Day-Range (Free Range) Broiler Chickens [edited: updates]

Due to a series of losses to predation despite our best efforts using the old pastured-poultry style system, we have made the switch to a free range system in which the chickens are fed outside the coops and go outside to forage during the day, and are locked safely inside the coops at night. While we expect to lose some birds to hawks and other daytime predators while the birds are outside, they at least have a chance of running away. The chief problem with having the chickens inside the coops was that if a predator manages to get inside then the chickens have nowhere to run. In addition, there is a built-in security flaw in the mobile coops, because they cannot have a floors in them which would prevent the chickens from foraging. In our system and with our topography it was not possible to keep predators from tunneling under the walls of the coop and getting inside.

In our day-range system the coops are now entirely covered in half-inch hardware cloth, including floors. [Covered floors proved too difficult to move through the grass, so we took them out and switched to running an electric strand around the base of the coop at night.] However, since the chickens are only kept inside the coops at night when they are asleep, it doesn’t matter that they can’t forage through the floor. [Still true, but we removed the floors for other reasons.] They go outside all day and forage in a much larger area which is protected by a temporary electric fence perimeter. We still move the coops regularly to spread out the manure deposit and to give the chickens access to new ground and we move the entire ensemble including the electric perimeter every week or two. So-called “free range” systems which do not move the chickens end up destroying all the available forage in the area. We make sure to move ours so that doesn’t happen.

For the farmer, managing this system takes about as much time as a standard pastured-poultry system in which broilers are kept inside mobile coops which are moved daily or more. In our day-range system each move takes more time and effort. The mobile coops are now heavier, must be moved farther, outdoor feeders and waterers must also be moved, and periodically the electric perimeter fence must be moved as well. However because the chickens are able to free range, when they are younger and don’t eat as much we can move them every few days instead of daily, so on average it is the same amount of time per day. Also, when using the old system we were spending a significant amount of extra time attempting to keep predators from tunneling under the coops — ultimately without success.

For now, this free range / day range system seems to be working well. We’ll provide an update after we have seen it in action for another season.

Why is supermarket chicken so expensive?

Math is fun!

What do concentrated animal feeding operation (CAFO) chickens eat?

Conventional CAFO chickens basically eat corn and soybean meal. (We hope. Sometimes they eat far worse things than that.)  Industry chickens gain a pound of carcass weight for every 1 4/5 pounds of feed.  So a 5 pound chicken in the chain supermarket ate around 9 pounds of feed.

How much does that feed cost?

Corn by the bushel is roughly 7 cents a pound on the open market and soybean meal is around 15 cents a pound.  (These prices fluctuate and I’m sure have changed since I first looked them up, but if anything, a major national chicken producer is going to have buying power and pay, if anything, less than the listed commodity prices.)

Soybean meal is about 45 percent protein and broiler chickens need around 20 percent protein in their feed mix (a bit more early on, a bit less when they are close to finished.)  So a 5 pound chicken will have eaten about 4 pounds of soybean meal and 5 pounds of corn.  The soybean meal provides 1 4/5 pounds of protein which is 20 percent of 9 pounds, and the rest of the feed is corn for added calories.

4 pounds of soybean meal X 15 cents a pound = 60 cents

5 pounds of corn X 7 cents a pound = 35 cents

A total of 95 cents.  That's total, not per pound.  95 cents to feed the chicken it's whole life.    

If you exclusively ate food costing less than 10 cents a pound, how healthy do you think you would be?

Let's be generous and triple that number for labor costs and depreciation of facilities and so on. Heck, let’s give all the workers a raise and say it’s a 4x multiple. That probably even covers trucking costs and shelf space at the supermarket, and you know what? You shouldn’t have to pay for that anyways. We all want truckers to be compensated for their service, but the fact that your chicken spent several days in shipping is of zero benefit to you, and you shouldn’t have to pay for it.

You're being ripped off

Why do they charge you $1.25 per pound for chicken in the supermarket?  That's $6.25 for a chicken that costs at most $3.80 to raise, process, and wrap it in plastic.  Well, they do it because they can.  They can get you to pay double their cost.

