Our local poultry processor, Mineral Springs, reached their legal limit under USDA regulations in 2024. What this means is that without additional independent poultry processing, it is not possible to increase the number of small farm chickens grown in our area. Once sold out, that is it for the year. We have already scheduled processing dates for 2025 and we are taking orders for chickens.
If you would like giblets (hearts, livers, gizzards) or chicken feet please order those separately. We’ll charge you based on the cost of cleaning and processing the extras you order. This will save you a tiny bit of money whether you keep the giblets or not.
Free Range non-GMO Broiler/Fryer Chickens
Our meat chicken season runs from approximately June through October. We have no capacity to raise more chickens than we already do.
You can order by email or by filling out the form at the bottom of this page.
Chickens are $6.75 a pound with our ten percent growing families discount for expectant parents or parents of minor children. Or $7.50 per pound at full price. Pick up at the farm on a processing day in 2025. Chicken processing dates for 2025 are May 30, June 20, July 9, September 19, and October 10. We normally have chickens ready for you to pick up by around 2:30pm on each processing date. Deposit is $10 per chicken.
You are welcome to place an order at any time but we always sell out of chickens and we can only produce a limited number. We are doing our best to not further raise our prices, but if costs continue to increase we may have to revise our pricing in 2026. As always, we suggest asking what exactly you are eating when you consume cheap CAFO-raised grocery store chicken. The cost-savings is coming from someone and the two most likely sources are labor exploitation (which can result in less attention to safety) and the value you receive from your purchase.
Free Range on Pasture
We free-range Cornish Cross chickens on pasture. Weights can range from 3 to 6 pounds with an average around 4 to 5 pounds. All of our chickens are free-ranged during the day. At night they sleep safe from predators inside mobile, open-air coops. Every morning we open the coops and feed the chickens a non-GMO feed mix outside the coops so that they all come out of the coops to forage and move around. We move the coops every few days and often daily, so that the chickens can forage nearby while being able to go back inside to escape hawks, rain showers, or the afternoon sun. Raising the chickens outdoors and moving the coops regularly is the most important part of the system. It ensures the chickens have access to fresh forage while also distributing their manure (one of our main sources of fertilizer) across the pasture. Many so-called “free range” corporate chicken operations have fixed coops which do not move, which necessarily means their chickens only have access to a prison yard devoid of any real forage. In contrast, our chickens free range in fresh pasture. However, we do lose more chickens this way to aerial predators like hawks and bald eagles.
We raise standard, Cornish Cross breed chickens. This is the commonly-sold kind of meat chicken you see everywhere, but ours are different — they are free-ranged (for real) on pasture. We would be happy to raise Red Rangers or heritage meat birds for a special order, but those chickens eat significantly more feed than the Cornish Cross and at current grain prices the cost is very substantially higher (double or more). We think that free-ranging Cornish Cross birds is an acceptable mix of flavor, health, and cost. While this breed doesn’t exactly “run around” all day, ours will certainly go through the fence to go find something tasty. (We put moveable electric fence around the chickens to keep predators out, not to keep the chickens in.)
Our chickens are vaccinated for Marek’s and coccidiosis. We know some people prefer unvaccinated poultry and we do as well, but we do not have that option. Our local hatchery, owned and operated by the Jenks family for generations, is no longer raising meat chickens as of 2025. While there are some hatcheries East of us that will raise unvaccinated poultry, our post office is particularly rural and there is too much risk in shipping poultry chicks over the mountains; it takes too long and the chicks have always arrived in poor health or deceased. We are now sourcing chicks from family-owned Metzer Farms in Gonzalez, California. They are doing what they feel they have to do to stay in business given the conditions set by decades of USDA and Big Ag mismanagement of U.S. poultry flocks, and this means vaccinating their flocks for Marek’s and coccidiosis: two well-known (not new) vaccines. We wish they didn’t feel they had to do so, but we are happy to support them either way. We think that how the chickens are raised matters a lot more overall, and we think that how we raise the chickens on our farm is extremely natural and healthy. If you must have never-vaccinated chickens, we would raise them if we could, but for now you’ll need to look elsewhere.
Pick up at the Farm
You can pick up your whole chickens fresh (unfrozen) from the farm when we bring them back from our poultry processor. If you want chicken feet, or giblets, these are available for an extra cleaning and processing charge. Just tell us how many you want when you place your order. Please note these may not be the feet, livers, or other giblets from your chicken, but they will be from birds in the same batch.
Picking up fresh chickens means you have the option of taking the whole (cleaned and dressed) birds home and breaking them down into smaller pieces before freezing them. If you want to cook a fresh chicken without freezing it first, you will need to let it rest for 48 hours in the refrigerator before cooking. In order to ensure the chickens are processed with the utmost care for food safety, we have them processed by family-owned local poultry processor Mineral Springs Poultry Processing. They have done an excellent job for us and we are happy to support local, independent meat processors. We do not have the ability to safely process your chickens on the farm with our current infrastructure.