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Rosa Shareef
Sumral, Mississippi
SUMMARY
 Pastured
poultry, goats and sheep on 10 acres
Member
of an 84-acre religious community dedicated to agriculture and
rural life
BACKGROUND
To learn more about
raising poultry on pasture, Rosa and Alvin Shareef participated in a SARE grant
project headed by Heifer Project International. Funded to help southern farm-ers
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 two permanent, five-acre pastures, with smaller pad-docks defined
with electric fencing. To minimize disease potential, she rotates her poul-try
around one five-acre plot for a year, 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 eight weeks at about $3, so profits are roughly $3. Multiplied
by 100 birds per month, monthly profits hover around $300.
The family raises about
50 turkeys a year for Thanksgiving sales. At 20 pounds each, they are real money-makers.
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 com-munity, New Medinah, planned to have minimal nega-tive
impact on the environ- ment. All members of the com-munity live in a concentrated
section of the property that sur-rounds a school for the commu-nity's children.
That leaves lots of open space for gardens, pas-tures 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 with-in your group, everyone knows how it was raised,"
Shareef says.
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