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Rosa Shareef (right) plans
to expand her processing operation to about 1,000 birds per
month.
Photo by Heifer Project Intnl. |
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Rosa
Shareef
Sumrall, Mississippi
Updated in 2005
Summary of Operation
Pastured poultry, goats and sheep on 10 acres
Management-intensive grazing
Member of an 84-acre religious community dedicated to agriculture
and rural life
Problem Addressed
Desire for rural living. Rosa
Shareef, her husband, Alvin, and their children are members of a
religious community that established New Medinah so they could live
and work in a rural place. From Chicago and other large cities,
most members had little direct experience with agriculture but felt
a strong desire to earn their livelihoods with their hands and raise
their families in rural America.
The Shareefs opted for chicken production, thinking poultry meat
and eggs would complement the other enterprises. They have since
expanded into sheep and goat production.
New Medinah’s 84 acres were carved from a larger farm. The
group first purchased 64 acres in 1987, then added 20 adjacent acres
several years later. Prior to the purchases, the whole plot had
been used as cattle pasture.
New Medinah lies in Marion County in south Mississippi, about an
hour due west of Hattiesburg and just east of the Pearl River. Its
rolling hills grow steamy hot in the long summer, providing a long
growing season. Many small row crop farms in the area have given
way in recent years to cattle and cash timber operations.
To learn more about raising poultry on pasture, the Shareefs participated
in a SARE grant project headed by Heifer Project International.
Funded to help southern farmers with the “nuts and bolts”
of alternative poultry systems, Heifer organized hands-on training
sessions, offered start-up funds and provided small-scale processing
equipment.
The Shareefs learned a lot at a three-day seminar hosted by Joel
Salatin, Virginia’s authority on raising livestock on pasture.
Salatin has written well-regarded books and articles about the considerations
and the moneymaking potential of pastured poultry, and conducts
frequent seminars at his farm in southeastern Virginia. He has spoken
at conferences and farmer forums throughout the country to spread
information about this alternative system. In his three-day poultry
seminar, he offers information on everything from construction of
the portable chicken cages to processing to bookkeeping, and the
Shareefs felt reassured after participating in it.
“I’m a city girl raised in New Jersey,” Rosa
Shareef says. “My husband was born in Mississippi and raised
in Chicago, so we needed as much education as we could get.”
Focal Point of Operation —
Pastured poultry
The Shareefs are one of four New Medinah families raising poultry
on pastures. The poultry includes Cornish Cross chickens for their
meat, broad-breasted white turkeys, and Rhode Island Red chickens
for their eggs. The Asian population in and around Hattiesburg prefer
her older egg-layers, Shareef says.
Like all other community members, the Shareefs practice rotational
grazing with their poultry and other animals. The Shareefs’
10 acres are subdivided into two permanent, five-acre pastures with
smaller paddocks defined with electric fencing. To minimize the
possibility of disease, she rotates her poultry around one five-acre
plot for a year, then switches them to the other plot for a year.
The goats and sheep then rotate through the plot just vacated by
poultry.
Using a simple plan designed by Joel Salatin, the Shareefs made
cages that are supported by a 12 x 12 feet wood frame, enclosed
with chicken wire and rest on wheels. They keep 50 to 95 chickens
in each pen, moving it daily. The chickens harvest their own grass,
bugs and worms, but the Shareefs also supplement their diet with
a high-protein poultry feed.
Though New Medinah is a community made up of people of the same
faith, it is not a commune where all the work is shared. Shareef
says each family was responsible at the start for determining what
types of enterprises they preferred, and each family is expected
to support itself. At processing time, her husband and her children
are there to help kill, clean and package the 95 or more chickens
they can butcher in a typical day.
The Shareefs maintain their own customer base, and market their
eggs and poultry under their own label.
Economics and Profitability
Diversity is the watchword around the Shareef household. They have
income from a number of different sources, although they hope to
make enough of an income off their agricultural efforts to make
that their primary occupation. Currently, Alvin teaches at a junior
college in Hattiesburg, although they plan for him to quit teaching
computer courses to participate full time on the farm.
