Poultry-Centered Regenerative Agriculture at Thunder Valley CDC

Hello, my name is Nick Hernandez and I’m
the director of the food sovereignty initiative for Thunder Valley CDC. Today, we had the opportunity to partner with Main Street Project, in planting two hundred hazelnut trees here in the educational demonstration regenerative
farm. Right now, we have a total of five hundred and seventy-five egg-laying
Rhode Island Reds that are in the process of laying eggs. We basically
collect about twenty five dozen eggs a day and we are creating an egg market.
We will soon be able to take it to our local grocery stores, convenience stores,
and out to our local membership, our tribal memberships. We’re looking to start
selling our eggs at the stores in creation of a local food economy so that
we can put a nutritious fresh variety and a locally produced egg on the plates of
our youth and families. We saw the soil come from a clay, sandy soil to basically a vibrant looser soil with the introduction of the chickens to the farm
into our paddock system. The soil has changed dramatically where it’s
not so… basically not so concrete but a richer, darker soil that has a lot of moisture and a lot of worms that shows lot of
growth and a lot of regeneration inside of it since the introduction of the
chickens. What we did today is we integrated a new species into our lands here, to partake in rebuilding our soil and providing them a food source for our
membership, and the reason why we we went with the hazelnut is for it’s food
variety – but also for its ability to provide a canopy for the chickens from
the hot heat but also from the predators in the sky. The system that
we’re creating is a scalable system. With Thunder Valley CDC our focus to
create a viable food system. We basically ship in ninety nine percent of our food
on to the reservation. And to a culture of people who thrived once before, we felt that this system is much needed, but this is also a
system that we that we understand in relationship to the trees, and
relationship to the water, to the soil, and to the animals. So we want to we want to
reverse those statistics reverse those ideas and then and make
something that’s positive – that we control, that we have a say in and that will
help us to create food sovereignty here on the Pine Ridge Reservation