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Do you have a foodie, grill master, or meat lover to shop for this Christmas season? Do they already have all of the cool gadgets and cooking items they need? We have just what you’re looking for. Maybe the person you are shopping for is you and you just want some great meat; we got you too. Our holiday gift box is a great deal too, you will get 15% more meat than retail. Choose from one of the options below and choose whether you would like to pick it up on farm, at the farmers market, or have it delivered.

Bailey Farm sample box $138 $120

• 2 grass fed bone in ribeye steaks
• 1 package of pasture raised chicken leg quarters
• 1 package of chicken backs (fantastic for making stock)
• 1 pound of forest-raised pork breakfast sausage
• 1 pound of pork chorizo sausage
• 1 boneless pork loin
• 2 bone in pork chops

Big eater box $230 $200

• 2 grass fed bone in ribeye steaks
• 1 pound of all natural smoked bacon
• 2 packages of pasture raised chicken leg quarters
• 2 packages of chicken backs (fantastic for making stock)
• 1 flank or skirt steak
• 2 pound of forest-raised pork breakfast sausage
• 1 pound of pork chorizo sausage
• 1 boneless pork loin
• 4 bone in pork chops
• 3 country fried steaks

Big porker box $148 $129

• 1 pound of all natural smoked bacon
• 1 pound of breakfast sausage
• 1 pound of chorizo
• 1 package of jalapeno cheese brats
• 1 package of hot Italian links
• 1 boneless loin
• 1 Boston butt
• 4 pork chops

Picking up your order

You will three different options to get your Christmas box. You can pick it up at the Cooper Young farmers market Saturday 12/18 from 9:00-1:00, on farm Monday 12/20 from 5:00-6:00, or we will deliver on Tuesday 12/21. If you choose home delivery there will be an additional $10 delivery charge. If you have any questions please call or text James at 901.340.2849 or email baileyfamilyfarmtn@gmail.com

After you fill out the form, we will reach out to you.

In the fourth installment of our farm tour series we will see our chickens after they have moved to fresh grass. Daily moves are the most important part of how we raise chickens. It is what allows us to produce the highest quality chicken.

As we’ve talked about before on here, chicken raised on pasture far exceeds the even the organic standards. I hope this video further illustrates that point. If you like what you saw, sign up for our email newsletter. We will have exciting news about 2021 coming soon.

This is our next video of our farm tour series. Today you will see how we move our chickens to fresh grass every day. This movement is the key to the chicken that we raise. A lot of chicken in the store will be labeled “pasture raised” or “free range” and simply have “access” to pasture. That means they live in a chicken house like the rest of mass produced chicken, there’s simply a hole in the wall every 100 feet so the chickens have “access” to go outside. As you will se in our video, that is not how we do things here. This system is why I often say our chicken is not even the same product as what you will find in any grocery store, regardless of the label.

Please reach out with any comments or questions. We received a lot of good feedback from our first video and would love to keep the conversation going. If you like what you see, sign up for our emails below and we’ll keep you up to date on where you can find us, any specials we may be running, and future virtual farm tours (and hopefully some in person ones in the near future).

I frequently have people inquire about how we do things on our farm and it always leads to an interesting conversation. As some of you know, we recently moved onto the land we are farming now and are in the process of making this the place we will continue to grow for years to come. We are not currently setup to host in person farm tours, but that is something we definitely hope to put into place in the near future. In the meantime, I have taken a series of short videos showing some of the more interesting components of how we farm. Today is the first installment, it’s me moving our pigs to a fresh paddock in the woods.

I hope you enjoyed this look at our pig operation, in the next video I will show how we move chickens to fresh grass everyday. If you liked what you saw and would like to learn more, please sign up for our email list with the form below and share this with a friend.

How was your fourth of July weekend? Did you enjoy yourself? Put your feet up and relax with some friends and family? Well our’s was quite the opposite of that. I tell you this story not for pity, but because it is quite comical how wrong everything went. Even if the intricacies of farming don’t interest you, I hope you get a chuckle from this.

That Saturday we were going to move the pigs from the farm where they had been living to the new farm. I had a plan that would have us finished before supper time, I made a lane way with our portable netting from the middle rear portion of this property up to where our loading corral and trailer was setup. This went slower than I had hoped but we got it done and all ten hogs were in the corral. We put feed in a bucket in the trailer and two pigs would get on, then another three, and so on until we were down to just two.

