our 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 have made major progress installing our automatic watering system for our M.I.G.H.T, Malay Invigoration Gene Hybridization Team, Project. Viggo is very happy not to have to replenish the chickens water three times a day now with this new system installed!
This has been a huge project for Cascadia Heritage Farm! We are trying to use the concepts we have learned from our local Conservation District. The main one we are employing is the use of heavy use areas. Our chickens during the winter were living in mud. This is not good for the birds, land or us. In this video we show how our coops have small sand runs that are our heavy use areas. These areas are to be used when it is too wet to let them go into their larger runs. These sand areas must stay dry to be effective and will be roofed. The amounts of cross fencing and gates has been surprisingly complicated to achieve the management of our chickens with these heavy use areas. We want to keep the environment as balance and health as possible to help keep our Mighty Malays healthy and happy.
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 have employed the “heavy use area” concept that we learned about from our local Conservation District as described earlier in this post. 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.