Why is that?  Does factory-farmed supermarket chicken have a robust and unique flavor that you find especially delicious?  Do you relish trips down the meat aisle in the supermarket, feeling the cold air from the display case as you check the sell by dates on the packages?  How old is that stuff, anyways? Do you enjoy thinking about groundwater contamination and algae blooms from tons (literally) of chicken manure runoff?  Have you ever thought, "Hey honey, let's take the kids out to see the factory chickens this weekend. Pack the breathing masks so we don’t inhale an unsafe amount of aerosolized chicken poop."   

Get what you pay for

Pasture-raised chickens cost a lot more to raise than factory-farmed poultry.  They eat a far more varied and healthy diet, but they also eat more - a lot more.  And managing chickens on pasture is a lot of work.  Many small farmers raising pastured poultry are lucky if we make minimum wage on our time and effort.  Even with a very small margin, good pasture-raised chicken does cost more.

But then, if you're buying factory-farmed chicken, you're not even getting what you pay for.    

Whole Chicken, Three Meals

Still no camera, but this is supposed to be so simple as to obviate any need for visual aids. A whole pasture-raised chicken really is a wonderful, nutritious, delicious basis for quite a few wholesome meals. Buying individual parts like chicken breasts or chicken thighs may be convenient, but is far more expensive overall. If you want good chicken meals at a good value, a whole chicken is the way to go.

Meal #1 Roast Chicken

You will need:

A chicken (plucked and processed)

A large, sharp knife

Salt, and other optional seasonings

A large pan or skillet plus an oven, or a grill

First, “Spatchcock” the defrosted chicken.

To do so, remove any innards that have been packed inside the cavity. Then place the chicken breast side down on a firm cutting board. Take your largest, sturdiest, heaviest, sharp knife and cut through the chicken back all along one side of the spine. Press the two halves down and pull apart so that the chicken flattens out. Take the knife and score along the center of the inside of the breast — the inside of the breastbone. You can cut all the way through to cut the chicken in half, or simply score the flesh in the center to make it easier to flatten the chicken out. Preparing the chicken in this way reduces cooking time and helps to create a more even cooking temperature throughout the chicken.

Cook the chicken. We almost always use a grill to save on dish cleanup, but if you like doing dishes you can cook the chicken in a heavy pan or skillet in the oven, in a dutch oven-type pan with lid on the stovetop, or even directly on the oven rack (with a pan underneath to catch the drips). First, season the chicken with your seasoning of choice, then place in your cooking apparatus so that the spatchcocked chicken is reasonably flat. It is better to start on a relatively high heat until you see the outside beginning to brown, and then turn down the heat if necessary to cook the chicken to temperature without burning the outside.

Don’t overcook. Use a probe thermometer to check doneness. (If you don’t need a probe thermometer to check doneness, you probably also don’t need to be reading a basic description of how to cook chicken.) Test it out and make sure it works: the probes can sometimes become mis-calibrated. The technology of a thermometer is simple, so expensive is not better. In order to instantly kill all potentially harmful bacteria in the chicken, you need to cook it to 165 degrees Fahrenheit. However, if you cook until the internal temperature of, say, the breast, is 165 and then remove the chicken from the fire, the heat from the outside of the chicken will continue to transfer inward over the next few minutes and your internal temperature will reach points well over 165. So remove the chicken well before it reaches the desired temperature, perhaps at 160. However, even this will overcook the meat. Read on!

Safe temperature vs. safe temperature. Pasteurization works to kill bacteria at very high temperatures essentially instantly, or at somewhat high temperatures held over a longer time. We don’t care if the harmful bacteria die right away or if they die after 10 minutes, so long as they aren’t there when we are eating the chicken. Cooking chicken to 145 degrees internal temperature for 9 or 10 minutes appears to be enough time to kill the harmful bacteria which would also be killed if you nuke the chicken to 165. So, remove the chicken from heat once it hits 145, keep it in a relatively sheltered, warm spot (you might want to cover it if outdoors) and let it rest for at least 10 minutes, checking with the thermometer that it stays at or above 145 for that amount of time. 145-50 degrees is a much better temperature to bring out the chicken flavor without drying it out.

Don’t worry too much if you overcook it. Be safe. Warning: if you don’t cook your chicken to 165 degrees, you do need to hold it at or above temperature for a sustained period (10 minutes at 145 degrees). That’s going to require some extra attention and measurement. We’ve frequently cooked our chickens to 190 because we are busy and can’t be bothered to constantly check the temperature, and while it’s not quite as good and parts are a bit chewy, it’s still fine and you can use it as an excuse to make some gravy.

