Automating grain feeding in mobile pastured poultry coops.

So far, the results have been mostly positive. There's no denying that there have been serious frustrations and fierce problem-solving sessions. First of all, the most important result for me personally is that I'm able to sleep through the night. This may sound silly, but when I was hauling buckets of feed every day, my right arm would start tingling at night and it would work into a severe nerve pain shooting down my arm. This happened every single night for months on end, waking me up in the middle of the night in agonizing pain. I was only getting 4-5 hours of sleep some nights. With little kids and a full-time farm, I felt like I was going absolutely crazy trying to keep my head on straight with little sleep. Within days of getting the automated feeders running, the pain started to fade away. Within two weeks, it was completely gone and it hasn't come back. 

Now that we've been running these systems for a while and the kinks have mostly been worked out, I've documented a plateau in time spent feeding poultry. In all cases, the average time spent went from one hour per day to one hour per week, for a savings of six hours of handwork per week. It should be noted here that the hour that goes into the feeding is pretty mild labor compared to the labor that went into feeding by bucket. Feeding by bucket involved scooping feed, loading it on a trailer, driving it out to the pasture, unloading it, carrying it, and then dumping it into a feeder. Now, the labor involved is filling a grain wagon (either from a delivery truck or from our stationary bin with an electric auger), driving it out to the coops, lining it up with the new bins, running the hydraulic auger, and making sure feed is coming out of the wagon. I bring a garden hoe with me to scrape the feed down when it starts to bridge and get stuck up high in the wagon. So that is not very hard work. But I had to learn quite a bit about augers, hydraulics, and other equipment. I bought all those things used and had to fix just about everything once already, without having any experience with them in my past. It's something to note if one is intimidated by new equipment. It's well worth figuring out how to use it. Financially, we are saving $90 - $120 a week in labor directly associated with feeding. We pay our employees $15-$20 per hour. I value my time at $35 per hour, leading to a savings of $210 per week. Let me be clear about something, though. The savings are far beyond a per hour rate. We haven't had to replace an employee since these systems were installed. Hiring an employee and getting them up to speed is very expensive. On average, we consider it a $2000 expense, just to hire,  train, process paperwork, schedule, and nurture a new employee. It appears that the bucket feeding was the part of the job that kept the door revolving on our farm. 

Prior to the plateau, there were many challenges that kept me out working late trying to troubleshoot various things, such as electrical connections, dead batteries, and auger mishaps. So, the over time spent on the feeding got up to an hour a day, sometimes more. But that was to be expected with a new system like this. 

We have also been measuring levels of physical strain. As mentioned above, I personally experienced life-changing results. I had, at the start of this project, taken over the feeding duties for our employees because we were losing employees who no longer wanted to feed with buckets for $15 an hour. On a scale from 1-10, in the moment of feeding, our average strain was 7.3. However, I emphasize the story above because that was an effect that came at a different time of the day and we weren't sure at the time that it was related to the feeding chores. After getting the kinks worked out, our physical strain is 1.2. It would be zero if we didn't have to constantly draw feed down from the wagon. We are working on a solution for that. 

The final measurement is burnout, measured with Maslach Burnout Inventory. We have been collecting the data on this, but haven't yet compiled it into a readable format. It ended up being a bit more involved than we anticipated, so I will include the results in the final report. But I can say anecdotally that everyone involved in day to day operations is a lot happier and willing to work. Judging from the employee retention, we can conclude that no one is burning out like they used to. 

Update:

The trouble with my arm is completely gone and I've been able to sleep well. None of that pain has returned (unless I haul water in buckets for the sheep). 

The time spent feeding remains at about an hour a week on average. It varies with turkeys and broilers depending on age, but the average is an hour a week for feeding systems. That includes filling the feed wagon from the stationary grain bin. Overall, we spend about 10 minutes at each coop to fill about 90% of their capacity (we try to fill when there's still 10% left in the bin). That's 40 minutes of active work (monitoring the coop bins, drawing down feed, moving to the next coop, etc) and 20 minutes letting the grain bin get filled. I use those 20 minutes to move all the coops to fresh pasture and then come back to a full wagon and go out to feed the flock. 

I still believe that this system has built in a sustainability and resilience that almost no other system could ever do for a pastured poultry operation. The main factor for both farms is keeping employees around for more than a season. I personally realized how taxing it was to spend countless hours interviewing, hiring, training, and then repeating the cycle after just a few weeks. I began to seriously consider whether my personality or management style was the issue. But it clearly came down to the physicality of the work. Since automating our feeding system, we have been able to build a strong team of reliable employees. In fact, two former employees have asked to come back to the team. It has also provided me with enough time and mental space to hire a farm manager, which has further elevated our business and led to growth and personal reward, both emotionally and financially. 

