Progress report for FNC25-1484
Project Information
Project Coordinator Corinna West has managed federal grant projects for over 13 years, including CDC, SAMHSA, and PCORI grants. Corinna has been a duck farmer-rancher-grant recipient for 4 years, including work with the Kansas Department of Aging and Disability Services. Her farm, “Urban Wildfinds and Forage,” has a slogan, “What can YOU do on ¼ acre,” and the answer is “Quite a lot.” Corinna is a disabled person, as are all the farmers in this project, and this adds quite a bit of diversity to the project. We have built a network with young adults, people of color, urban and rural farmers, veterans, and immigrants.
Austin Noah is a young adult from Raymore, MO, who just graduated from 4H. He has won three national titles for showing poultry, two of them with Cayuga ducks from our breeding program. He is an urban farmer who is now mentoring other young adults in an after-school program. He is also a Showmanship judge and a clerk for local poultry shows.
Jennifer Reynolds supports the Springfield, MO region and has worked for 20 years as a full-time farmer-rancher, including producing pigs, chickens, sheep, ducks, geese, and turkeys. Jennifer brings a connection to the mental health community, as her farm is also a halfway house for several justice-system-engaged youths. She was a service coordinator for a large grant for COVID-19 outreach through the Kansas Department of Aging and Disability Services.
Lisa Sulenes represents the Parsons, KS region and has worked with ducks, chickens, geese, and turkeys for over 4 years. Lisa is currently an enlisted Army soldier and brings a connection to other soldiers and also to veteran-related projects.
Shawn Vue is from Kansas City, KS, and represents the Hmong refugee community. There are over 2,000 Hmong Refugees in Kansas City, and they have a solid cultural tradition related to poultry. His farm has experience with peafowl, pigeons, quail, ducks, geese, and chickens.
Damon Patterson is an urban Farmer in Kansas City, MO, who supports a collective of Black Farmers working to reclaim and purchase land through the land bank. His ducks support his farm through manure production and local eggs.
Deb Wilson is a farmer/rancher in Topeka, KS, who has national experience with show stock in the dog show world. Chelsea Grace is a farmer/rancher in Springhill, KS with a large goat farm as well as poultry.
Our research question is, "How can we get farmers in our region to adopt more ducks?" Ducks are native to our region and are more productive than chickens, which come from tropical jungle fowl. However, farmers purchase chickens because this is what they know or have always done. We are working with eight farms to produce baby ducklings and then explore eight different methods for marketing the poultry to the community surrounding their farms. Each farm will be a node in a scattered site hatchery. We will teach each farmer to overcome past biases and objections about ducks. We will support our eight farms in choosing good quality Heritage breed stock, support for hatching ducklings, and support for marketing through different techniques. We will explore which marketing technique is effective for moving the most ducklings while producing the highest revenue for the producer. Our farms will keep back the best quality ducklings to produce breeding stock for the hatchery for the next generation. Producing local poultry will solve the problem of baby birds dying in the mail due to delays from the US Postal Service. Healthier genetics mean lower inputs and more sustainability for meat and egg production.
USA Duck Team is a regional food system network of disadvantaged duck farmers in Missouri and Kansas. We work with Heritage breed Cayuga ducks as the best homesteader meat/egg crossover breed. Ducks are more productive than chickens in most situations, especially in wet regions, and are more heat tolerant and cold tolerant and more compatible with gardening. Furthermore, ducks resist the avian flu strains decimating the poultry and dairy industry. We are promoting the adoption of a more sustainable meat breed as an alternative to Cornish Cross chickens, which rely heavily on shipped birds. Because the USPS has struggled to deliver poultry alive due to shipping delays, this project will explore and test the viability of a scattered site hatchery to produce local poultry. Eight different farms will be receiving incubators and hatchery management training. All eight farms use good livestock management practices and sustainable poultry-raising techniques. Most of our farms use "backyard poultry" models, where the flock has a full unrestricted range of a backyard or a sizeable free-range pen. Backyard models are more sustainable for local small-scale production.
Our methods to support disadvantaged farmers include multiple best-practices recommendations from the USDA. The Food Animal Concerns Trust also funded our project to help support an increase in incubation capacity. After four years, our network has multiple farmers experienced in poultry keeping, incubation, meat processing, and marketing. Many of our farmers are already producing ducklings, duck eggs, and duck meat, and additional sales would increase the sustainability of their operations. Many of our network farmers are ready to step up, for example, moving from Styrofoam incubators to cabinet incubators or from hand-plucking to using a mechanical plucker. Many of the farmers in our network are ready for additional support with marketing and sales, and this is why we are building a website with individual farm listings to increase capacity for local pickups. The business model is a "scattered site" hatchery and "scattered site" meat processing plant for local pickups. Small farming is an accurate and sustainable model for the future. The meat production model will be helping people use their USDA small grower exemption, where they can legally process 1000 birds per year on-site that they have raised. In this grant, we will buy incubators and pluckers, and farmers can then use those assets to generate additional revenue.
