Rachael Ferber

Greetings!
We have a smallish layer flock (100 hens) with mixed heritage, hybrid and crossbred birds that we rotationally graze with an eggmobile.
I just love hatching chicks under broody hens and watching them grow.  It's totally complicated, I have many small houses that I move around to keep the moms happy.  I don't let them try to incubate the eggs when they are with the rest of the flock because that usually goes poorly.  We raise them in a series of yards until they can join the main flock.  I generally buy one batch of chicks in the spring from a hatchery and transplant them under broodies, but the rest of the year I try to set our own fertile eggs.
This year is going awesome, I've hatched 50 chicks in addition to the 25 I bought from Cackle.  We have lost some, as often happens, but we haven't used any electric heat!  We are off grid and don't really have the juice for that, so we have a lot of incentive to make it work without a heat lamp.
It takes a bit of work and management, so it has me wondering: how many chicks/clutches do folks raise under natural mothers?  Who is totally rocking it and raising all their replacements without artificial brooding?  How many small houses does that take, or what is the system?!
Cheers,
Mae

Hey Tyler,
I like the sound of gift economies a lot. I've got a book about gift culture that I'm working on and I will post my reflections on how I think that may or may not work for our situation here. I think there is a desire for these official positions to be handled/hired/payed/evaluated/etc. in a way that is really transparent and consistent and that would work for when we need to hire people "off-farm" for a position. For the most part people hired here for ongoing positions feel as though they are a part of our community, but we are in the situation right now of needing to hire an accountant and not having any applicants from within the ecovillage and we will likely need to hire someone who is a friend, but not a member. I don't know if a gift economy would work well for that, although there are subcommunities here who use that style and like it very much. I'll read up on it!

Hey all,
I live in an ecovillage and serve on the HR committee and we are realizing that now would be a good time to really look at the economic system we are using internally here and decide if it is what we want or if it is what happened because it's what we know from the outside culture. I am really interested in exploring some alternative economies and bringing them to our next meeting but I don't seem to know where to start. I had thought there was something called a living wage that depended on how much you needed, so poor people with kids would get more than more established folks or single people for the same job. I couldn't find anything about this on wikipedia and I don't know if it is real. I am also interested in gift economies? What we are looking at is that we already have a super awesome and vibrant alternative currency which we can use for everything, including, rent, food, use of common spaces/internet/electric/water, childcare, healthcare, etc. There is also a really strong informal barterering network that works great and gets a lot of people's needs met. I know a family who got their homebirth with a CPM paid for with a large amount of firewood chopping! What we are struggling with is how to pay people who work for the official nonprofit and the land trust that owns the land (the official corporations that must be legally compliant and that run the general community stuff. Path mulching, accounting, etc.) We are building a huge new community building and need to figure out how to hire and pay people to work on it. We've already decided that some people will get paid more, the project manager for example will get 3x our community base wage. I am interestesd in figuring out a way to pay people that feels good to folks who work outside the community and bring in US dollars to keep this thing running, and is helpful for folks who don't have outside income and enables people to make it work here.