Hi y’all, it’s Michael Gault here, your Smyly Farmer.

Farming is hard, and farming through a disaster seems to be much, much harder—emotionally, mentally, and physically.

After freezing temperatures for days on end in January, to a national scare of Avian Influenza in February affecting supply chains and working our farm harder than ever before, here we are in March starting off our first two meat batches of the year at a complete loss.

Our brooder caught fire this past week after what appears to be an extension cord melting due to it not being able to handle the amount of energy output we were running to heat our brooder.

We have been working to scale our farm effectively over the years by increasing our batch sizes, with aims to become more profitable, if that’s already not a problem within itself in farming. This scaling of our farm has created greater and greater risk as more cost is invested in infrastructure, inputs, as well as our time/labor.

Last summer in 2024, it was our transmission going out on the way back from PA with 1800 birds, some of which weren’t even ours, as we were being paid to pick them up for a fellow farmer friend. That was also about the biggest hit we had taken for a loss to date, having to get a completely rebuilt transmission in our only farmer’s market/delivery vehicle. We were in shock. To say I have PTSD from transporting live poultry now is true… it’s something I will have to deal with every time we go get birds.

It goes to show the physiological strain farm accidents have on a farmer.

As I’ve grown as a farmer, the only path forward is to rebuild.

Working to put the correct infrastructure in place to have a better production space, minimizing the risk of loss through accidents such as our brooder catching fire, is our main goal.

These funds are to help us secure a brooder that is a converted shipping container, so that more infrastructure that is able to maintain and keep the temperatures regulated better; which is what we need for best broiler chick production.

We are fundraising to rebuild our farm infrastructure after a devastating brooder fire.

Your support will help us secure a converted shipping container brooder to ensure better temperature regulation and safer production for our broiler chicks.