Happy Chickens for Fiji Cyclone Disaster Hit Areas

It has been a hot and very wet summer here in Fiji in the southern hemisphere at the Happy Chicken farm, and the hens are have been on their annual "vacation", not laying eggs so that they will have the resources to change their feathers for new ones (= molting).  We closed the hatchery for two months and have just begun to set eggs in the incubators again, as the weather is finally cooler and the hens are gettting back to work laying their precious eggs.  

News from Koro Islnd in the Cyclone Winston disaster area:

We sent an incubator to the Nabasovi Women's Group in January along with 90 fertile eggs- which they successfully hatched, and so we sent a second lot of eggs in February, which they also hatched. But in March we unfiortunately did not have enough eggs to send. However, the oldest hens will begin laying in June, and they have retained 20 of the chickens, which will soon become the new breeding flock!  The woman's cooperative ageed to turn the incubator over to Senirosi Talei, "Bu Seini", who has good business sense, as she successfully runs the village 'canteen'.  Seinirosi will now receive special support to create her own hatchey business, hatching chicks monthly on behalf of the nearby villages.

Thea, the US Peace Corps volunteer supporting the project, will be travelling to Suva soon, to purchase school supplies on behalf of the community, and we will send back with her on th boat 90 fertile eggs for the incubator, starter feed for the chicks, supplemental feed for the breeding flock, and more cuttings of edible feed plants. 

With the first lots of chickens sent to Koro, we had to also send many bags of feed, as the vegetation was so badly damaged that the chickens could find little to eat from the land. That was costly and burned up most of the donations, but it was desperate times.  Now local chicken feeds are becoming more available, with coconuts beginning to bear again, and mornina cuttings which we sent up with the trainees nearly two years ago, have grown into trees whose leaves make excellent feed when combined with coconut and cassava roots. 

Our forging chickens at the farm recently taught us an additional wild plant, which the chickens absolutely love to eat- 'costus' or 'crepe ginger', which turns out to be edible for humans as well- see the photo below. We will now include this plant in the workshops, with one happening at the farm next week for a group of young men from Beqa Island

As local capacity and knowledge of the Happy Chicken methods spreads and increases on Koro, we may need to send an additional incubator to Bu Seine (in red in the photo below), in order to meet the needs of the island's fourteen villages. 

Vinaka valkalevu- thank you SO much to the donors and to our helper Thea, and of course to the Nabasovi Women's group for making this all possible.

Communities continue to recover from the horrific cyclone disaster, and while some families continue to live in tents, and some classrooms at the schools continue to operate from tents, the rebuilding process is going well.  However, the vegetation and traditional agroforests are recovering more slowly, as so many of the breadfruit and coconut and banana trees fell, but fortunately the bananas have already come back, and some of the surviving coconut trees have begun producing as well.  Sweet potatoes are being produced in abundance, as is cassava. Full recovery will take another year or two. 

The chickens we sent out with the workshop participants last year are laying eggs as well, mostly relying on foraging and on waste food.  Communities have been taught how to prepare wild plants and to mix Morniga leaves with the chicken feed, but for now the chickens must be kept at low densities in each community, until such time as the coconut trees begin bearing heavily again, with the ideal chicken diet being coconut, morniga, and cassava, with supplemental foraging.

We have thus far sent out incubators to three communities affected by the disaster, with the 90-egg, 40 watt machines operating on solar power.  Unfortunately, communities without access to solar power have been left out, and so we are looking into a simple low cost solar system as a solution, but in the mean time the villages with solar power are hatching chicks on behalf of the other communities. 

The chicks are been hatching very successfully, and every month we are sending additional fertile eggs by boat for the community to incubate. The children help by digging worms and if an egg is infertile, it is boiled and crushed to feed the newborn chicks.  A new excitement occurs with each new hatch, especially attracting the children, who learn to gently hold the chicks and to feed and give then fresh water regularly.   

So we are very happy to report that hope has now replaced desperation, and the baby chicks are very much a part of that hope for a new day and for a better future. 

Thanks so much for being part of this effort.