 I was going to say I'm old enough to remember that I was a mirror lad at the time, but the first energy crisis late 70s, early 80s, and there was a lot of interest in heating greenhouses with non-conventional methods, so they tested a number of different animals relative to the BTUs they gave off. Guess which animal won? Not chicken. That's why I'm interested. Rabbits. Rabbits. And there actually were greenhouses that had rabbits in them to help defray the heating cost. Well, K is growing chickens, not rabbits, but I think this will be equally intriguing. So K and F, it's all yours. Well, thank you very much. My talk is, of course, as you can see by the slide, diversified high-tenile rotations using chickens in the rotation for insect control, soil fertility management, and additional heating, or how to foul up a high-tenile operation. When we applied for the grant, the objectives at our farm are fertilization, weed and pest control, heat management, and to extend the growing season. The problems that we were facing, we are mainly an herb and produce farm. I grow plants, and the plants are what we sell, and then we also sell the fresh-cut herbs, and the high cost of propane was killing us in the high tunnels. Managing soil quality and fertility in a chemical-free system. We are chemical-free. We are coming off of old wheat ground, which means the nitrogen has been sucked completely out of our soil. We have high acid, we're soil in the world, so naturally we chose to farm. Controlling insects in a chemical-free system. The solution, as I saw it, that would require the least amount of work for me personally, is a six-plot rotational system with rotations of the herbs and the vegetables, adding the chickens and fallow into the plots with a various combination of coverings on the high tunnels, the low tunnels, and to run the fallow plots uncovered or naked. Chickens also were introduced into the plot system both for the benefits of heating, fertility, and insect control. First of all, of course, you have to erect the high tunnel. We did have two high tunnels and a seedling house that we were already using, but for the purpose of the grant, we wanted four tunnels and two plots for the rotation. How many of you have your own high tunnels? So you know the joys of putting up high tunnels. I'm from Kansas, so there is nothing that blocks the wind from Oklahoma to Nebraska, and so about the midpoint is where we live, where it's really kicking up steam sweeping across Oklahoma. So the high tunnel erection was very important. As you can see with this particular high tunnel, the year I got the grant was the year of the incredible drought and high heat. So naturally, again, we're going to a high tunnel production system. We had a plot of tomatoes that were already planted, had not produced one single tomato. So we decided that's a great place for the high tunnel. We'll just put it over the tomatoes and see what we can do. So where the arrow is, that was the low tunnel with the tomatoes covered. Safety first. The best thing that I can tell you for an operation of any kind is if you have sons, many, many, many sons of all ages and then they bring their friends with them. So Jacob, my youngest, is up the tree trying to cut back enough so that the elms, which shed terribly, don't overhang the greenhouse. Many of you probably had a greenhouse collapse. Again, this is the existing tomatoes. You can see the tomato plants that look like they ought to be doing something but just absolutely did nothing that year. So we went ahead, put the high tunnel right over that non-producing tomato bed and we picked our first tomatoes on December 15th that year. They were planted in April. I may point out that the tomatoes were not particularly good, but that was not the point. The point was I had something round and red to put on a sandwich. Again, putting up the high tunnel, the joy of pulling plastic. Again, waiting for a day that is not windy in Kansas is brutal. Probably here in Missouri too, but in Kansas it is very tough. So we had all the boys on speed dial and we said, when it's not windy, we're going to call you. It was not windy 10 minutes before sunset. They came smoking in. There's gravel everywhere. They go sliding through. We laid the plastic out. And this time, you all are familiar with how to tie the rope on the plastic. My middle son came up with putting a plastic bottle top from like a two-liter bottle of Coke in and wrapped the rope around that, held up a treat. I mean, it went right over. Nothing pulled out. It literally took 10 minutes to get that tunnel covered. You can see the dark picture. That is after the wiggle wire was on and we were literally in the complete dark, but it was up and I was thrilled. I think I had a grant report to write like 10 minutes before we got it up. So these are the completed tunnels. This particular one, number one has three foot sidewalls with roll-up sides. This is the largest tunnel. This is where the chickens spend the most time because it's the largest area for them. And also the height of this particular tunnel makes it, it's cooler in the summer and it's warmer in the winter because of its height. Number two has seven foot sidewalls. They're Lexan sides. They are double wall Lexan and that's the one that we put the brooder bench in for the baby chicks. Number three is a Quonset style. It has no sidewalls. It's just the Quonset, but the sides are able to be rolled up. Number four has three foot sidewalls like the other one, but we've set it up to where it can be covered with anything, either wire or mesh or tarp or plastic or screen or nothing. Again, our main focus is production of vegetable and herb transplants. Then we do potted herbs and tomato plants for sales at farmers' market and planting and growing of produce for market. This is the first step. We ordered the chicks. I had had a car accident several years ago, so we had been without chickens for about four years. It was killing me. I'd buy the eggs in the store and you know how you got your good hard shell at home. First egg I broke all over the kitchen. I hit that against the thing and it just exploded. I said we were going to have chicks and we're going to have chicks quick. So we ordered the chicks and in the transplant house, we have the large benches. What we did was we made frames that went all around the base of the benches and this is where we set up the brooder. So after they get their first pin feather on, after I get them out of my kitchen, you know, anybody have their chicks in the kitchen? Yeah, that doesn't last very long, but that first pin feather boy, they're out in the greenhouse and they're under the brooder. So we've got the plant tables with the screen all the way around it and doors so that we can get in and feed them and then they have two lights, two of the heat lamp lights are suspended underneath. So the plants on top keep the chicks warm. The chicks heat does the plant and right away, I noticed that we had good root growth. My tomato plants particularly, they were just way ahead of anything that I'd ever grown before. It's a web bench top, but yes, the first thing I thought, oh, let's put plastic there so that when we water the tomatoes, we're not watering the chickens. So yes, it's solid, but it's because a solid bench just doesn't work very well. This one's just covered with recycled greenhouse plastic is what I do when I change a greenhouse. I just save that. This is the plants over top of the brooder. Again, we just get such beautiful growth because they've got that bottom heat rising and it's work to treat. You know, sometimes I have these dumb ideas that don't really quite pan out, but so far it's worked beautifully. You can see there's hanging baskets across this plant bench. When we brace the greenhouse, my husband made V shapes and we've got the hanging basket poles across. So what I do with those is if there's a night where there's a super freeze warning and I'm a little bit worried about the chicks, anything maybe under 38 to 32 kind of concerns me a little bit, especially if they're very tiny, then I use those plant racks and just tarp it. So we've got an extra insulation of tarp that hangs down to the floor so it gives the chicks, you know, it completely covers that screen. So they get that added insulation. And this you can actually pull the tarp with one hand. Sometimes it takes me going one side and the other side, but it's very quick and easy to just move that tarp to the side so I don't take it on and off. It's just like a shower curtain. The lack of wind, of course, in the high tunnels gives the plants that extra edge. So I've got just beautiful, good-looking plants by the time our market opens. The market that we go to the most starts the first Saturday of April, runs clear through the end Saturday of October. So this gives me a good edge. I'm a real stickler for not selling people plants before it's too early to plant them. So the most things that I sell in April usually are perennial plants. And then I try to push them back till May because I don't think it's serious when people are planting basil and tomato too early, but that's my other soapbox. Now what do we do? We've got the chicks done and the reeder, they've finished off. So we're going to take them outside because once we get past that stage, I usually do spring chickens. So spring chicks. So now we don't want them in a high tunnel because it's going to get too hot pretty quick. So we do outdoor runs. Again, I mentioned the first year of our research grant. It was the highest temps. I wish I had temperature information for you that first summer, but I melted three thermometers in the greenhouses. So that's how hot it was. The considerations are, again, I mentioned to you that I do not like to work personally. I don't mind watching other people do it. But we needed a method of moving the chickens from the brooder into the next high tunnel run. Something easy to do, fighting the instinct to home of the flock because those of you that grow chickens, you know, once they've slept two nights someplace, they think that's where they live and they will never deviate from that. So I needed to fight that homing instinct and something else for the safety of the chickens, i.e., the city coons that the naturalists say, oh, yeah, trap that coon, take it out to the country. Yeah, I don't want your city coons. Coyotes, neighbor's dogs, whatever else. Owls, rats, possums. So, oh, they're bad on everything. So we created a mobile chicken house. We did the quick and easy frame. We didn't have to make it too big because they're not going to be staying in the house. This is just where they're going to go to sleep at night. Then we put it on an old boat base. We had a boat trailer that we found. We put a heavy welded steel panel that's got the short grid. So the chickens aren't getting through it and nothing really, a mouse probably could, but not a rat, could get through the base of it. The ideal thing about this is the manure just falls right through it. There is no cleaning out of this chicken house. It's completely self-cleaning. That's the part I like best. Okay, so then when we move it, it will pull with just the small garden tractor. We don't even have to get the tractor out. This is the soil I'm fighting, if you would notice. That's how it looks. That's really the color and texture of our soil. So this is why we're wanting to get some more fertility into it. So the first outdoor we run, we put between the grain bins and the Lexan high tunnel. We left the chicks out there. They had it cleaned up completely in about three weeks. We had several. I think we probably had 80 because we ordered and by that time we had 80. So they ran through that pretty easily. They scratched it. We did not leave them out there too long, but immediately the soil was just good and we got them in, out of that area, tilled it in and were able to plant potatoes. In our excitement of actually growing something, I did not get a picture of the potatoes. So I gave you a picture of me cutting the potatoes. But it was very fast and we were able to plant on March 17th, which I had an aunt who never planted potatoes any time at March 17th. The next location when they went from that run, they went into the high tunnel without covering. And this was another place. You can see the green in the background. That is how that looked when they moved in there. It was completely unused soil. It had not been tilled if it had been, we've been there 30 years. So it has not been used in all of our 30 years and probably maybe 30 years before that. No, it's a wire covered, sorry. Yeah, you can see it better down at the bottom, but it is wire covered and then it's got chicken wire over the top of it. And then this is the other side view of the mobile chicken house and this is the egg layer box on the side that flips up together the eggs. They were in there a whole long time and I think in the next picture you'll see where they stayed a little bit longer. It didn't seem that the soil was vastly improved although we did get some squash to come up in it. I think probably it needed another season beyond to lay fallow. We did a low till after this, but like I said with it open it just didn't seem like that maybe it was still too hot and the manure was still too hot for it. These are 20 by 24, 20 by 24 wide and 6 foot high. We'll run through this pretty fast because I'm probably running out. Then we moved them to the tunnel with the roll-up sides and it is 16 foot tall, 15 and a half in the middle. So this is a taller tunnel. This is where the tomato plants were that you saw earlier and they cleaned it up. We left them in there three months and then took them out and I think we planted the third month after that. So they had a little bit of time to live in there and scratch in there and completely, completely till up that soil. So Dave got in there with the tiller. This greenhouse when we get a doorway at the end it will actually let our little tractor in so we won't have to till by hand. But again, the no shoveling, but this soil broke down, the manure in this house broke down much faster than it seemed to in the uncovered tunnel. There's just no other way to explain to you the beauty of this soil versus what you saw on the outside. It's right next to it and literally there's a line where the chickens were to where the outside is that it isn't. You want to really lay down and roll in it. So what I chose to do is have my husband plant so I could take pictures. What we did then is after we planted, since we are potted plant producers, I used the potted plants as row covers, weed barrier really. If they had those laying on the ground it increased incredibly my greenhouse space or high tunnel space so that the plants could be in there and they finished off much faster and the lettuce grew beautifully. And you can see in just another two or three weeks the amount of growth. This is soil that wouldn't hardly grow anything and I was like dancing around. We actually had Swiss chard and lettuce for the first day of market. We have never had that before in our lives. Just a quick marketing tip, listen to what people are talking about, your stand if you go to farmers market. I was selling Swiss chard right over left, hand over hand and it wasn't my, what I call my older crowd usually bought the Swiss chard. Nobody young knew how to do with it but I was having younger customers, younger customers. I thought what are they doing with it? And I heard the term green smoothies and I thought well that sounds interesting. So I went online, checked out green smoothies, went to work, made green smoothies for my office. I said here try this. And we posted the QR code which takes them directly to my internet site and had a whole thing of green smoothie recipes and I doubled my sales by the next week because the crowd that was buying it just had their phones out there and snatched that. Strawberry was one of the open row. We used the spun row cover in Kansas. Again, you can see the success rate. It's hard to keep nail down. It's hard to keep on in our wins but it did do its job and kept the birds and the chickens out long enough for the strawberries to kind of mature without a peck in every single one of them. Bracing is so important. If you're in a heavy snow country you will ultimately lose a high tunnel. The little collapsed tunnel here. How many of you were in for Dr. Gu's presentation that was just in here? This was something that was at Great Plain Growers one time and it was from the East Coast they had this wonderful idea that you could make quick and easy high tunnels with PVC pipe. And I said that'll never work in Kansas. Oh yes, it's very structurally sound. So we made this PVC pipe tunnel and you can see it just first snow it just absolutely folded. So we propped it up inside with a ladder and then the next week it blew over and broke the four by four posts that we had sitting in it. So I would not recommend a PVC pipe. This is the Quonset House and you can see with just having the chickens in it the snow melts right off. I mean just there's just enough residual heat that it doesn't stick. This kind of blurry picture that is taking without opening the door because it was I think 20 something less degrees than that so I didn't want to open the door if I didn't have to. But that is through the ice on the outside of the door. It was just a sheet of ice on the outside of the door but the inside was beautiful. Never got below 38 no matter what the outside. Never got below 38 with the chickens. Never got below 38. How cold would it get outside? Less than 20 that year. This is I'm on my this is the start of my second year on this. A lot of our customers ask what happens to the chickens. Everybody's concerned about the lifespan of a chicken. They want them to live to a ripe old age and then die in a rocking chair somewhere. So we're thrilled when our bullets reach egg laying stage. We try to explain to people the lifespan of a chicken that they have so long. Any fryers that they buy in the store are probably eight to ten weeks old that they cannot fathom that at all. So we try to try to explain to them give them a little little bite. The unexpected joy for me this year is once we had turned the chickens out one of them found her way. Remember that homing instinct found their way back to the greenhouse that they had been in before had a clash of eggs that we didn't find and we got 13 baby chicks out of out of this high tunnel. I have one rooster. I got it free with this last thing. It was an exotic bird. The chicks came and there was this one without any feathers on its neck and it was God awful ugly and I thought oh that must be the exotic bird until I saw a fellow walk by wearing a hat and I thought oh no that's probably the exotic. So they sent me pictures yesterday that I didn't get on the thing. All of the babies have a little mohawk. So I'm anxious to see we have five different hen hen varieties. So I'm anxious to see these five different hens wearing a hat. No it was just deformed. It's also my best egg layer. Equal rights. You know you're going to keep your hands because they're producing something. I tell my roosters right off the bat they have the same opportunity. If they choose to lay an egg or set a nest they're golden. They can stay. If not we have other ways of dealing with them. I say serve or be served. A lot of people think that's unnecessarily cruel to the animals but I remind you that the tomatoes and the okra suffer the same fate. Okay the positives of this experience beyond having my sons and husbands help tremendously with the project it did add fertility to the soil almost immediately. We noticed an up in nitrogen. We use a lot of wood chips as pathways and by the time the chickens scratched all that out and did their business that gave also a huge amount of organic addition to the soil without us actually doing a lot of the shoveling and taking care of that you would expect. The extra warmth in the high tunnel was amazing. Only once in the last two years did the chickens water even freeze and that was just a little tiny scale on the top. So I've been more than happy with the additional heat. Significant drop in pest population. I haven't had a really good way to monitor that other than visually but the last two years with the heat we've had terrible grasshopper plagues and while they aren't out and about all the time they have I think they've scared them at least and our production particularly of vegetables was up by more than 50% in the first year. How long did your chickens stay in the brooder? The brooder I wait until they're about pull at size probably four to eight weeks. Underneath the bench? Underneath the bench. Do you have to eat the brooder? Just two heat lamps, it's all I've used. I don't put them in there until they've got all their pin feathers. Once they've got pin feathers I figure they're good to go and it's just two heat lamps under each bench.