Things start to go awry

Getting impatient and a bit cocky I suppose, I decided to try to coerce these two pigs into the trailer. The end result was one of them bursting through the loading corral and straight towards Highway 70, while the other luckily hopped up on the trailer. While I was securing the trailer with nine pigs already loaded, my wife was sprinting towards the highway to cut the pig off and send him back onto our long, narrow land. After twenty minutes of chasing and maneuvering, we got him to run back into that lane way from earlier and get ready to start the process again.

This time he slipped under the fence before he even gets to the corral and here we go again. He wasn’t so cooperative as to run back into our setup the second time so we eventually let him get settled down and I hastily erected a couple hundred feet of netting around him. We took the other nine pigs to the new farm, built them a paddock with food and water, and headed back to that one stubborn pig right before dark.

Things get worse

We set the trailer and corral back up as they were and, rushing to beat nightfall, connected the makeshift paddock to our loading area. Once again he slipped through the fence and we’re off to the races again. This time it is dark and we are back in a part of the property my wife is unfamiliar with so it’s pretty much me chasing him around. At one point he slipped through an old barbed wire fence onto the neighbor’s property, so I’m running around a stranger’s property in the dark chasing a pig for a while until I eventually get him back onto our land. After some more close calls we decide to let him fall asleep, put a fence around him, and comeback with daylight and help.

We still have ten pigs

The next morning a good friend of ours and two of his children come over and with a lot of hands get this pig loaded, but not without another breakout and dead sprint towards a busy Highway 70. Once that was finished and he was on the new farm, my wife and I had a nice, long breakfast. My workday was far from over but at that point it didn’t matter.

I hope you have enjoyed laughing at our misfortune. If you want to stay up to date with everything happening on our farm and new products (like pork!) when they become available, sign up for our email list below.

Thank you

If you follow the news I’m sure you have seen stories of the potential empty grocery store shelves, big ag processing plants closing, factory farms being stuck with livestock they have no outlet for, and corn prices falling.  All of this leads to a great deal of uncertainty in the agricultural world that could spill over into the world of everyday people.  I don’t want this post to be alarming, I don’t write this to say we are on the brink of a national disaster, but a lot of the things coming to the surface today have been brewing for a while.  I’ve had some people ask about our supply chain and if I foresaw any issues coming in the future on our farm so I want to let everybody know where we stand.

To begin, I have already ordered all of our chicks for the year and I feel confident that our hatchey is rock solid and we will not have any issues getting those chicks.  If an issue ever was to arrive there are other hatcheries that could step up but I do not foresee that happening.  All of our GMO free grain is grown and milled on a small, family owned farm in Centerville, TN.  The grain we are buying this year was actually produced last year so supply will not be an issue.  Our grain mill does not operate in the same commodity space as most of the big guys so they are much more stable in these times.  Both of the processors that we use are local, family owned operations; they operate outside of the factory farming space.  They are both very confident there will be no interruptions in their operations.  

One beauty of being a small, independent farm is that I am not contractually obligated to use any of these providers.  If something were to go wrong, and I don’t think it will, I can always pivot to another provider.  Most of these big ag producers don’t have that luxury and they are hurting because of that.  I really do feel bad for those guys who are so beholden to how one large corporation chooses to handle this.

Another beauty is I just laid out, in one paragraph, our whole supply chain.  It really is that simple and has that few points of potential failure.  We have many fewer steps to get food to you.  Our farm doesn’t rely on truck drivers, grocery stores, or massive companies like Tyson and Smithfield having to make decisions for thousands of different scenarios.  We can strictly focus on producing food for you and others in the Memphis area.  As I said above I am certainly not trying to alarm anybody about an impending situation where the grocery store shelves are bare, but I do believe this gives hints as to how something of that nature could happen in the future.  We should take this as our warning to make better choices in the future.  Please let me know if you have any comments or questions.  I love the feedback and would like to do a follow up post about this.

See how to purchase from our farm here and signup for our newsletter below to find out when new product is in stock and what’s happening on the farm.

Over the course of this past weekend, I personally made 24 home deliveries, quite a few of these to people who have not previously purchased from us.  It is always very exciting to make these deliveries, especially when I get to chat with the customer I am delivering to. This covid 19 outbreak has certainly cut down on the number of conversations I am having while delivering but it hasn’t eliminated them and I made an observation while I was out this weekend.  Everybody was at home.

