Organically Fed, Pastured Poultry
We carefully graze our organically fed birds on pasture to produce an awesome tasting chicken and duck that is truly healthy for you and has been raised in a manner that restores the environment and honors the chicken.
Two Ways to Order
A La Carte
No obligation a la carte orders are filled when poultry is available AFTER CSA members have had their first dibs. Supply is limited, email us to get on the waiting list. The next delivery is estimated for May '15.
Poultry CSA
The best way to get poultry is via our CSA. When you place your deposit you reserve your share of the batch, securing your supply and the best price. If there are extra birds you also get first dibs on a la carte orders.
We only do batches for the CSA as demand warrants. Once we have enough reservations we'll order the chicks, who then take 3-4 months to grow out. If you reserve now the next butchering wouldn't be any earlier than June '15.
Poultry
2019 Chicken
Our first batch of Red Rangers is due to butcher in the August time frame. A second batch of Rainbows or New Hampshires is projected for summer butcher.
Duck
Our next batch of duck will not be until spring 2019. Email me to get on the notification list for when we go live on CSA reservations and waiting list sign-ups.
Goose
If I have sufficient demand we'll hatch some geese from our flock. Email me to indicate your interest.
Turkey
We so want to do turkey but have too many new things on the itinerary to add them. But 2019? Email me to indicate your interest.
Learn More
GREAT TASTING & HEALTHY | THE PROBLEM WITH CONVENTIONAL CHICKEN | COMMUNITY SUPPORTED AGRICULTURE (CSA) | ORDER YOUR CHICKEN
Great Tasting & Healthy!
Our mission is to produce the best tasting, nutrient dense, health building, chemical free poultry possible in a way that restores the environment and allows our birds to live healthy, happy lives! Our birds are:
Our customers keep raving about how our chicken:
"This chicken was sweet and succulent and simply the best chicken we have ever eaten."
- Brenda Frankenfeld, Lawrence, KS
"We're HUGE fans of the chickens we picked up. It's yummmmmy."
- Katie P., Kansas
"Put us down for another 3-4 pound chicken... I just made a soup from the one we got earlier this week, and my husband is begging for more! :)"
- Hillary Urich, Shawnee, KS
"The chicken was delicious. I slow cooked it yesterday with a generous spice rub and couldn't believe the size of the thigh and leg bones."
- Sidney G. Kline Jr., Kansas City
"The chickens are very tasty, high quality."
- Jerrald G., Overland Park, KS
"I roasted one of the chickens last weekend. I had never roasted a chicken before, so I wasn't sure what to expect. It was awesome. Flavorful and tender. Turned out great."
- Amy C., Lawrence, KS
- Non-GMO Fed - Our birds are never fed GMO grains of any kind. We use only organically grown grains (mostly certified) which are legally prohibited from being genetically modified.
- Organically Fed - Non-GMO is not enough! Our birds eat locally grown, organically produced grains and organic supplements to make sure their food and yours is free of harmful contaminates such as GMO's, round-up, and other cancer causing chemicals and is produced in a manner which doesn't harm the environment. Much so called Non-GMO feed and food is still produced using pesticides and other nasty chemicals including Roundup, the chemical behind much of the harm associated with GMO foods.
- Pastured - Our birds spend their days grazing green pastures and consuming grasses and insects. Not at all 'vegetarian fed', this diverse diet and exercise benefits nutrition, flavor, and bird health while lending it a unique taste of place.
- Naturally Raised without chemicals - We use NO chemicals, antibiotics, vaccines, or other pharmaceuticals which compromise the health of the chicken and compromise the bacterial and chemical health of your food.
- Slow Growing - We raise a slow growing broiler breed produced by a small hatchery in Alabama, S&G Poultry. Taking 12-16 weeks to reach maturity, these birds have time to build better flavor and while growing at a slow rate that avoids health issues. They also have a nice balance of leg, thigh, and breast meat.
- Small scale - We are an independent, small-scale diversified family farm exclusively producing food for our own local consumers. Our chickens are but one part of our operation. They are raised naturally as part of a greater system that fits them in their ecological niche on our farm. Our entire operation is structured to mimic nature and enhance the natural processes to build fertility and restore the environment.
Our practices benefit and enrich the life and health of our birds, the environment, and you! Raised in this manner your chicken is nutrient dense; meaning it tastes better, leaves you feeling fuller (hence you eat less), and is better for you. Chickens raised right have a unique and wonderful flavor that is beyond compare!
All of this stands in stark contrast to the way supermarket chicken is produced and even that grown by local farmers. Conventional chicken production, even on pasture, puts low-cost first, compromising the quality, flavor, and healthfulness of the meat.
Awesome poultry can be yours: order now!
The Problem with Conventional Chicken
There are a number of problems with the grocery store chickens most people are used to. Though touted as a low-fat, healthy food, they are actually bad tasting, bad for you, bad for their farmers, bad for the chicken and bad for the environment.
