Poultry - a gateway to pasture-raised

Lets make one thing clear - chickens are not my favorite animal on the farm. Not even close. I like them for the first week and a half, when they arrive as fluffy babies and everything they do is cute. Once those feathers start coming in though, they plummet to the bottom of my list of favorites.

But when Joe and I started talking about doing pasture-raised chickens on the farm, it was a no-brainer. We had always raised meat chickens for our own family since pretty much the first year we got married. It was my first introduction to raising my own food, especially protein. I loved knowing where the food I was making came from.

And that’s why even though chickens are not maybe my favorite animals at the farm or favorite chores to do, they are a really important part of what we do. That’s because we recognize for most people, just like for me, it’s an easy way to start when knowing where you food comes from. Buying a quarter share of beef or whole pig can seem really intimidating, and we understand not everyone has that kind of freezer space on hand.

But a chicken? That’s not a huge jump for most people. As consumers we just consume a lot of chicken to begin with.

So whether we have someone who wants pasture-raised meat but doesn’t want to commit to a huge amount of meat, or someone is looking to try pasture-raised for the first time, chickens are definitely the way to go. Which is why I call them the gateway to pasture-raised.

We’ve been hearing great feedback from our chicken customers this year about the flavor of the chickens. And a lot of our customers appreciated the size of the birds too - an average weight of four pounds. Some people like a whole chicken the size of a small Thanksgiving turkey, but most of our customers didn’t want or couldn’t handle something that big.

If you’re one of our pasture-raised chicken customers from this year - thank you! And make sure as you’re cooking up that chicken that you don’t get rid of all that yellow fat - that’s the good stuff right there and how you know you’re getting good pasture-raised meat. The yellower the fat, the better the bird.

Stay tuned this winter for a tutorial from me on how to quickly and easily cut up a whole bird! This is NOT something I’m good at, but I have someone I know who is a pro, so I’m going to try to persuade her to give me a lesson and share that with all of you!

Now go enjoy those chickens and we’ll see you in the spring with our next batch of birds!