 Good afternoon everybody. My name is Amy Serberg. I own Berry Goods Farm in Morristown, Indiana, just southeast of Indianapolis. Not too far from here. We are a very small diversified farm, just started in 2015. This is something that I started on my own as a second career. My first career is in engineering to be able to stay home with my five kids. So I've got pictures of everybody on the farm there. And something that really has become a passion of mine growing has always been a passion of mine. But farming is a whole next step. So I applied for the farmer rancher grant and did some research on my farm, integrating poultry and vegetables. So the problem, we started with salatin pens and I think it was about 2012. So they take space to store all winter long. And I wanted to do a little bit more in the winter for our winter farmers markets and growing. So I was looking into growing greens in the winter time. And so I teamed up with actually my dad who's a mechanical engineer to design these and we call them coop houses. We use them for chickens in the summer and then we take two of them and combine them together to make a hoop house for the winter. So here you can see the summer configuration. So these are designed with the Johnny's hoop house bender or hoop bender with the electrical conduit. We did a four foot wall so that you could make it six foot tall to get into it. In the summer configuration this holds about 50 chickens. And then the winter configuration you take this back piece which is held on my carriage bolts and you flip it out on each of two coupes and then slide them together and you have a green house. It's about 26 by 6 feet long. My hoop house I should say it's not heated. So in constructing this cost for the eight houses materials 1745 and labor 1360. So it's a fairly low cost investment for me to be able to experiment with this and get some data on how well it worked on my farm. So each house costs us about just under $400. They hold 50 cornish cross chickens at just over a square foot per chicken because you've got about 60 square feet in those. And we also did turkeys so we would run 25 turkeys in a season and sell those at the local farmers market and to subscription customers. And two houses together for the greenhouse configuration gives you approximately 100 row feet depending on how you can figure it. Salad mix we grew salad mix kale. I have pock choy in them right now. Several different types of crops that you could go. So the potential number of chickens and six month season were about 300 per coop if you assume that you would I had a separate brooding facility in the barn and would bring them out and then have them on the pasture the last four weeks of their lives. And then winter harvest was we had a return of about $2 per row foot on that which I think is fairly standard. This gives you a little bit more detail in the summertime we would put in a reflective tarp to keep the chickens cooler. Obviously you don't want them in a greenhouse with plastic heating up all summer long. You could also roll up the sides. But you can't see as well maybe in this picture here you can roll up the sides. So that four foot wall would be like a ledge and the hoop was on the inside. So you can roll up the sides and set that right there. And we had a little clip that came up to hold it in place to get plenty of air flow for the chickens. But also then if there's a storm or something we could roll those back down and keep the chickens from getting wet. This right here was an important component. This is just basically a three trailer hitch. And we used a lever. It's a trailer. It's actually supposed to be like a hand trailer puller. That was my lever to be able to move these by hand across the field. And I was able to move them. That was an important part of this. My husband is a physician and isn't doing the farm. So I do the farm. He helps. He helped with some of the construction and things. But I wanted to have a system that I could manage on my own. And this was a way to do that. We constructed these to be pretty lightweight. And over the couple of years that we've been using and we found that there are some stress points here that we've had to put like little triangles in to reinforce a little bit just from the moving. Just the jerking across the field as you go. In the winter. So then we put this is actually just a low tunnel I had. But we would configure the houses kind of in a little village so it's easy to get from one to the other to work. And there's my son helping us put one together. So you pre-plant the crops. And so I would plant my crops in August. And I didn't need to slide the houses over until about October timeframe when it started to get cold enough to get a frost on those crops. And I could put this is the agribon, the frost cloth over those crops to help protect them through the winter. Pretty much the same thing you see done in the larger hoop houses. And we would slide these over so when you open them up, you have a three ends that are open. You can just slide them over the crop one on either side. So and then fasten it together here and put in another piece of plastic right there. We used the Johnny seeds has those clips to put on there. And those work fairly well. But if you got a really high wind, they would pop off and fly across the field. So one of the things that we were playing with we haven't done yet actually is doing some string across there, like greenhouse string just to kind of hold things down a little bit better. To insulate, you bring the curtain side down and then we put sandbags here to help hold that in place. And then we would use straw to help insulate the sides. And we found that that helped retain more heat through the eat through the night. And even though this was a smaller hoop house, I had a lot of the same results as people with much, much larger houses in terms of what would survive the winter and how cold it got. We did do some temperature monitoring. In general, it kind of brought us one zone south so that we had about 10 degrees warmer in there. And that's just a picture of my kids helping me do salad greens one winter. Yeah, and that's I kind of went through some of this already. I used row cover for insulation on the crops themselves. We did strong sandbags on the side. So it acted kind of like a modified low tunnel, but you could get in there and work. So with salad greens, I was able to cut and come back again, sometimes getting three or four cuttings before December when things were really, really slowed down. But that would get me through the Thanksgiving and Christmas markets. So it was tall enough to work for a multiple harvest. We would vent them. Usually, I had most of the trouble venting would be in the spring because in the fall, a lot of times I would wait till the very last minute to throw it to put those over the crops. But in the spring, that is one thing about this house is being smaller, the temperatures were pretty variable up and down. So you would have to go out there and vent them. But you could actually open up the plastic at the junction where the two pieces went together to bend it out the top if you needed to vent it quickly, or we could open the doors on either end. That worked out really pretty well. And then as it got consistently warmer, you just roll up the sides. We did find you could reduce disease buildup by moving to different locations. So one of the winters, we had a little problem at the end of the winter with Downey Mildew on some of the kale. So the next season, I just moved to a different location and didn't have that problem that next season. That was one of