CHICKEN: There are basically two types of birds you can raise for meat – purebred heritage varieties and high-octane hybrids. Some people prefer the heritage breeds because they are more “natural.”  We thought so, too, until we raised a batch of old-fashioned chickens. They took twelve weeks to reach market weight, and once dressed out, their “traditional” narrow-breasted carcass was positively skinny compared to what people expect a chicken to look like. They aren’t anywhere near as meaty or as tender as the supercharged hybrids. We decided it didn’t make sense to try to grow birds that you had to convince customers to buy. Production hybrids like the heavy Cornish x Rock grow to market weight in six weeks, have a feed to weight conversion ratio of 2:1 (2 lbs grain or equivalent input = 1 lb live weight gain) and yield a carcass with a huge meaty tender breast and thick drumsticks. The downside is that since they are bred to grow so fast and so top heavy, they are prone to develop deformed legs and aren’t really interested in anything other than eating grain. If allowed to forage, they don’t roam very far, preferring instead that you bring their food to them. 

We experimented with various methods of confined pasture husbandry, which basically involves enclosing 50 to 100 birds in a portable bottomless roofed cage which is moved once or twice daily across the pasture. The theory is that the chickens graze on fresh grass and forage for nutritious bugs, producing a tasty meat, while reducing parasite infection  and susceptibility to disease. We discovered that the potential nutritional benefit of fresh forage was soon compromised by the copious manure stomped into it by 50 lazy chickens confined to an 8x8 cage. They did indeed forage for about the first fifteen minutes or so after their cage was moved to fresh ground. After that they lost interest. One might question why the birds couldn’t just be turned out to pasture protected from predators by portable electric poultry netting. The answer is that unsheltered three-week-old meat birds are too delicate to withstand the stress of cold or rain unsheltered. So if you want to raise pastured poultry, you need portable cages. Cages work best however, on level and smooth pasture. Our flattest field was too wet. The driest fields were neither smooth nor level.

Since it is the varied diet of fresh greens and other forage that is responsible for the taste and health of the birds and the lack of strenuous exercise ensured by close confinement that insures tenderness,  we’ve developed a compromise system that successfully achieves both without resorting to moveable enclosures. Instead of bringing the chickens to fresh forage we bring fresh forage to the chickens. They are sheltered at night and during inclement weather in the horse barn  (after the horses are turned out to pasture in late spring). During the day the doors of the barn are left open and the birds will roam freely about as far as they feel like, which is generally no more than a few yards from the barn. This allows them as much scratching and foraging as they are wont to do, certainly more than they would otherwise indulge themselves confined in a portable cage, but not so much that they toughen up those drumstick muscles. The key is to provide them with a manger full of fresh-cut green forage hung at beak height off the ground.By nightfall, the mangers are routinely empty.

Our meat birds are raised in batches of 100 at a time, staggered about two weeks apart. This allows us to rotate facilities as the birds grow and require more space. It’s also a small enough batch so that we aren’t faced with having to dispatch and process an overwhelming number of birds on a single day. Fifty is a comfortable number for us to manage. We have an on-farm area where we can kill and process the birds. We have a thermostatically controlled scalder that can handle 5 birds at a time and a Featherman plucker that gives us a remarkably clean carcass in about 20 seconds. Once eviscerated and washed, the carcasses are chilled in well water before being aged for two days in a dedicated refrigerator.  Ageing permits the natural enzymes to break down the proteins in the muscle, tenderizing it. Contrary to what you might expect, if you cook a fresh-killed chicken it will be noticeably less tender than one left to cool for two days. We know this from direct experience. After aging, our birds are available for sale fresh. Any not sold immediately are frozen.