Happy Chickens for Fiji Food & Climate Emergency!

Greetings to all our donors and circle of interest. 

News:  We have made real progress with upgrading our breeding pens in order to pass Biosecurity requirements for approval to send the chicks to Vanuatu.  The improvements are also making the pens much safer for trainees and the many children who "help" with the feeding and egg gathering!  The work, funded by a small grant from Ford Motors, was overdue.  The pens were unsafe because of a large colony of rats that had created a maze of burrows under the pen's dirt floors.  The rats had evaded all attempts at control.  I contracted the rat-borne disease leptospirosis, and our neighbor died of the disease a few years back.  We have now cemented the chicken house floors and sealed off the labrinth of rat tunnels.... and without their hiding places the rats have either died or have moved out!  The mistake of allowing left over feed to remain in the pens over night has also been corrected, so future rat problems will be kept to a minimum.  Once Biosecurity gives us the green light, the Vanuatu work will commence, which should be in late July. 

In the mean time here in Fiji we have begun the groundwork for a Happy Chicken workshop to take place in Votua Village on Fiji's Coral Coast, where the community has set aside a large reef area as a communty managed no-fishing conservation area.  Luisa, the wife of the village chief, is one of our most active Happy Chicken participants, and we envision a woman-focused project.  We will provide mobile rearing pens and training support, and the women will purchase the chicks at cost, and will build (with our input) the small chicken houses from local materials.  As the village is a major coconut producing area, training in virgin coconut oil production will also be conducted, with the waste coconut serving as a major feed for the chickens.     

Chicken News:  Summer vacation is over!  The summer molt, the two month period where the hens "go on vacation"- stop laying to rest and repair their bodies and change their feathers, started in late February and ended in early May.  We began setting eggs into the incubator just three weeks ago, and our first hatch took place this week. We sold nine dozen chicks to the community at cost in the Sigatoka Market on Saturday.  The hatch rate this time was only 60%, but we have since purchased a new humidity monitor.  We then discovered that the humidity was far too low in the incubator, and so we have been able to add pans of water and increase the humidity to the required 50%.  We have also added a hatcher, with a humidity of 75%, and so with better control of the incubation and hatching process we expect that subsequent hatches will be much improved. Lessons learned- don't trust faulty gages!    

Lastly, the UK NGO Just World Partnerships will be supporting me with a stipend this year, allowing full time focus on the Happy Chicken work.  We can assure you that all of the funds donated will go towards actual project costs, not personnel.

Thanks again for your part in making this work an emerging and growing success,

Austin Bowden-Kerby