USA Duck Team Scattered-Site Hatchery

Commodities

• Fruits: berries (brambles), cherries, figs, grapes, paw-paws, persimmon
• Animals: poultry
• Animal Products: eggs, meat

Practices

• Animal Production: animal protection and health, feed/forage, genetics, housing, livestock breeding, manure management, meat processing, meat processing facilities, meat product quality/safety, watering systems
• Crop Production: continuous cropping, double cropping, fertigation, food processing facilities/community kitchens, food product quality/safety, no-till, silvopasture, terraces, water storage
• Education and Training: farmer to farmer, mentoring, networking, on-farm/ranch research, participatory research
• Farm Business Management: agricultural finance, agritourism, farm-to-institution, farmers' markets/farm stands, grant making, whole farm planning
• Natural Resources/Environment: biodiversity, grass waterways, hedges - woody, soil stabilization, wetlands
• Production Systems: integrated crop and livestock systems, permaculture
• Sustainable Communities: food hubs, leadership development, local and regional food systems, new business opportunities, quality of life, social capital, social networks, sustainability measures, urban agriculture, urban/rural integration, values-based supply chains

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 residents 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 opportunities 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 area 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.