The physical strain prior to automation, like I mentioned in the previous report, was 7.3 (not taking into account the night pain) on a scale of 1-10. After working out most of the kinks, the strain plummeted to 1.2. Now, we have settled at a rating of 1. There's something to be said for repetition here. Doing the weekly feeding with the automation has become extremely easy. I don't think the actual work has changed since the previous report, but I do think that the weekly repetition has naturally built in habits, meaning we have begun to go through the steps without having to think too much. Working with old equipment and new systems generally means that the farmer needs to maneuver through the nuances of their own circumstances. For example, I use a 1967 tractor with abundant quirks, leaks, and attitude. Then I have a newer (1990) grain wagon with hydraulic auger that has its own ideas of how things should be done. These are paired with a very old bin and auger that stores feed and the new automation system on the coops. On David's farm, he has a similar situation, but everything is newer by a decade or two. In both instances, we've had to break out the farmer toolbox to make it all work together. The point here is not that one must only have cheap old iron and make it work. Instead, it's that each farm will have its own circumstance and using the equipment on a weekly basis leads to fine tuning both the physical operation and the farmer's motions. After a year of operating the system without too many hiccups, I found myself moving through the motions much more gracefully and having a much improved understanding of the nuances to keep the system running smoothly. That has decreased the physical strain significantly and has improved the burnout measurement, which I'll discuss next. 

We used the Maslach Burnout Inventory to measure the emotional side of the project. While this has historically been underrecognized, I believe it is the most important element of running a farm. A farmer can feel trapped by their own systems and feel obligated to continue based purely on social pressure and the anxiety about how others will perceive their "failure" if they were to change the course of their farm or life. I have seen it personally. Because of my unique upbringing, I have avoided these feelings to a great extent. However, as I have grown the farm business and had more of a relevant role in our community, I have sensed these pressures mounting. It's uncomfortable and it takes a huge amount of mental energy to dig deep to live one's life or run one's farm exactly as one desires instead of how the industry or community expects one to. It was easier to do when the farm was less well known. Now, it feels like every detail of the farm (and my life) is being watched by the thousands of customers and thousands of farmers who pay attention to our operation. That is a real challenge with very real emotional weight. It takes courage to break free of expectation and blaze a new trail through the unknown wilderness of sustainable farming. These stressors get compounded significantly when the daily physical work being done is strenuous and unrewarding. It often feels like a mysterious elephant in the room when farmers are together talking about their farm and their work. The conversation often leads to how hard farm life is (oh but it's worth it because we're doing real impactful work!) and what else are you going to add to the farm next year (yeah, I think I can squeeze in some more enterprises). It starts to sound a little crazy. I always think "In what other industry would there be this unrealistic expectation to perform extreme physical labor year round and then dream about how to add more more work to schedule for next year? For this reason, we chose to use a strong measurement tool to track the emotional facet of the project. 

I will upload the full spreadsheet of the collected data. This data is completely inline with the narrative I've shared so far. To put it briefly: The beginning was tough. It got better, but it took a lot of troubleshooting. Then we achieved the equivalent of Farm Nirvana. 

The Maslach Burnout Inventory (MBI) measures three things on a scale from 1-7: Emotional Exhaustion (want low number), Depersonalization (want low number), and Personal Accomplishment (want high number). These three facets show a comprehensive look at burnout potential in a work environment. It was nice to come across this tool because it put into words and measurements the exact challenges and pleasures that most farmers experience on a daily basis. It's sometimes hard for one to put their feelings into words in the thick of a challenge, so we found the MBI to be useful for that. 

We followed suggested definitions of each.

Emotional Exhaustion (EE): Feeling drained, fatigued, or overextended by work demands.

Depersonalization (DP): Developing a distant or cynical attitude toward one’s work or those involved.

Personal Accomplishment (PA): The sense of competence and achievement at work (the opposite of burnout).

For EE, our collective first third of the project measured at 3.67. By the last third our EE measured at 1.2, for a total drop of 2.47.

For DP, our collective first third of the project measured at 3.00. By the last third our DP measured at 1, for a total drop of 2.00.

For PA, our collective first third of the project measured at 4.93. By the last third our PA measured at 6.4, for a total increase of 1.47.

In my opinion, these numbers don't seem significantly dramatic. However, it's important to understand that EE and DP both ended up lingering around the lowest value for the final 1/3 of the project, which is impressive. And for PA to be within 0.6 of the highest value is also impressive. It's worth noting that the first several weeks of the project were spent building the infrastructure. This was quite challenging at times, as described in previous narratives. On top of the construction efforts, we were also running our farms, feeding by buckets, and raising young children. So there were some factors that led to spikes in overall stress, which we found to be challenging to separate from the project's research objectives. In my opinion, this actually resembles more of a realistic look at implementing the system anyway, so we didn't work to decipher exactly where the stressors started from. 

Prior to the project's start, we collected data on the MBI factors in order to have a baseline to compare against. Unfortunately, half of the data was collected by the farmer who left the project prior to its start date, so I chose to abandon his data. The new collaborator did not have the data because he was not originally going to participate. My personal data, however, is useful. 

My average (over the course of 2 months) EE prior to starting the project was 4.6.

My average DP prior to starting the project was 4.8.

My average PA prior to starting the project was 4.5.

This means the difference between my original data and the data for the final 1/3 of the project is even more dramatic. Again, there is room for error as I had some other things happening in my life (newborn in the house), but I again defend that as being more realistic anyway.