DQ Farm (est. 1991)

So, is your organic farmer 'sustainable'?  Does he practise sustainable agriculture, or is he the organic version of the commercial industrialised farmer? 

Here's an example of how we practise sustainability:

This is a filtration pond.  Plants are used to absorb the nutrients in waste water from the fish ponds and from washing the rebans.  From the pond, the water flows out into a bacterial filter to further break down the pollutants.

From the bacterial filter, a long narrow winding stream further filters the water using water plants. 

Alongside, water loving plants such as bananas, misai kucing, etc. will absorb all nutrients that seep into the surrounding soil. 

 We try to reduce our foot print as best as we can.

So, is your organic farmer 'sustainable' or is it just business for him?

So, what do we feed the chickens?  Grass of course.  We seeded over 30 varieties of grasses, legumes, and plants in the fields.  We selected them for protein, for omega 3 and for antioxidants.

Then, we supplement by cooking for them!  Yes, we cook for our chickens to give you the best, most flavorful, nutritious chicken you can find in the world:

These huge cauldrons, or kawahs ("crater kuali") are used to cook for the chickens.  What do we cooked? The final mix is a secret,  but we have banana piths, old-type non-GMO jagung, ubi, sago and lots of tilapia from our own ponds.

Here's a pond next to the reban to cool down the chickens while trapping the flies and insects as free protein for the fish.

What's with our claim that our chickens are "Permanent Free Range"?

In some countries, free range is defined as having "access to outdoors".  So, if you have lots of little doors for the chickens to go out, and yet you place all the feeders inside so that the chickens seldom if ever go out, you can still validly say your chickens are free range.  In Malaysia, free range can mean hanging around a permanent reban which the chickens retire to during the night.  The grounds will be smelly, dirty, full of flies.                                                        

Our permanent free range chickens are raised in fresh fields with movable coops being used to move them from padang to padang.  They never go back to a reban.  They are moved from fresh field to fresh field, and when the time come for them to be harvested, they are on fresh fields, not muddy smelly bacteria infested grounds.

We are the only farmer in the world using these heat-insulated movable, dismantleable field houses.  One man can pull the tent to a fresh field once the existing field becomes dirty.

Today I captured the mystery sound in audio video.  I am trying to add a link here and I hope it works as I am doing it the first time.

Here goes:

The recording comes out a bit tinny and does not do justice to the actual sound.  Perhaps if you up the bass and the mid range, you might be able to get a closer approximation of the sound.

The sound was coming from this nest I build for the chickens to lay eggs.  The edited video containing clips of the sound is only about 20 secs long.  The actual unedited video is 19 mins long - way too long to upload on this blog.

If anybody wants to view the full 19mins, you can email me.  The video will show me shoving a stick around the inside of the nest and you will see nothing, zilch!  Then suddenly, the mystery bird sound from thin air.  Enjoy!

The flower pot you see here is where I placed my video cam to record the scene.