This may seem obvious with a statewide stay at home order, but it is still quite noticeable and different from what my delivery routes were like when all of this began.  It led me to think about the value of being at home. When we are all at home, we’re talking to each other, playing with the kids and the dogs, and (of particular interest to me) cooking together.

In my opinion, there is such a value to cooking together, and eating together.  Cooking can often have us do things we haven’t quite done before, maybe things that push us outside our comfort zone.  Cooking is a great thing to get your kids into as well. It also leads us to eat together, like literally together. When you put effort into preparing a meal, I believe you’re more likely to sit down as a family and enjoy the fruits of your labor.

I know there are a lot of people who can’t wait for life to open back up, and in some ways I am one of those people.  But I also think this is a great chance for us to stay at home, to spend time with the people we love, to try new things together, and hopefully even cook a meal together.  I know we’re all ready for this to be over and for businesses to open back up and people to get back to work. That being said, I hope we can see this time for the blessing that it can present.  And hopefully when all of this is over we keep a few of the positive elements from this experience.

To stay up to date with us and our product availability during these crazy times by singing up for our newsletter.

Spring is here and it’s a very exciting, busy, and usually joyous time on the farm. I know the news is filled with disheartening Coronavirus updates everyday but when you walk onto the farm it just seems to all go away. The chickens still need to be moved and fed, I’m still trying to install a new water system that is making me pull my hair out, now we have pigs on farm and that’s a whole new ball of wax. When I’m working on the farm, that’s my reprieve. So hopefully this Corornavirus update will bring you a little more joy than most you are seeing.

What’s new

As I mentioned above, we have pigs. They’re doing great and the kids have really enjoyed seeing them act like pigs in the woods. They are all healthy and happy and we’re just excited they’re on the farm. We also have baby chicks coming tomorrow, our second batch of the year. I am also about to finalize the plans for an additional batch of chickens to finish in July.

What’s been affected by the virus

Unfortunately the Memphis Farmers Market has decided to delay opening the market for an indeterminate period of time. In the mean time, they are working to come up with other ways to get local farm products to the patrons who frequent the market. While the market is shut down, we are going to be doing weekly free home deliveries to all of Shelby county on Saturdays. Click here for all of the details. We also have a couple chicken shares still available along with some bulk pork packages, the details are here if you’re interested. We will be back in stock with fresh chicken next week so we’re excited to begin serving you again very soon.

Our COMMITMENT to you

We are diligently following the events going on and all recommendations from health officials. We will be wearing gloves and a mask when we make our deliveries and also when we pack orders or otherwise handle product. We have also increased our production to try to make sure we keep product in stock. I have spoken with our feed provider as well as our butchers and everything in our supply chain is still rolling along without a problem so I am confident we will be able to continue providing you with our chicken and soon pork during the duration of this crisis.

To stay up to date with any further changes or product availability, sign up for our email list. We would love to hear from you.

Recently, I was speaking with Andrea LeTard, a fantastic local chef and food blogger at Andrea’s Cooktales. She was telling me about how she vowed to only eat meat that she knew where it came from and that it was raised humanely.  We discussed how difficult it can be to find humanely raised chicken, especially in the Memphis area.

I hear this a lot from our customers and I decided it was time to dig a little deeper.  As Andrea and I discussed that day and as I’ve written about before, even “free range” and “organic” chicken from the supermarket is not exempt.  When large companies are producing millions of chickens, the decency of the chicken goes right out the window. The vast majority of chicken consumed in America is raised in shameful conditions.

I often extol the benefits of chickens living on pasture, which there are many, but I think it’s important to take a moment and simply think about the being that is the chicken.  Joel Salatin often talks about “the chickenness of the chicken” or “the pigness of the pig”. I believe there is great wisdom in those words. The chicken will act like a chicken so long as we let it. How can we consider ourselves a moral people if we subject animals to the kinds of conditions that factory farming creates?

As you can see in the picture above, there is quite the contrast in factory farming vs the way we raise chickens.  Chickens raised in factory farms are a commodity; they are manipulated in any way the puppet master may see fit. Chickens raised on our farm are treated as living, breathing animals from start to finish.  As a society, the way we treat animals that are under our management says a lot about who we are. I hope that you will choose to support ethical, humane farming and kick factory farming to the curb.

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.