Polyface Farm Summer Internship: Week Eleven

Reader Contribution by Kristen Kilfoyle
Published on September 8, 2014
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Monday, August 11th

My morning chore this week was to move the broiler shelters. The moving of the shelters went very well aside from that the birds didn’t seem to want to move. The way the Polyface shelters are set up is that one side of the pen is poultry wire and the other side is enclosed. The birds generally like to move towards light, so pulling the shelter from the poultry wire end is generally pretty easy and the birds move along with you. This week, due to the way the shelters are situated, we were pulling from the enclosed end so the birds would need to move towards the darker end, which they don’t usually like to do. The way to remedy this is to have someone else with you on the other side of the structure to help move the birds along. If there is nobody available, you just have to move the shelter very slowly. Fortunately, this wee I was paired with Erik, one of my fellow interns, as I was the mover and he was in charge of feeding and watering the birds after they were moved. I liked having him there, as the moving went along much faster.

The rest of the day was spent stacking wood, doing some work in the freezer trailers Polyface stores their inventory in and setting up a spigot on the water system upgrade Eric, our Apprentice Manager, and Daniel Salatin have been working on.

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