Hay Creek Heritage Farms is a husband-and-wife run farm dedicated to conserving and promoting sustainably raised, heritage livestock breeds and heirloom vegetables. Our animals are raised with care and we practice farming using organic methods. We offer a variety of produce, cut flowers, pasture-raised duck, chicken and goose eggs, and heritage turkey, chicken, duck, and goose through our CSA program, which serves around 60 families, at the Saturday Eastern Market in Detroit and the Tuesday  Ypsilanti Downtown Farmers Market. We run the farm ourselves with a 2 CSA workshares and 1 volunteer, so we are consistently looking at ways to increase efficiency and save time.

Our pasture-raised birds have access to 6+ acres to forage, however, we supplement that with a custom feed blend that is hand mixed by us on the farm. We use around 300-350 pounds of feed per day, comprised of local, non-GMO grains that we lacto-ferment in totes, field peas which we sprout, plus with organic vitamins, and sunflower seeds.  While this feed regimen balances our desire for a nutritious, non-GMO feed at a low cost, it requires a great deal of manual labor.  An industrial mixer would allow us to mix 1500 pounds of food at once, significantly reducing our time and effort.

This mixer would also allow us to reduce time and labor in seed starting and fertilization. Currently, we hand mix an estimated 30,000 lbs of organic seed starting mix per year to create the optimal medium for our vegetable and flower seeds. We test our soil yearly, and amend as needed in order to ensure the correct balance of nutrients for our crops. We manually mix an average of 10,000 lbs of fertilizer and soil amendments per year to apply to our fields. An auger mixer would significantly reduce our manual labor and allow us to expand poultry flocks and crop production, in order to have more eggs, produce, and flowers available for customers.