Don’t feel guilty, but…

Chicken is really cheap. Most folks eat a lot of it. We and other pastured poultry producers raise chickens using humane, healthy, natural farming practices, and we do our best to keep the cost down as much as we can, though of course raising healthy, natural chickens costs more than chickens raised in cages.

The fact that basic cage-raised, soy-fed chicken is so cheap is a prime example of how completely insane our modern food system is.

Let’s do some math. There are about 1300 calories in a whole chicken of around 4 pounds.

Alternatively, a laying hen that free ranges might lay 250 eggs a year. That’s approximately TWENTY THOUSAND CALORIES

…

We’re going to stop doing math now because it ought to be obvious that you have to be insane to kill the chicken and eat it instead of collecting the eggs. (Don’t feel bad, we’re crazy about grilled chicken in our family.)

Oh, and by the way, the chicken you are eating takes about 10 pounds of grain to get to size if it’s raised in a little cage so it can’t burn off any of those precious calories being healthy, whereas the layer hen can forage for almost everything she needs given the right environment, with some supplemental nutrition to ensure she remains healthy, such as calcium for strong egg shells. The frankenchicken broiler will never produce eggs, whereas the laying hen can still be put into a flavorful and healthy stew or soup stock after she has lived a long, happy, productive life.

So TWENTY THOUSAND calories from running around eating bugs (chemical-free pest control), or one-fifteenth of that if you feed more than twice as much in grain as you get back in meat.

A stopped clock is right sometimes

A vegetarian, no meat diet is horribly unsustainable, but much of the criticism of modern meat consumption is on target. Please enjoy your chicken dinner (we do) but don’t take it for granted. Mass market chicken prices are the result of underpaid labor, undervalued cropland, and petroleum reserves exploited without regard for future generations.

Holistic farm management

We raise meat chickens as an important partner species in our dynamic program of holistic farm management. Because broiler chickens (even the free rangy types) range less than layers, we can move them around the farm to areas where we want to add chicken manure. This lets us naturally apply fertilizer straight from the chicken to areas of the pasture that look like they need a little extra help. However, there is a limit to the number of broiler chickens we will raise in a year, because adding too much natural chicken manure fertilizer to our pastures would be counterproductive.

We also sometimes put the broilers next to our sheep or pigs to help with pest control, although the heritage layer hens tend to be better at this overall.

In a sensible food system, a nice roast chicken dinner would be a treat: perhaps something special to make with the family for a Sunday meal. That’s why we encourage our customers to make sure to use the whole bird. Save those bits and pieces of leftovers and make chicken salad or tacos the next day, and save the bones to make bone broth. Before corporate agribusiness, that’s exactly how most people ate chicken. Even though our chickens cost more than the confinement-raised birds at the supermarket, we think that eating this way actually provides better value for your money. It’s also far more sustainable.