Their other most dependable source of income is the sale of their
pastured broilers, though their efforts in this area have been hampered
by weather and other setbacks. They produce about 100 chickens per
month.
Still, Rosa says, the potential is there, and if they can get back
to more normal weather, or when they can find the time and money
to construct shading structures, they will be back on track to processing
a higher number. When they do, they expect an average monthly income
of between $5,000 and $6,000. That’s the average weight of
their chickens (3.5 to 4 pounds) multiplied by a price of $1.50
per pound.
Shareef calculates the cost of raising one of her broilers to an
age of eight weeks is about $3, so the profit she makes from selling
each bird at the average weight is roughly $2.25. Multiplied by
her expected sales of 1,000 birds per month, that’s a monthly
profit of $2,250.
In addition, the Shareefs raise 50 turkeys each year, all of which
are currently processed and sold just before Thanksgiving.
“Those are the real money-makers,” Shareef says. “I
ask the same price per pound as I get for the chickens, but my average
turkey dresses out at more than 20 pounds, so there’s more
profit even if it takes longer to raise turkeys and they eat more.”
Rounding out the income picture are the sales of eggs, watermelons,
spring and fall greens, any extra produce from the family garden,
as well as lamb, mutton, and meat goats. Shareef produces 20 goats
annually, primarily to area Muslims who slaughter them for religious
ceremonies.
All of their sales come through word of mouth and through repeat
customers. Shareef spends no money on advertising, nor does she
need to leave the farm to peddle her product. Many of Alvin’s
students have become repeat customers — and not because they
hope to curry favor from him, Shareef says.
“Good product at a good price tends to sell itself,”
she says. “All I have to do is keep working to make more of
it.”
Environmental Benefits
New Medinah was planned to have minimal negative impact on the environment.
All members of the community live in a concentrated section of the
property that surrounds a school for the community’s children.
That leaves lots of open space for gardens, pastures and woodlots.
The pastured animals deposit lots of fertilizing manure, and because
they tend to select different grasses and are moved daily, they
have only added vigor to the pastures, Shareef says. That’s
even during a protracted drought.
Community and Quality of Life Benefits
Members of New Medinah help each other build their goat herds in
a “pass-on” program by giving each other some of their
goats’ offspring. “By using livestock raised within
your group, everyone knows how it was raised,” Shareef says.
New Medinah members were sensitive to the wariness and outright
suspicion among many residents of Marion County when they announced
their plans to build a community there. Some even circulated petitions
to keep them out. However, in the nearly 20 years since, both groups
have reached out and established warm bonds with one another, Shareef
says.
Those efforts now include programs that expose young children to
the care and feeding of horses, small engine repair and cultivating
seedlings in a greenhouse. While managed exclusively by New Medinah
members, the programs remain open to all children in the county.
“A lot of the same people who didn’t want us here now
buy a lot of good food from us, so I think each side has shown we
can be good neighbors,” says Shareef, who teaches youths in
a community garden.
Transition Advice
“Think big but start small,” Shareef says without hesitation.
“If you’re thinking about pastured poultry that you
process at home the way we do, make sure you visit someone who does
that on processing day and help out. If you don’t enjoy that
part of the job, my advice is that you don’t even try it,
because that’s a big part of raising birds.”
The Future
The Shareefs’ foremost goal is to reach the point of processing
an average of 1,000 chickens each month. They are certain the market
is there, and say they just need the time and budget to attend to
all the details involved in such an expansion.
Shareef says the profitability of raising turkeys is so appealing
she’s going to expand beyond producing only traditional Thanksgiving
birds to take advantage of the sales potential at Christmas and
Easter, too.
 Profile written by David Mudd
For more information:
Rosa Shareef
New Medinah Community
15 Al-Quddus Road
Sumrall, MS 39482
(601) 736-0136
Rosashareef@hotmail.com
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