Help Hay Creek Heritage Farms Scale Up with a Mixer!

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.

Once the funds are raised, we’ll place our order for the auger mixer bucket and the rear hydraulic kit that allows our tractor to power the mixer. When the equipment arrives, we’ll hook it up and start mixing!

We often find ourselves selling out of high-demand products, like chicken eggs, with our CSA and markets.  We raise our animals and produce in a way we truly believe in – using sustainable, humane methods to produce a quality product for our customers. We custom blend our poultry food, seed starting mix, and fertilizer because we want to control the quality of ingredients and provide the best possible nutrition, while keeping costs in check. An auger mixer will permit us to greatly increase our efficiency by eliminating hours of hand mixing, while staying true to our mission. This will be key in allowing us to expand our flocks and fields to provide more eggs, produce and flowers for our community!