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May 18, 2025

Hi, my name is William. Here at Bright Hope Farm we have maintained the ecological health of our streams for over four years. The health of the streams is a good indicator of the health of the rest of our farm. Recently, I did found three species in a stream on our farm.

  • Yellow fin shiners, stonerollers, and creek chubs

We love raising chickens, we’ve been raising laying hens now for nearly twenty years. Who knows how many chicken coops, brooders, and mobile tractors we have used in that time. Many made out of repurposed materials that we have collected ove rthe years. When we started our farm here in Clarkesville, we built a coop here by the house to protect them from coyotes, and we have kept improving it. This year we remodedeld the coop, we used clear plexiglass to sheild our girls from wind and rain while maximizing the light entering the coop. We also added rool away nest boxes which we also had never tried. We built a stae of the ark rool away nest box and it has worked great. We hateched ad raised hundreds of pullets which we used to help other families start thier own flocks. Our flock consists of a wide variety of breeds that have led to some beautiful and interesting combinations, some of our our favorite breeds include Domieckers, Ayam Cemanis, Black Australorps, Speckeled Sussex, Cream Legbars, Black and aRwed stars, Black copper MQransa, Silver and Golden laced Wayendots, Barred Rocks, White Leghorns, Americaunas, we also have experimented with dual purpose birds that specialize infree ranging like the Pioneer, Red Ranger, Buff Orpoington, Rhode Island Red amnd Bielefelder.
Rabbitat

a year ago we started making rabbitat. rabbitat is brush piled up to provied cover for rabbits,ground nesting birds, and other wiled life.over the past year we have seen the population of rabbits rapedly growing. Rabbits and Deer share similar habitat and haviung a healthy population of Rabbits generally indicates a healthy popultaion of deer. One of the most common question that peop;e ask us is how we deal with predatoers on our sheep amd chickens. Rabbitat plays a role. We want to help natuive populations of prey animals thrive to provide an alternate sourse of food to our sheep and chic=kens. We know we have a robust predator population becaus ewe rutienely see coyote, raccoon, and oppussums and thier tracks. However, we have not lost a chicken in over a year or a sheep in over fifve years to a predator. We think that it is our job is to be aware of the health of the wildlive populations around us. We used to load oll of the limbs thgat we ci=ut off our ferncle lines and take tem away or burn them but now we pile them in to give rabbits a place to live. A interesting part of this story is that our cows either hate Rabbitat or just love to destroy them. We don’t know why but they love to scatter the materials we stacked. We are looking for thories’ to explain this phenomenon, please share in the comments.