the big advantages of having these be movable. And we didn't supplement with heat, so they're truly just hoop houses. We took one house and modified it one winter for some laying hens. I wanted to rest my winter coop and get that really well cleaned out, especially the pasture area that was around it was getting too muddy. So we decided to use one of them for chickens through the winter. And actually that worked really well for us. We modified this door to put in a chicken door to help keep more heat in here. We used a straw for deep bedding. Put it in, you know, six inches tall, roughly, and you keep adding through the winter. And as that decomposes, it adds more heat. Put in nest boxes along the side. Since you had that frame on the bottom, you could put nest boxes in there. We had roll out nest boxes on the side and put roost in the back. We were able to keep 35 hens in there through the winter. And with the solar heat and the deep bedding and the warmth from the chickens, we actually had less trouble with freezing and these than we did in our insulated coop. We were able to keep the water from freezing, except during really extremely cold winter. So this would have been not this past winter, but the winter before, which was a little milder, but we did have some of those really super cold days. Those would be the days that you would have to go out there and change the water and make sure that the chickens weren't too cold. But we didn't have any, you know, frost damage or anything. Let's see. I think that was it on that one. But that did work out very well for us. And then you have a place you can move your winter coop as well. So you're not married to one spot. We did testing during this. And this was part of the research project. Did some soil testing. I don't know if you can see that real well with the light on this or not, but you can see the strip where we were going. And anybody that's familiar with the salatin method, this is what the salatin fields look like. You know, when you're moving your chickens across the field, they're fertilizing that area that they're moving in. And it gave us controlled fertilization. I was able to run in between my rows of blackberries. I could run them. In this case, I was running them up toward my orchard area. And our soil test we took over two years for the project. We would take five samples from the area that the chickens were in and five samples from an adjacent area that they were not in and blend those and then send them in. And so you can see in 2015, the areas without chickens, this is your percent organic matter phosphorus. And then this was without without chickens. And this is where the chickens had run. And same thing in 2016 saw slight increases. So you're getting some increase in nutrients and organic matter. But it's not like a huge amount all at once. I know there's a lot more research that has been done on the soil impact here. This is just kind of an overview that we have. Benefits of this project controlled fertilization. So we're controlling exactly where our chickens are going. Continuous supply of fresh pasture for the birds. So we had about four acres of horse. It was planted in horsements pasture, which is the orchard grass and legume mix, which was really good for the birds. It produces a great meat bird. It also helps with your eggs. You get these nice dark orange yolks. Our pen cost was recuperated faster. Since we were able to use it year round. So I was getting returned in the winter and not just storing that coop. Our business was a little bit more diversified. So going to the farmers market, not I had chicken and eggs, but I also had greens. So I was kind of like a one stop shop at the farmers market. We found that that was a good advantage for our customers. Increased our soil health over time and decreased fertilizer needs for the summer vegetables. So just you know, you're slowly adding that organic matter and those nutrients. So I didn't have to fertilize the vegetables as much considerations. So chicken storage, when you're growing a whole bunch of chicken, then you need freezer space. And this was something that I really didn't plan for as well at the beginning of this project. So we ended up not using the coops at the full capacity with eight of those, we could have raised a lot more chickens than we actually did. But what we did, we used the freezer space that we had and we did add one more freezer to be able to do more of that. Food safety, obviously, when you're integrating chickens and vegetables, you have to be cognizant of issues with chicken manure. Chickens can carry several human pathogens. We would power wash the coops after we were done with them in the fall. And before we put them over the vegetable crop. And then we would also use cover crops or time between when we ran a chicken in a certain area or ran a coop through a certain area and when we would plant the vegetables. So I would allow that pasture mix to grow for a little while and making sure that we were following at least the organic standards of 120 days between the manure application and vegetables. Usually it was more than that. Drawbacks. So the current design, this design is pretty small. It's 20 by, sorry, 10 foot by six foot pen, which is small enough to move by hand, but too small to make a very large, grow a very large batch of chickens at one time. I don't know if any of you are familiar with the prairie schooners they will hold up to, I think, 1500 chickens. There are some very large ones that you can use and pull it with a tractor. It'd be interesting to see, you know, if you use one of those larger ones and then use that as a winter greenhouse or something like that, it helped what you would get there. There's extra labor. So the diversification comes with the drawback of, you know, you're managing chickens and you're managing vegetables. So I'm growing summer vegetables and I'm managing chickens at the same time. We managed that. I managed, I hired somebody part-time to help me with the chicken operation and that did help. Extra storage, I did mention that already. Required in the winter for frozen birds to sell through the off season, which is different than your vegetable storage and needing coolers. So it's just a little bit more capital. My conclusion that concluded that the system worked in a pretty complementary way. We felt like being able to move where we put our vegetables in the winter was a big positive for our farm, especially for disease control. We were making soil improvements fairly slowly, but we did make them. And definitely one thing that I found pretty interesting was how well they controlled insects in my orchard and around my berries. I suspect, but I don't have obviously data on, you know, how they would have controlled insects for the vegetables, but I would assume that you're going to get fewer, a lower insect population. Your chickens are eating those all that constantly. The scale of this project in particular would work in a smaller setting. So I have some numbers here about, you know, eight houses would take about 50 to 60 feet across, times four to six weeks of movement for the birch, which gives you about 420 feet for one rotation by that, you know, if you're just going straight down. So if you have a smaller urban garden type setting, this might be something that would work pretty well for you. She asked what breed of chickens I was using. So I use the Cornish Cross broilers for my meat chickens. We use broad-breasted white turkeys for the turkeys. My laying hens were a mixture of golden comet and Americanas. I like that blend for the color of the eggs. It's very marketable.