Her Story
About Amy
I wake up every morning and go out to take care of chickens, gather eggs, and fill incubators. I move baby chicks to brooders, and as they get bigger, we move them into bigger pens. There's mucking pens, cleaning pens, raking pens. In between is sales and service. We do home visits to check on people's flocks, checking their overall health. A lot of the phone calls that come in are general questions - if they have a problem, something's going on, whether it be mites, or a rooster spending too much time on a hen, or they've got a sick bird. We've gone as far as casting ducks' legs. It's something new every day, I promise you. It's never the same. We've had to amputate a leg on another chicken, we have casted a duck's leg. I had a turkey once that flew up on top of a coop and cut its breast wide open on the sheet metal, and so we stitched her up, and she's doing fine. Every day brings some kind of new adventure when it comes to animals. I deliver over 100 dozen eggs a week on routes to personal home deliveries, and then I've got a couple of businesses that we deliver to. As far as the chickens go, we sell chicks, and then we sell a lot of pullet layers. And then I sell turkeys, quail and quail eggs, and ducks and ducklings. We had peacocks last year, and we lost our peacocks in the July floods. We lost a lot of birds in the July flood, but we're rebuilding that back up, so we're back up to chickens, ducks, quail, guineas, and turkeys.
Her Interview
Ten minutes with Amy
01What do you attribute your success to?
I attribute my success to hard work and dedication. That's really what it comes down to for me.
02What are the biggest challenges or opportunities in your field right now?
At this moment, things have been a little slower this year, but I think that's an economic challenge. Last year was insanely crazy, and this year has been a lot calmer and slower. Everybody in my field prepared for what we dealt with last year, and then it didn't hit like that this year. So we're all still dealing with the challenge of having more birds in our pens than what we normally would - overcrowding. But it's been more of an economic impact to us. My biggest challenge was that flood. We lost over 300 and some birds to the flood. To come back from that and think, okay, we're gonna be okay, and to get all of our breeders and stuff like that back, and to get birds brought in that we were gonna be able to sell for the spring, and then have a very slow spring, has been a real challenge for us. Between spending the year rebuilding and getting prepared for a season that wasn't what we thought it would be, it's been a real economic challenge. On the opportunities side, there's always opportunities. There's opportunity for expansion and growth still as far as our farm goes. As far as the whole industry goes, I think there's a huge, huge market for local farm-produced eggs. I can't meet the demand of what there is for the current market. If anybody was wanting to expand something, I would tell them to expand their egg production. That would be the first thing, if they're wanting to grow. Start by expanding your egg production, because you make more off the eggs than you do off the chicken, all day long. Any farm-fresh product that you can provide nutritionally for the public is in very high demand right now. I would tell them to start marketing your eggs and expand your egg market, because it's there. And then if you want to go past that, I would definitely say provide meat. Even people that are selling farm fresh fruit and vegetables at farmers markets are doing so much better this year than they have in previous years. There's a huge market for it right now.
03What values are most important to you in your work and personal life?
Honesty is a big one for me. I say God, community, and family. I mean, those are the most important things to me.
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