Frankenchicken
"Healthy food can only come from healthy animals."
The breed used in factory farms (and by most local farmers!) is the Cornish Cross chicken. We call this hybrid freak of nature the "Frankenchicken". Their unnaturally high growth rates, reaching full size in as little as 5 weeks, lead to a host of side effects. Even when pastured these immune-suppressed birds are smelly, dirty, can barely walk, have a high mortality rate, and produce blander food. Without careful management they literally eat themselves to death and often have heart attacks or die without apparent cause.
While their high growth rate and feed efficiency makes them profitable to grow, we refuse to raise them. This means our chicken costs more and we make less money, but we believe health food can only come from healthy animals.
And with chicken as in all things in life, you get what you pay for. Fast growing, feed efficient birds simply do not take in enough nutrients nor have enough time to create great tasting, nutrient-dense meat.
Flavorless
It wasn't until I started eating farm raised chicken that I realized how horrendous grocery store birds are. To think I used to like that stuff? By comparison it is flavorless, stringy cardboard. Frankenchickens are lazy birds that lay around in their own manure all day eating, even when raised on pasture. The lack of exercise, the hyper-feed efficiency, and the lack of selection for meat quality have resulted in a meat which is bland at best and inedible at worst.
Conventional, GMO Feed
Most farmers feed their chickens conventional feed made from non-organic grain. This means the grains were produced in a manner that is destroying our environment, contaminating the feed and environment with chemicals causing cancer and a myriad of other diseases, and are grown from GMO seed which is also causing health problems in plant and the animal. Furthermore chicken feed is often dosed with various chemicals including arsenic and antibiotics in order to boost feed efficiency.
Factory Farming
Your grocery store chicken is produced under circumstances that look more like a factory than a farm. These birds are kept in large crowded confinement barns by the thousands where they live in a space about the size of a sheet of paper and are handled and processed largely with automated equipment. Even so-called 'free-range' birds are actually grown indoors in confinement.
"About 11,000 people die every year from S. aureus infections, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and more than half of those deaths are from the hospital "superbug" methicillin-resistant S. aureus or MRSA." - LA Times
Contaminated Chicken
These conditions are so deplorable the are fed antibiotics just to keep them alive. Independent tests of store chicken routinely find high levels of contamination with a myriad of pathogens like salmonella, e-coli, MRSA, and more. Many of these are resistant to our antibiotic treatments, a resistance developed in the factory farm, and some of them are novel diseases of our time having originated in the confinement farms to begin with. The way these chickens are treated is literally killing you!
One recent study found almost half of all meat in the grocery store was contaminated with Staphylococcus aureus (the common cause of Staph infections). And half of those were resistant to the common treatment antibiotics. What does this mean? You have a 1 in 4 chance of buying a piece of meat that could very well hospitalize you with a nasty, difficult to treat infection. This study covered all meats (including chicken), beef, pork, and turkey are all raised in conditions very similar to chicken.
This has three major causes. First, the deplorable conditions produce sick birds. Second, the heavy use of antibiotics is breeding new varieties of antibiotic resistant bacterias. And third, the massive processing plants with lots of automation and high throughput leads to carelessness and lots of chance for cross contamination.
But you can't count on the FDA to do something about this. So long as less than 50% of meat samples at the processing plant come back negative they let the meat be sold! They don't care if your food has disease causing pathogens. Their solution? The customer should handle the meat properly assuming it is contaminated. To avoid this health risk you must take matters into your own hands. While we cannot guarantee perfectly safe food, we raise our birds in an environment the avoids many of these problems and process them by hand on our farm on a small scale.
Slave Labor
The modern poultry industry has been vertically integrated by the poultry processors who control everything from egg to butcher. The farmers raise birds under captive contracts that make them little more than slaves. They bear almost all the risk, have no control over the way they raise them, and rely on off the farm jobs to survive as all the profit goes to the processor. Because most farmers are paid less than the true cost of production, essentially paying for the privilege of working for free, 83% of all farmers rely on off the farm jobs to survive. This is neither just nor sustainable.
Environmental Degradation & Food Security
The modern poultry industry relies on a system of grain agriculture which is unsustainable and threatens our long term ability to grow the food necessary to feed our nation.
In the first place it is economically unsustainable. The unprofitability of agriculture has led to a decades long exodus of farmers out of farming with few new farmers to replace them. Many of the rest have given up farming for food and are simply farming for subsidies; planting things in places and times which are destined to lead to crop-failure. While growing crops isn't profitable, collecting government subsidized insurance payments for failed crops is.
Secondly it is ecologically unsustainable. Conventional agricultural soil practices are destroying habitat, killing the soils, and eroding away our soils. In 150 years of US agriculture we've lost half of all our top-soil and once its gone its gone, all that will be left is unproductive desert. And all that topsoil being washed away is taking with it a raft of disease causing chemicals that are poisoning our water supplies and destroying the ability of the Gulf of Mexico to even support life.
Find out how wonderful real chicken is: order yours today!