Note: If you’re concerned about overcooking the chicken — that is, you don’t trust yourself to take it off the heat in time (perhaps you are trying to do this while juggling other tasks?), OR if you’re concerned about undercooking the chicken — that is, you read everything above about not cooking to too high a temperature, but you’re cooking for someone immune-compromised, or you don’t Trust The Science of how pasteurization works, or for some other reason you really want to turn the heat up to 11 on this bird, then try brining the chicken overnight. Boil a few cups of water with about a quarter to half cup each of salt and sugar and perhaps some aromatic herbs and spices, until the salt and sugar dissolve. Then add cold water (or ice) to cool and dilute the brine. Put the chicken in a pot and pour in enough brine to completely cover the chicken. You can also do this in a (clean) cooler, and then fill the cooler with enough ice that the chicken/brine stays at a safe 35 degrees F (ideal refrigerator temperature). A properly-brined chicken is a lot more forgiving of high heat, so you can let it go to 165 without worrying about drying it out. Just make sure to drain the chicken and pat it dry or you’ll get soggy skin, and remember that you’ve already added some seasoning with your brine, so you can probably ease up on any extra seasonings applied before cooking.

Meal #2 Chicken Quesadillas (or Chicken Tacos, or Chicken Salad, or Chicken Casserole, or Pizza Topping, or Puff Pastry Chicken Pies…)

Clean up the carcass — but don’t work too hard. Once you’ve had your meal and the chicken is cooled down, tear off any major pieces of meat left on the carcass. Don’t try to get every little piece from all those bones in the back, just take off any major pieces you didn’t eat. Chop these up and they can be lunch or dinner the next day. Our go-to is usually quesadillas, because they’re easy to make in a cast-iron skillet and we can hide vegetables inside. Also, reheating the chicken along with something wet (such as melted cheese) seems to help keep it from drying out as much.

Meal #3 Chicken soup (stock)

While this requires adding all the other ingredients of the soup or stew, you are getting the nutrition of chicken bone broth, and if you save your chicken bones and make a big pot of stock you will get multiple meals out of it.

Freeze the bones. It’s not worth making chicken stock out of just one chicken, so freeze the bones and any bits of meat left on them. Just chuck it in a freezer-safe container until you have enough to fill a pot. If you aren’t going to eat the chicken skin, freeze it along with the bones and it will help flavor your soup stock.

How to make bone broth. Start with roasted, cooked bones — these already are. Use enough water to cover the bones but not too much extra. Add a shot of some kind of acid — apple cider vinegar works. The vinegar can help to release nutrients from the bones. The chemical effect is likely minor, however, so skip the vinegar if you don’t have it. Let the pot sit for 10 minutes or so to let the acid do its work, then bring the pot up to a slow boil. Once boiling, reduce the heat to a low, low simmer and cover the pot. Simmer it for as long as you can. Twenty-four hours would be great. You may need to add water periodically to make sure the bones remain covered.

Consider adding chicken feet. There’s no reason your chicken bone broth/stock needs to be gelatinous at room temperature. However, some of us like that and the collagen probably is good for you. It’s unlikely that there is enough collagen in a chicken carcass to produce that gelatinous feel, so the best way to produce that in your chicken bone broth is to add a few (properly cleaned) chicken feet to the pot. Chicken feet have a lot of collagen in them.

Season the broth if you want to. We generally do not pre-season soup stocks. When we defrost the stock later to use it, that’s when we’ll add whatever seasonings and flavors we want. For the same reason we don’t add vegetables or herbs. We do all that when we’re cooking the final dish. Of course, if you already know what you want your stock to taste like, go ahead and season it now.

There is meat on those bones. After your stock is done, or you’re bored waiting for it, pour it through a mesh strainer (or just ladle it out and don’t mind the bits) and put the stock into freezer-safe containers for storage. You’ll be left with the bones, which are likely crumbly and falling apart. Picking the meat out of those bones using your fingers is a somewhat tedious and messy task, but there is likely enough to make a nice addition to the stock and thus to whatever final dish you end up making with it.

Pasture-Raised Poultry vs. "Free Range"

There is a difference

The United States Government says there is no difference between a chicken raised outdoors on pasture in the open air and moved daily to fresh forage, and a chicken raised in a giant warehouse with a door to the outside that is open sometimes.

