 So I'm going to try to give a brief introduction to my farm and then a short description about our project and then I try to go into a little more about pasture layers, just like an overview of some of the problems and the difficulties, but really feel free to stop me in questions. So we're about eight hours north of here. We're in northern Michigan, so way up here. I'm sure like right now we've got snow on the ground, we've got frost every night, seems like a different world down here, honestly. So we probably deal with a little different, some different issues than you guys, but I'm sure a lot of it is transferable. So we are four season farm. We're primarily a vegetable farm, but we do proteins on the side. We have 80 acres of fields, woods and pastures. So it's certified organic, the land is and our produce is, but we do not certify our proteins, mostly because we don't have a really good source for organic proteins, for organic grains and so yeah, it's just a, yeah. So about 10 acres of vegetables in production and then yeah, we do about a thousand layers in the summer on pasture, about 700 in the winter, yeah, meet birds pigs. So this, so this, the grant started as, so we've raised, I lived in New Hampshire for a couple of years, we did about a, well same thing, about a thousand birds on pasture there and two big flocks, like big giant movable pastures, we circle them with these electric nets and yeah, here's just like pictures and we put these, yeah, these are basically on wheels, we, they're movable roosts, movable nest boxes and their feeders and waters are all sort of like connected and we move them as they need it, so like they're always on fresh grass. Typically, it depends on the time of year and what we're trying to do, but typically we'll move the nets once or twice a week and we'll move the actual houses either every day or every other day, we'll attach a tractor to a truck or whatever and just sort of bump them forward, but we had never had any real problems in the summer, they like, well for us, they like, they like pretty, pretty well, I would say on average, I would say the, for like a young flock on average, we get about 85% production, however, because we have a lot more demand in the summer, we try to, we have some older birds mixed in with the newer ones and so that, that brings down our average lay in the summer because some of them are older, but it works out economically for us because we want as many birds as possible in the summer and we have to lower that in the winter because we just have less demand, so I would say on average we're around 80% in the summer, that's average like 75% are like sold, like, you know, there's gonna be some like house eggs we call them, but so 2014 we had, and it's just sometime mid-summer, the production just started dropping like crazy and we couldn't figure out why, I couldn't figure out why, at some point someone was like, I would divide your flock, we had about 350 layers at that point and one, and one movable coop, someone said to divide the crop, divide the flock, so we did, and toward the, and it started coming back up again, like production, it was never great, but it came back up again, and so that winter we're just trying to figure out why, so I thought, oh maybe we need, you know, just have smaller, smaller flocks, so that, that year we applied for this grant, the next, so we applied for it in 2015, but the grant didn't start until 2016, so 2015 we had 500 birds in pasture and we had two flocks, so about 250 birds each, and just like, like it had always been, everything was fine, you know, we had good, good ray light, lay rate, but then the SARE project started in 2016, and so we had three flocks, we had a 450, a 250, and 100, yeah, 100 bird flock, the idea was, yeah, just to, just to test the production, again, it started out all, everything was the same, no problem, until sometime in mid, mid to late June, it started to be, it was a really hot summer for us, which fortunately for the project, because that was the issue, unfortunately for us, our production started to drop, and like crazy for the two, the same thing, so it went, it dropped down to nearly 60%, our 100 acre, 100 layer flock didn't drop, like the smaller flock stayed, stayed playing pretty well, actually above 80%, I mean it was like that most of the summer, but it was a really hot summer, so the answer for us was like, yeah, the smaller flock lays better, but the question is why, because it's not simply like 100 birds is the answer, obviously a lot of people have lots of birds, and we had gone for years with much more birds, so that winter I spent a lot of time just looking around, trying to understand why, and at this point I was pretty sure that it had to do with the heat, I mean, I was sort of like a blind squirrel looking around, trying to understand these things, and so I was thinking like in the South, people obviously deal with this a lot more with heat, and how do they deal with it, so I got in touch with some producers, and we got on this, there's an American Pastured Poultry Producers Association, it's called APA, if anyone wants to raise birds, meet birds or layers on pasture, it's such a good organization, they put on, I think, 10 times a year this little magazine called APA Grit, it's just like farmers, and it's a pretty low-key newsletter, but then they have a producer plus option, which costs 50 or 70 bucks a year, something like that, and you're on this list there, which is just with farmers, you can ask them questions, it's really awesome. So we got in contact with that, started asking questions, and what we found out is like for when it's, so in the heat of the summer, birds are all, they don't want to eat midday, they don't want to drink midday, they want to do first thing in the morning, and so if you're out there at even 8 in the morning, it looks like, oh yeah, there's some birds eating, some birds drinking, and it's like there's plenty of space on your feeders and waterers, but in the middle of the summer, they want to get all of their feed nutrition in that cool part of the day, so they're all congregating around that early in the morning and in the late evening, and if there's stress or competition, they're just going to have, they may seem fine, but they're going to have a lot, they're more stress and more, just more issues, so they're just not going to lay as well, essentially. So what was going on, I learned, was like with a smaller flock, so we have these big, pastured feeders that say, they hold 300 pounds, they say they're for 250 or 300 birds, and we had a couple of those out there, so seemingly plenty of space, however, it's really not enough space for feeder and water space per bird, so what we did is we, so this was 2017 this year, we increased the watering and bird feeder space to like 3 to 5 inches per bird, well 3 inches was sort of standard, but when it got really hot, although it never was that hot, it was like a medium hot summer this year, we, yeah, we increased it to like 5 inches per bird, which is a lot, like if most of the time, if you're out there and you have 5 inches of water or feeder space, you're like nobody's eating or drinking, it's because that's a lot, it's basically it's enough for them to all eat or drink at once or pretty much, and that made a huge difference for us, and that's essentially what we're going to do going forward, so it's not, we aren't going to shrink, so my first thought was like, okay, if we want 1,000 birds and pasture, which is about what we have in the summer, we would have 10 small coops, which is how we do our broilers, but what we did, but it's just, it's very inefficient as you scale up, so we also wanted these larger flocks, they're more efficient for layer or for like labor management, so this is what we figured out is what we need to do, I don't know if I'm just talking like crazy, if you guys, yeah, okay, so another thing we did, we gave more shade, more protection from animals from predators, so our production rates were about 80%, again, for our younger flocks that are at peak production, it's actually quite a bit higher than that, it's probably closer to 90%, but we have some older birds in there, so we have about half of our flock that we carry over for a little over a year of lay, which seems inefficient, but it's because we have such a high demand for eggs in the summer, and we don't have that much of demand in the winter, so we try to figure out how to deal with that, and this is what we do, so the production is actually a little bit lower than it would seem like, and the winter actually it's a little bit higher, and that's because the birds are in a little more, a little better production age is why. What we did is I found some old trailers, you know, at garage sales or auctions or whatever, and basically I put tarps over them, I put like wooden slats that made them, they were just like a small old boat trailer, and I put like 12 foot long, two by 12s, and put a few of them, I just put giant tarps over them, and I attach that to the back of our movable trailers, and so it just like pulled around with it, and so there was nothing to that with the roosts or anything, and I probably bought the trailer for $75 for one of them, and the tarp was $20, so just like that, and really simple. Another thing I did experiment with a little bit, and we're gonna do more this year, let me actually get to like, well, so yeah, here's a good example. So what I did with this is I moved this out, like I put like a ridge pole that went out farther, and I attached just like some tarps that were like an awning sort of a thing, which helped, you know, in midday it helps quite a bit because you've got, yeah. So it wasn't like I extended the structure much, but yeah, you just increase the shade area, and actually it's protection from the sun, but actually a more port for us is birds, because we've got two eagles that are always around, and then, yeah, that's our main issue in the middle of the day is eagles. We do have owls that are an issue, and then skonks a little bit, but let me go back here a second. So, yeah. So to me, what does pastured mean? Pastured means if they have constant access to grass. Yeah, moving them around, I mean, there's lots of ways people do it, but like to me, this is free range. You've got a permanent structure, you open the gate, you know, in the morning, or wherever you leave it open, and the chickens can go wherever they want. Depending on how many birds you have, pretty soon, like as you can see, and this is pretty mild, anything within close range, there's not gonna be much grass, like vegetation for them to eat. And so what we do is we move them intensively on the pasture. Yeah, and to me, that's pastured. And in the winter, we don't have grass at all, so we change our labels, and we just say, like we're non-gmo, we're local eggs. Yeah, so we don't wanna confuse people with that means. Okay, why do you wanna pasture birds? So it's definitely, I mean, the chickens can act like chickens out there, they're packing and scratching around. I think that's really important. You know, healthier eggs, healthier farm. It's for us, one of the main reasons we started, so I'm a vegetable farmer, that's what I am, and we got layers, one for the market, because we can sell eggs, people want that, and we already have the market build in, I mean, it's because we have our customers that want these things. It's really good for the soil, so we'll have, we rest about a quarter of our garden a year, like one of our plots, about a quarter of it, and so we'll put that in a cover crop that's good for the layers, and we'll move that throughout the year, and so that's really helped us with our fertility and organic matter. Will you talk about that? It's a huge topic, cover crops. So we have, and part of our garden every year is some stuff with black plastic, like plastic mulch, and it's always a struggle for us of what we do in between the rows. And something we learned a couple years ago is we plant, so when we put our black plastic out, we'll sow really thick rye, an annual, which you would think, oh, this isn't a great one, but it actually works great, because it doesn't grow too high, it sort of shuts itself down in the heat, which is what we want, and then we undersow that with quite a bit of red clover. And so what the rye does, the rye will grow up a little bit and we'll mow it, and you don't really see much clover until later in the year, and then the next fall, or the next spring, after the plastic's gone, and suddenly we have these strips of red clover that were established the year before. And so what we've done is the garden that's coming out was the year, the previous year was the one in black plastic mulch. We don't do a lot of plastic mulch, probably about an acre and a half out of the 10, I mean, maybe that's a lot, out of the 10 acres is in plastic mulch. And so you'll have these strips, like maybe two and a half feet wide of pre-established red clover, medium red clover's what we use, just works for us. I mean, you could do other things as well. And then we'll go in there, we have like an old grain drill, and we'll go through with the grain drill and we'll plant like, well, we'd like to put a variety of things down, but basically it's things that we can mow and then we can shut down, but that aren't perennials because we're not trying, in that area, that place, we're not trying to grow perennials. And so what we, typically what we do, because so again, because we're organic, we don't put the chickens anywhere near the garden, anything on the garden that we're growing that year, because like there's a 90, 120 day rule. So we only put the chickens where we have like a resting year for the garden. And then we also have lots of pasture. So when, basically when they've run around that once or twice, or what we're trying to do, at some point we want to clip that down and put it into a fall cover crop that will over cover winter for the next year. So basically we have them in the garden probably till early August or so. I mean, it really depends. We got three different flocks so we're moving around, but other times a year they're on pasture. Yeah, just something, we have rolling hills, we have pigs and yeah, meabirds and such, for example. We have this stuff, it's electric poultry fencing. I think it's great. I think it's awesome. It's about a dollar a foot, if you buy it in like 160 foot rolls, which is typical what they sell it at. We do two around, two 160 foot lengths a time, and then what we'll do is move we'll have an extra two we set up to like to make it a bigger thing, a bigger bubble we call them, and then we move it forward into that. And so it just gives them time to move forward. I don't know if that makes any sense. We do farm tours and this is like, usually you can like point things out and it's much more clear. And so what the fencing does is it keeps out land predators. And like, except for skunks, we've never had an issue with land predators. Like I see coyotes, I see fox. As far as I know, I've never had an issue. We have aerial predators that are our issue. And we've learned some things there if you want to talk about that. So the first thing we did for aerial predators, specifically for eagles is we put out these strings which didn't seem to work. I thought, oh, you know, this will like confuse him. It didn't seem to work. Maybe I didn't put out enough, I don't know. And then someone actually probably got 10 people emailing me this NPR report last year. It came out some guy in Georgia who had the same issue. If you have chickens, you've probably heard it. And they did the same thing, but with fishing line. And I think, and so we tried that and it seemed like it worked. However, we tried it later in the summer and usually we have issues earlier in the year because by mid to late summer, the chickens get smart and they sort of learn. But early in the years, like we lose, you know, maybe a chicken a day. And so that's a big issue for us. It's just eagles. Like we have hawks for some reason. The hawks never bother us. We have owls which only come at night. And what we've done for that, we've moved, we're moving to, you can see some of these things, some of these other structures we've used. Sorry, I'm going the wrong way. Our original structures were like this. And these are old boat trailers. Just like the cheapest thing we could find. They're pretty low to the ground. And we're moving everything to these ones that are higher off the ground. This is like running gear it's called or like hay trailers. And they're just higher off the ground. And what it does is it gives, so that when the layers come in at night, I don't like to lock the layers up. And that would be one thing you could do is like go out there and lock them every night. But then you got to do it in the morning. Like I have these big holes I can go into. But if you do this, and we experimented one this year with they have to like jump up high and they have like two or three gates that are small for them to get in. And for the most part, so the owls are smart. The owls will jump in there and go in with the chickens. But if you make it harder for them, they don't. But skunks can as well. For a while I thought we only had an owl problem. But I learned that actually skunks, when they consume a bird it looks just like an owl. Basically they eat their head and start to eat their shoulders. And the skunks are pretty good at getting under that netting. If the more often you use it and the hotter, like the more electricity that's running through that thing, the better. Yeah, yeah, yeah. This is sort of where it seems like the pastured industry is going to these guys. This is basically how people use meat birds these days. They're an enclosed structure, they move them every day, they're on skids. These guys are being sold by three or four farms around the country. I personally am probably gonna stay away from them because it seems like what they do is they keep them in there the whole time. They're basically confined on pasture. I mean, there seems like there's plenty of space. I think this is recommended for like 200 or 300 birds. And then they just move it forward. So they always have green grass theoretically. But what you're gonna do here is you're not gonna have any predator problems. And but these are real expensive as well. These are much cheaper and more, you can basically build them with what you have on your farm. I don't know. Do we use the same type of structure in winter? No, I wish we could. We have a big barn, we have in the basement of the barn. You know, it gets 20 below sometimes. We've got this much snow in the ground. So essentially, there's nothing we can do. We move them in. Well, when we have to, usually it's around Thanksgiving. Last year was a little bit earlier. And like right now they're opened up. Like the barn is opened up so they can go outside. But it's not until most of that snow is gone to they actually go outside. That's a struggle. But yeah, we essentially can't. But maybe it's possible down here. I know guys do keep these kind of things in the winter. They'll just close them up. So that would be an advantage for us. For someone down here. But I don't think for us we could do that. So people will go to farmers market. If you're selling vegetables, why don't you just have eggs too? Because everybody buys eggs. I feel like there's an, especially in summer, there's an unlimited demand for eggs. But it's an issue. If you've got all these chickens, what are you gonna do with them in the winter? Because there's not such a demand. It's a real issue. You know, we've got wholesale contacts. We have a year around, essentially a year around 42 weeks CSA. So we can deal with that in the winter. But we're pretty established. But these younger farms who only have 100 birds, it's more of an issue. In the winter, everybody's got eggs and they're not selling. Well, and that's a whole different problem. But there's something to think about if you wanna have eggs. Like, what are you gonna do with the eggs in the winter? But it's the buddy of mine. He wanted to make something that he could pull around by hand. And he built this one. And there's another picture I have on here. This is the one we built. And this essentially is on two bikes. I built it on there. It was a little too heavy. And I tried to adjust it last year. I still wasn't very satisfied. I could pull it around. But my workers could and it was just too much. So one thing we did with this is we made the nest boxes and the roost two different vehicles, two different pods. So that's a challenge to this day because I'm trying to find it. I have another picture somewhere. Sorry. Oh, right here. So this is what my friend did. The other one is his first attempt. This is his second attempt. This was like basically on four bikes and this is their nest boxes and this is their roosts. And it worked a little better and he managed no problem. But it's, yeah, they're still pretty heavy. We always dealt with flat tires and everything. With the truck and a tractor doesn't matter. You just pull it forward anyways. But in the bike it's different. The question was about how much acreage do you need like for a flock or how much space? So for us, we have these two fence links. So essentially 360 perimeter fence around there which is like two fences, 320 perimeter. Maybe that's a quarter acre. I'm not really sure exactly what. If you have a hundred birds, you could actually move that around quite a bit and that, you know, to always have in mind grass. So, but for with a bigger flock, with our 300, 350 per like per pod, we try to move those once a day. We probably can move through an acre. I don't know exactly. My guess is about two weeks. But you can move them around there several times. Again, the goal is to always have in mind grass and like how fast you move them is depending on your situation, like what you're trying to accomplish. If you're trying to fertilize, then you want to like just bump them forward just one at a time. If you're trying to like move them around your pasture to always give them like as fresh grass as possible, then it's a little different what you're trying to do. There's other people who, I mean, and there's lots of, again, APA is awesome because people are trying this in lots of different ways. There's one guy who has, he moves his houses to totally different parts of the farm every day. So they lock up at night and I guess in the middle of the day. So he doesn't use the perimeter fences. In my mind, that's crazy. But like it works for him, you know? And so, yeah, there's lots of different ways to do it. In the summer or like in the later summer where we're actually on pasture, we move them a little slower. It's more like, it's a permanent pasture. So there's plenty of grass growing. It's way more salish. For the clover and the ryegrass or whatever, that's not ryegrass. It's winter rye. Because it's an annual, it's not as established. So they can make it seemingly bare ground much quicker. But it bounces back, or at least the clover bounces back quite well. And my goal isn't to develop pasture there. My goal is to keep cover and fertilize. Typically what we do on that is I'll move the birds, the layers through there really quick and then I'll put meat birds in there, which allow it, and those guys are in much smaller paddocks. And so it develops, the clover's and the rye and whatever else is there will grow up around it and bounce back much quicker. ["Pomp and Circumstance"]