Hello, my name is Nick Hernandez and I'm
the director of the food sovereignty
initiative for Thunder Valley CDC.
Today, we had the opportunity to partner with Main Street Project,
in planting two hundred hazelnut trees here in the
educational demonstration regenerative
farm.
Right now, we have a total of
five hundred and seventy-five egg-laying
Rhode Island Reds that are in the
process of laying eggs. We basically
collect about twenty five dozen eggs a
day and we are creating an egg market.
We will soon be able to take it to our
local grocery stores, convenience stores,
and out to our local membership, our tribal memberships.
We're looking to start
selling our eggs at the stores in
creation of a local food economy so that
we can put a nutritious fresh variety and
a locally produced egg on the plates of
our youth and families.
We saw the soil come from a clay, sandy soil to
basically a vibrant looser soil with the
introduction of the chickens to the farm
into our paddock system.
The soil has changed dramatically where it's
not so... basically not so concrete but a
richer, darker soil that has a lot of moisture and a lot
of worms that shows lot of
growth and a lot of regeneration inside
of it since the introduction of the
chickens.
What we did today is we integrated a new species into our lands here,
to partake in rebuilding our soil
and providing them a food source for our
membership, and the reason why we we went
with the hazelnut is for it's food
variety - but also for its ability to
provide a canopy for the chickens from
the hot heat but also from the
predators in the sky.
The system that
we're creating is a scalable system.
With Thunder Valley CDC our focus to
create a viable food system. We basically
ship in ninety nine percent of our food
on to the reservation.
And to a culture of people who thrived once before, we felt that this
system is much needed, but this is also a
system that we that we understand in
relationship to the trees, and
relationship to the water, to the soil, and to
the animals.
So we want to we want to
reverse those statistics
reverse those ideas and then and make
something that's positive - that we
control, that we have a say in and that will
help us to create food sovereignty here
on the Pine Ridge Reservation