Each farm will use slightly different techniques to market and sell its hatchlings. We will improve local meat production capacity by purchasing pluckers and supporting meat processing training under the USDA small grower exemption. USA Duck Team will expand farmers' market access by building our website to include farmers' listings for ducklings, duck eggs, duck meat, and other value-added products. With more ducklings in the network, our food system will be able to produce more meat, as ducks only take eight weeks to brood out and can be legally processed using the USDA small grower exemption. More backyard producers of meat and eggs will increase local food capacity for the community served.
Objectives
We are testing different marketing methods to sell and promote ducklings. We will be testing farmers' markets, farm stands, art events, Craigslist, Facebook groups, feed store contracts, feed store events, and websites as sales strategies to connect local buyers with local producers of ducklings. We will measure success by the number of Cayuga ducklings sold on each scattered-site farm and in our central headquarters farm. We will calculate the revenue produced per duckling for each miniature hatchery. Our breed promotion and customer training model will support the adoption of more sustainable meat and egg production in our region.
Cooperators
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Research
USA Duck Team supports eight farmers with disabilities to produce Heritage-breed Cayuga ducklings. We are researching different sales and marketing techniques in a scattered-site hatchery model. Outcomes measured are the adoption rate of ducklings and revenue produced per duckling at each location.
The logic behind this choice is to enable every farm to access a larger market than it could have separately. The main hatchery the farms sell to has constant access to high-quality eggs. If a disease breaks out at one hatchery, it doesn’t severely impact the entirety of the project.
This also allows each farm to pursue its own sources of income with extra eggs while having the stability that comes from a steady purchase of its eggs each month. That income stability from the flock means farms can experiment with other ways to make money with their birds. They can slowly build up their own egg market or learn how to hatch and sell on their own, all while getting guidance from the group on what has and has not worked for each individual in their attempts to branch out.
This model has helped empower people who otherwise would not have considered this possible due to the size of their backyard, their overall experience with raising ducks, or their knowledge of breaking into new markets using things they have produced themselves.
Since each farmer is limited in how much they can grow, they are spread out and are in an area with considerable market potential, each can learn from the others without negative competition, creating a community that draws on strengths without feeling financially threatened. There is a steady group of eight farmers in this project, with the possibility of numbers adjusting as new people are given opportunities to be slowly integrated in.
We have supported our farmers with Improved Income or Profitability, Supported their ability to use Accounting Practices and financial measurement tools, and worked with farmers on tax preparation and tax reportin. We have provided support conversations during hatching egg pickups, and Improved Market Opportunities. Our 8 farmers explored different marketing techniques so homesteaders can get started on backyard ducks and meat and egg buyers can find products near their homes.
Educational & Outreach Activities
Participation Summary:
Each weekend a different local event was scheduled with information about raising ducks, how it has been done locally, how others can get involved, and local product displays of meat and eggs. These events included farm store tables, farmers markets, and park events.
By keeping the events casual and generalized, we were able to reach a larger percentage of the population than we would have with specifically duck-centralized events. Individuals who had never considered raising their own ducks, either because of their location, space, or availability, would be allowed to discuss their concerns and interests.
We are expanding the type of events we are looking at attending. This year we were one of 30+ local farms on the Farm Tour that allowed people to come directly to the farm and see how a quarter acre plot can be turned into a duck farm.
By expanding into more events we will be able to reach more people who may not have considered this a possibility.
Learning Outcomes
The main barrier we identified was that many individuals working with heritage poultry were not actually producing a significant number of hatchlings. Although we budgeted for cabinet incubators, not all of our grant partners were ready to hatch 240 eggs at a time. What we did was to work with farmers on smaller incubators, and to support them with supplies such as remote monitoring systems rather than more incubators. Many farmers weren’t ready to grow out or sell the ducklings that a full cabinet incubator would produce. We did find that one of the biggest barriers was brooder space, so the hardware cloth rolls in the budget were strongly appreciated. What we did to increase capacity was to bring in new grant partners and new producers so that we could still expand capacity without stressing out our people who weren’t ready to expand rapidly. A scattered site hatchery has many advantages, since the farmers are not in competition with each other and because disease aren’t shared. The key livestock isn’t at risk like a centralized model. The disadvantages of a scattered site hatchery is simply more drive time and coordination. Also, not all the farmers were cooperative with the program plans, as some farmers dropped out of communication during the grant period and others lost their flocks to predators due to not enough security in their pens. We would recommend that other farmers use ducks instead of chickens for livestock projects. Ducks are more productive than chickens in most situations in America, yet farmer-ranchers continue to do chickens rather than ducks because this is what they know. In China, which has quite a bit of expertise in feeding hungry people, they barely even cultivate chickens. Instead, they produce over 10 billion ducks per year. It is time in America to have Duck Promoters, duck research, and more duck farms.
Project Outcomes
A lot of people really appreciated getting started on ducks as backyard poultry. One homesteader said, "I won't live without ducks now that I have had them as pets and livestock." People appreciated getting information on backyard poultry production and liked getting good quality hatchlings to get started. Our Cayugas are bigger and greener than most hatchery stock so their startup efforts were more productive.