An Egg a Day - A Note from the Farmer

Many of you know that Hannah and I started our journey in Hatit last February. I wanted to write you today to explain one of our first agriculture project that will be launched this week. Over the past 5 months we have been working on providing chicken coops for the families on the hill through the help and support of churches and team members. The coops were designed to be a mobile coop know as a chicken tractor. A chicken tractor is a small bottomless coop that can be moved around the garden. By moving the coop as needed the chickens can eat fresh grass and bugs in the garden and can work and fertilize the soil for the gardener. In addition, moving the coops helps offset the cost of feed even though feed will be available for purchase through our organization. Each coop has 2 nesting boxes, a perch, an access door, an egg collection door, and a double layered vented roof that covers the nesting boxes and provides shade underneath.

 Each family will have the opportunity to enter into a lease purchase agreement for 1 year to own 6 laying hens and 1 coop. The agreement was set up as a sustainable project that provides each family with eggs among other things. Each hen lays about one egg a day providing a family with the potential to have 42 eggs each week for food and sale if they desire to do so. I felt that a 1 year agreement is critical in making the project sustainable. By having each family enter into a contract they will be able to take pride in ownership, learn responsibility and care of the hens, and gain understanding of how a small business operates through buying feed and learning to sell eggs for more that the cost of the feed. The contract will also be a way to monitor the chickens and coops for care. By having contingencies in the contract, the family will have to understand that they cannot eat or neglect the chickens or they may face a penalty and even lose the hens and coop to another willing family. Once the 1 year contract is over, they will have full ownership of the coop and hens. Hopefully they will see the benefits at this point and will continue to have the hens for producing eggs for eating and sale.

The payment process will work through designating a person on the hill to collect 10 eggs each week for 52 weeks from each of the families. The 10 eggs collect will be used to create a sale opportunity for 1 to two ladies to sale in the market place. The money made from the sale of the eggs will do so much to not only give the ladies a job but also to study the egg market prior to setting up a larger poultry business that has the potential to provide food, jobs, and to be the first locally supported operation of the hope center.

Please keep us in your prayers as we launch this project. Please pray
* the families will understand the intent and need for the contract
* the hens will stay healthy and be a continued help to the families.
* God will give us wisdom and support as we continue to grow in the poultry business.

Also, please give God praise as he is the one that does it all and brought this project into existence. To Him be the Glory.

In addition we have been eating the harvest from the gardens. The gardens are a trial run and on a small scale but ideally will be much larger for the seasons in the future as will the yielded crops. In the mean time we are all enjoying okra, tomatoes, eggplant, beans, cantelope, watermelon, spinach, arugula, beets and cucumbers.

The grounds at the Hope Center continue to become greener after I, with the help of a team, planted more than 80 trees. The maintenance of the trees and plants without an easy water source and a lack of rain continues to be challenging. We are in the process of looking to increase water access so that the trees outside of the Hope Center will have a better likelihood of surviving the heat.

Thank you for all of your prayers and support. I look forward to updating you more as projects develop and evolve.