Month: November 2019

In my last blog post, I wrote about what pasture raised means.  This may seem like a minor detail to some but I promise that it is not.  I have written about this in the past here and here. I promised at the end of my last post to suggest some things to know and questions to ask before purchasing meat.

1. You should strive, whenever possible, to know the farmer that produces your food.  Having a personal relationship with that farmer allows you to get to know them and get a feel for if you trust them.  Most local farmers would be happy to show you around their farm. Websites like local harvest is a great place to see what farms are around you though it is obviously an incomplete list.
2. Ask questions about how the animal lived, where they were housed, and what kind of feed they ate.  These are the most basic questions in determining the quality of the meat you are buying. Were the animals raised on pasture?  Did they ever receive any antibiotics or hormones?  Were they fed a species appropriate diet with no GMOs?  You value eating quality meat because you know how important it is to your health, the same principle holds when it comes to the quality of what your food ingests.
3. Listen for explanations that don’t make sense or it seems like the farmer is dancing around something.  Unfortunately, misleading language is very common in the food space. For instance, access to the outdoors does not necessarily mean they live outdoors.  There is a grocery store chain in the health food space that has a six tier system for grading the quality of chicken. The problem is that their definition of pasture raised doesn’t involve movement.  By my definition, that is not pasture raised. When it comes to food labels, they are very commonly manipulated, I wrote about that here.  

I say none of this to scare anybody but I do want people to be aware.  There are people out there who use buzzwords to increase their profits without living up to those standards and I hate to see people ripped off.  The good news is that there are options out there to get the quality that you desire, you just have to know what you’re looking for. If anybody has any questions or suggestions for this topic or any other, please leave a comment or email me at baileyfamilyfarmtn@gmail.com.

If you’ve read anything on our website or social media you’ve surely seen me say that every chicken we raise is raised on pasture, moved to fresh grass everyday.  I say that for a reason. I say that because that explains what pasture based livestock farming is. Animals in nature move. Whether it be a herd of buffalo or a flock of birds, they do not remain stationary or confined.  Movement is relative to their size and ability to move (walk, slither, fly, etc) but they all do it. This is because a stationary animal would exhaust its resources and live in a world overflowing with feces. To achieve optimal animal health, therefore soil health and people health too, we mimic nature.

On our farm, all of our poultry live on grass, and move to fresh grass.  Every morning I get up and move our broiler (meat) chickens to fresh grass, then I refill their water, then their GMO free feed.  Chickens must receive some grain to thrive but we do that last in the process because that allows them to forage through the grass, snacking on some clover or bugs, before I bring the grain in and they belly up to the bar.  This daily movement to fresh grass is what allows our chicken to have the superior quality, taste, and texture that our customers have come to expect.

I have written in the past about the misleading nature of food labeling.  These shortcomings exist when it comes to pasture raised meats too. A major grocery store chain, that is well thought of in health conscious circles, has a six tier grading scale that it uses.  They even use the term pastured. There is one term that, unfortunately, you won’t find in any of those descriptions, movement or move or rotate.  You get the idea, none of these truly define what pastured poultry really is.  Very few large producers truly define and use pastured poultry correctly. Instead they carefully manipulate terms to fit these very narrow definitions; they charge a premium while selling a sub par product.

In my next blog post I will go through what you should know about the meat you’re buying, the questions you should be asking to ensure you get the quality you are paying for.  Until then, you have our word that everything we produce is raised on grass, moved to fresh grass daily. To learn more about what we do, sign up for our email list or shoot me a message.  I’d love to have a conversation with you.