Pennypack Pickings 08/01/09

"Its good to know that we can buy chickens that haven't lived their lives in utter misery"

These were the words of a rather delighted customer of ours as he was purchasing a Pennypack chicken last week. He seemed pleasantly surprised that we were offering pastured chickens, and I certainly hope - and expect - his delight continued right through dinner.

His comment caught me by surprise. We do what we do at the farm as a matter of routine. Raising chickens from day old and eventually bringing them to market as fully dressed broilers is a process we all know well, with one step following another in a predictable fashion. This gentleman's comment surprised me because it's been a while since I've considered the comparison he was making: our chickens versus the conventional mass produced chickens.

This is not to say that our chickens are the only ones that have not lived their lives under less than ideal circumstances. In fact, there are numerous smaller farms throughout the countryside that are raising broiler chickens outside in a pastured setting. In researching how to best grow broiler chickens in a way that was both humane and economically viable, I read about and visited a number of these farms. Perhaps most notable was Joel Salatin's Polyface Farm in Swope, Virginia. You may have heard of Salatin, first made famous by Michael Pollen in his Omnivore's Dilemma. He now seems to enjoy a semi-celebrity status as he travels throughout the country, writing and speaking, and is profiled in the new film, Food, Inc. that we saw earlier this week.

Salatin's chicken operation was much like ours - the chickens are kept in moveable pens on pasture, moved daily to give the birds fresh grass. The two notable differences were the size of the operations - we typically have three to six pens full of chickens, where as I believe I counted 70 some on Salatin's farm, and the breed of chicken. Salatin uses the Cornish cross, the conventional industry standard. This bird is the same one used in the massive chicken houses and has been bred to put on weight rapidly. Last year, we decided to switch to a red broiler, a breed developed in Italy for outdoor rearing that is much more active and energetic than the Cornish but that does not grow quite as fast.

Overall, my experience has been that all of us in the "pastured poultry" market have struggled to provide an alternative to the factory farmed convention, finally sticking with a method that balances humane treatment of the animal with economic viability. Growing the birds this way costs a lot more than the CAFO (confined animal feedlot operation) convention. We move the pens every day, and fill the feeders and waterers. We also use organic, or transitional organic feed. This does sharply contrast to the poultry CAFO operations that house up to 60,000 to 70,000 birds, that only have sawdust and their own manure to rest on.

Food, Inc. shows what the inside of one of these poultry houses looks and feels like, as well as cattle feedlots and confinement pig operations. This is an eye-opener for many of us. Not exactly the bucolic pastoral setting we might imagine these animals living in.

In addition to our own chickens, we also carry humanely raised meat products from other local sustainable farms. So, next time you are thinking about meat for dinner, I invite you to check these products out.

Happy eating, Andy