ARI has chickens, goats, and pigs. Scott has been assigned to chickens then pigs, while Chrys has been assigned to chickens then goats. This means that during food life work (FLW) each weekday we feed, water, and clean the animals from 7-8AM and 4-5PM. On Saturday we only have FLW in the morning, and the rest of the weekend people are assigned one more FLW slots to spread the work around while ensuring the animals are tended to.
The goats are pretty much everyone’s favorites. They are kind of cute, relatively clean, and have their own personalities.
There are only six goats, so they are easy to maintain. They also are the only animals with names (after characters in the movie Frozen). And they provide milk for supper.
Pigs are next on the list. The small ones also are kind of cute, but they get less cute as they get bigger, and the big ones are kind of scary. The biggest weigh 135kg (about 300 pounds), so get out of the way if they are moving in your direction. We have about 50-60 pigs of all sizes, although that number will change any day because one of the sows is about to have piglets.
And of course they produce a lot of manure. Not so fun. But we use that manure to produce methane gas, compost, and fertilizer, among other things. We also eat a lot of pork at ARI, so thank you pigs.
It is hard have much affection for the chickens. Most of the chickens are “layers” – we eat a lot of their eggs and sell the rest. Fewer are “broilers” – raised for meat. There are about 200 chickens.
Actually feeding and watering the chickens is not so bad. But the mixing room, where we mix what eventually gets fed to the chickens, is the least appealing spot on the ARI campus. We will not go into any more detail, but here is a video glimpse.
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