Polyface Farm Summer Internship: Week Six

Reader Contribution by Kristen Kilfoyle
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Week Six ended up being one of the more fun and interesting weeks for me here at Polyface. I noticed that was able to better apply the skills I’ve learned without as much supervision and the intern team as a whole has become a very cohesive and capable unit. We are also preparing for Field Day, which is exciting.

Monday, July 7th

This week, I was assigned to Projects for morning chores. Projects is fun, as you basically take care of whatever comes up that needs to be taken care of. This morning, we cleaned out the main barn in preparation for some hay bales we needed to put there, assembled float valves for the watering systems for the pastured turkey nets that are going to put out later this week, and set up a training fence for the piglets (a small strip of electrified wire to train them about the joys of touching a live current with your snout). After breakfast, we had a planning meeting regarding July 19th’s Field Day gathering here at Polyface. I’m really looking forward to Field Day. The vendors and exhibitors that are coming all have products I’m going to need for back home and I’m excited to meet everyone that comes. I’ll be at the registration table first thing in the morning, so make sure to say hi if you’ve been reading these! After the meeting, we demolished two old turkey shade structures, saved what we could of the timbers and brought in the chassis to our shop manager for repair in anticipation of the new shade structures we need to build for the pigs.

The afternoon was spent bringing one of the new Gobbledegos (The turkey shade structures we made last week and the week before.) to one of the pastures here at Polyface, setting up the shade cloth and putting the netting up. We were expecting to have turkeys out there within the next few days and needed to have everything good to go. After this was finished, we set out for evening chores.

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