This is clearly not true.

The American Pastured Poultry Producers Association is a trade network of farmers who share tips and ideas on how to better raise poultry on pasture. They produced a video briefly discussing the very real difference between Pasture-Raised poultry and other methods:

“Free Range” Chicken is Fake

“Free range” chicken sold in a big “organic” grocery store chain probably bears very little resemblance to what any of us would expect of a real free range chicken. Real free range chickens are pasture-raised.

Unless the giant corporate mega-farm moves the chickens frequently, the birds are not getting much of any benefit from ranging or foraging. All you have to do is imagine what a flock of chickens or ducks or other birds does in an enclosed space. The area will become covered in bird manure and the plants growing there will be pecked and scratched up. Also consider how far a chicken or pretty much any domestic animal ranges from wherever it is regularly fed every single day. How many animals do you think will leave the food trough to go wade through manure to find some distant forage-able area they don’t even know is there?

Now let’s imagine a hypothetical agribusiness chicken operation with a ventilated warehouse full of several thousand “free range” chickens provided “continuous access” to the outdoors. What does that “outdoors” look like, outside that chicken facility? Do you think there is anything really growing there? Is there a reason for the chickens to leave the warehouse where they are fed? What exactly are they doing or foraging for when they emerge into the urea-blasted moonscape out of the air-conditioned warehouse doors? (It’s air-conditioned because with that many birds in an enclosed box with only a few exits, the CO2 buildup would kill them all without a ventilation system. Pretending this is a bonus is the job of the marketing department.)

The only way to raise chickens that really do forage in fresh, healthy, natural pasture is to move the birds to new pasture on a regular basis. It simply can’t be done with birds raised inside a stationary ventilated giant warehouse with “access to the outdoors”, which is quite likely what is being advertised as “free range” chicken at your closest “organic” supermarket chain.

Don’t waste your money on overpriced fake “free range” chicken. Get the real deal. Pasture-raised at a farm near you.

Eating chicken is kind of weird

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.

CSA Pickups and Farmers Markets, Summer 2019 (updated 9/27!)

This is a list of farmers markets we will be attending this summer. The list of markets is not final and we will be at some markets in the winter time as well, so check back here or send us an email if you don’t see a market near you.

If we’re not at your local market one week, chances are we are somewhere else and we’ll be back to your area soon.

CSA Pickups

This list also includes dates and locations for CSA pickups. We continue to look for additional CSA pickup locations, so if we don’t have anything convenient to you then please let us know.

When markets close for the season we will be adding CSA pickup locations in the same areas for the winter months, so when your CSA pickup spot closes you will be able to pick up chicken at another location nearby. (If you want that pickup location to be in your driveway, let us know.)

Chicken Subscription CSA Members: If you ever need to change your CSA pickup location or postpone pickup until some other time, just let us know at least a few days in advance and we will do our best to accommodate you. If we don’t hear from you and you don’t show up to get your chicken, unfortunately we can’t give you a refund (we can’t sell somebody else your chicken.)

Albany Farmers Market (SW Ellsworth St. & SW 4th Ave., 9am - 1pm Saturdays)

We are cutting back on market days in Albany because we are beginning to run low on several popular items. If you want something in particular, we urge you not to wait too long!

October 5 (CSA Pickup)

November 2 (CSA Pickup)

November 16

Beginning in December, Albany CSA pickups will be at the farm in Scio. Contact us for more information.

Newberg Farmers Market (N Howard St. & E 1st, 1pm - 6pm (Wednesdays)

October 9 (last market this year)

Portland Farmers Market - Shemanski Park (10am - 2pm Wednesdays)

October 23 (CSA PICKUP)

November 27 (CSA PICKUP)

Beginning in December, Shemanski Park CSA pickups will be move to 3415 SW Stonebrook Drive in Portland.

West Linn Summer Market (14th St. & Willamette Falls Drive, 4pm - 8pm Wednesdays)

As the West Linn market has ended for the year, West Linn CSA pickups are at 2562 Pimlico Drive in West Linn.

Mobile chicken fertilizer machines

We have another Youtube video up. Now that the fall rains have come, the cool season grasses are doing great in the wake of our mobile chicken coops. Just enough chicken manure plus scratching has resulted in visibly better growth compared with grass nearby where we did not run chickens.

Check out the video: