Project Overview
Using Portable Chicken Farming to Improve Home Vegetable Garden
Commodities
- Vegetables: cabbages, cucurbits, eggplant, onions, tomatoes
- Additional Plants: herbs
- Animals: poultry
Practices
- Animal Production: animal protection and health, pasture fertility, grazing - rotational, housing
- Crop Production: organic fertilizers
- Education and Training: demonstration, extension, farmer to farmer
- Farm Business Management: whole farm planning, new enterprise development, value added
- Production Systems: agroecosystems, holistic management, integrated crop and livestock systems
- Soil Management: soil analysis, composting, organic matter
- Sustainable Communities: sustainability measures
Proposal summary:
For health reasons, Lusia Leofili would like to see her family eat more vegetables. But vegetables in local stores are often too expensive, mainly because they’re imported. Leofili, who raises bananas and 10-15 chickens, will use her Western SARE grant to explore ways to raise more chickens in portable pens. Not only would this method increase the number of chickens for home use, she could grow vegetables on the newly fertilized ground. Her portable 6-foot by 8-foot pen, built on wheels, will have slatted floors so manure can drop through to the ground but the eggs cannot. She will move the pen every other week or monthly, leaving the ground beneath fallow for two weeks, after which she will plant tomatoes, eggplant, spinach, Chinese cabbage, cucumber, spring onions and herbs.
