Rosa Shareef - Sumral,
Mississippi
To learn more about raising poultry on pasture,
Rosa and Alvin Shareef participated in a
Sustainable Agriculture Research Education
(SARE) grant project headed by Heifer Project
International. Funded to help southern farmers
with the "nuts and bolts" of alternative
poultry systems, Heifer staff organized hands-on
training sessions and provided start-up funds
and processing equipment.
"I'm a city girl raised in New Jersey," Rosa
Shareef says. "My husband was born in
Mississippi and raised in Chicago, so we
needed as much education as we could get."
Shareef subdivided her 10 acres into 2 permanent,
5-acre pastures, with smaller paddocks defined
with electric fencing. To minimize disease
potential, she rotates her poultry around
one five-acre plot for a year and then switches
them to the other plot for a year. The goats
and sheep then rotate through the plot just
vacated by poultry.
Using a simple design, the Shareefs made
their own cages, which are enclosed with
chicken wire and rest on wheels. They keep
50 to 95 chickens in each pen, moving it
daily. The chickens harvest their own grass,
bugs and worms, but the Shareefs also supplement
their diet with a high-protein poultry feed.
Profitability
Next to Alvin's off-farm job as a teacher,
the family's most dependable source of income
is the sale of their pastured broilers. They
process about 100 chickens per month, in
keeping with state regulations, at an average
weight of about 4 pounds at $1.50 per pound.
Shareef calculates the cost of raising one
of her broilers to an age of 8 weeks at about
$3, so her profits are roughly $3. At 100
birds, monthly profits hover around $300.
The family raises about 50 turkeys a year
for Thanksgiving sales. At 20 pounds each,
they are real moneymakers. Shareef also produces
20 meat goats annually, sold primarily to
area Muslims who slaughter them for religious
ceremonies.
In all, livestock sales contribute about
10 percent of their household income. "Good
product at a good price tends to sell itself," Shareef
says. "All I have to do is keep working
to make more of it."
Environmental Strategies
Founders of the religious community, New
Medinah, planned to have minimal negative
impact on the environment. All members of
the community live in a concentrated section
of the property that surrounds a school for
the community's children. That leaves lots
of open space for gardens, pastures, and
woodlots.
The pastured animals deposit lots of fertilizing
manure, and because the different grazers
select different grasses and are moved daily,
they add vigor to the pastures, Shareef says.
That's even during drought.
Community, Outreach, Quality of Life
To help young people, Shareef teaches kids
in a community garden. Members of New Medinah
also help each other grow their goat herds
in a "pass-on" program by giving
each other animals after their goats produce
offspring.
"By using livestock raised within your
group, everyone knows how it was raised," Shareef
says.
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