Category Archives: Farming

How long do eggs keep?

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We get the question all the time, “How long do your eggs keep?” They have an expiration date on them, which we haven’t always done, and actually aren’t required to do, but it does help us to know how old eggs are so we can make sure we’re selling fresh eggs and rotating stock appropriately. But how significant is that expiration, and if you happen to have SGR eggs that have expired, what should you do? 

Well. We can’t give advice on that, but we CAN share with you some knowledge about what egg freshness means. 

We had a couple boxes of eggs “expire” recently, and being the frugal farmers we are, we can’t throw them away. Instead, we are using them in our house. I wanted to explore this topic experimentally, so I snapped some photos as I was cooking breakfast this morning. Before we get into that, let’s just talk chicken for a moment. 

Like all animals, chickens (or more specifically, hens) are very in tune with the season. Back when our great great grandparents raised hens, they probably threw them kitchen scraps and a little supplemental grain, but the hens ran around foraging all day on what they could find. They probably weren’t the most efficient layers ever, but they probably proliferated their own young (by hiding their eggs!) and gave enough eggs for the farmer and perhaps a couple of his neighbors and friends.

Most households back-in-the-day had their own chickens. It doesn’t take many to produce enough eggs for a family, even if they’re doing it inefficiently. But when winter hit and the first frost killed all the grass and sent the bugs underground for warmth, the hens stopped laying to preserve their energy, since food wasn’t as plentiful as in summertime. So however-many eggs Mama had put up in the cellar, those were going to have to last until spring when the first egg was laid. So if you asked her, “How long do eggs keep?” she would probably answer, “All winter,” as long as they had been handled carefully and preserved correctly.

An egg has all sorts of protecting qualities built-in when it is laid, such as a fancy shell that allows outgassing as the egg ages and a membrane that keeps moisture in to slow down that aging process. It also has a substance called the “bloom” or cuticle which acts as an antimicrobial barrier. Since our eggs aren’t chemically treated, and they are mostly unwashed (a few get washed as needed), they’ll keep for quite a long time in the right conditions. In fact, refrigerators extend the shelf life of eggs to way longer than the time they’d keep in Mama’s cellar. 

Now back to my kitchen. So I have these eggs that “expired” back on October 27. That expiration is set for 6 weeks after collection date, so they were laid some time around September 15. Today is November 25. These eggs were laid 71 days ago, or are just over 10 weeks old. Golly, they’ve been expired for almost a month now!

So what did I do? I cooked ’em!

But first I inspected the shells and cracked them into a bowl. If the shells were badly damaged, there was a possibility of spoilage. So rather than risk spoiling a whole panful of eggs, I would crack the questionable ones separately. The first three had no cracks, so into the bowl they went. 

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I could immediately tell they were still fresh because I could still distinguish between the two parts of the white. (By the way, you will KNOW a bad egg if you get one. They’re gross!) If you can still grab the inner white (the thick slimy part), it’s a very fresh egg. See?

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I did have a few cracked eggs, (It looks like this particular dozen was used at market for a bumps-replacement set.) In my experience, the cracked eggs are the most likely to be spoiled, even though spoilage risk in the fridge is very low. 

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The crack is shallow and doesn’t appear to have penetrated the membrane, but I cracked this one into a separate container, just in case…

P1040208Looks good! And you can clearly see the distinction between the inner white and the outer white–which means it’s fresh! It’s so fresh that it remains intact when I grab it: 

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As it turns out, all 8 eggs that I cracked for breakfast were perfectly good and ready to be scrambled. 

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And here they are in all their undyed, pasture-raised, non-medicated glory: 

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So now you know how long eggs are capable of remaining fresh. And if someone asks you, “How long will farm eggs keep?” you can tell them, “As long as they need to.”

 

High Density Pasture Management

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Matt has been researching and experimenting with a new cattle management technique called High Density Pasture Management. The strategy changes throughout the year depending upon seasons and the types of cows being grazed (momma cows nursing calves versus finishing steers versus pregnant dry cows), and is quite complex in strategy, so we won’t attempt to describe the entire method here and now. However, we can share what we’re doing right now during the winter season (i.e. hay-feeding season) to sustain our grass-fed cattle.

Pastureland likes to be disturbed for a brief period, and then left alone to recover and grow. The disturbance method we use is livestock and manure because it involves no chemicals and it works so well to restore the soil’s health. Our soil at Shady Grove Ranch was in pretty poor condition when we arrived 4 years ago. But we’ve already seen tremendous improvement in many areas, despite a 3-year-long drought that may or may not have actually ended. 

The grass is dormant at this time of year, so we feed hay (stored grass) to the cattle. This is a critical time for the pasture–it can receive the nutrients from the “recycled hay” (aka manure) but it also needs time to grow and get established without hungry bovine mouths nipping off the baby grasses and legumes just as they emerge from the seeds. 

This is where High-Density Pasture Management comes in. Simply put, we spread out just enough hay to last the cows one day, let them eat and poop to their hearts’ content, and then move them to a new section of ground and repeat. They can’t be allowed to return to the newly “fertilized” but immature, growing pasture until it has established enough underground energy storage to bounce back from the grazing that will come later. This can take as long as 120 days, but after that initial waiting period, we can graze the land multiple times with just short periods of rest between grazings. The end result is more cow-food produced in a season when using strategic pasture access, rather than allowing cows to free-range constantly over an entire pasture.

Why does this work? By allowing the grasses to mature, we take full advantage of the balance between root energy storage and photosynthesis, and so the grass-based system becomes much more efficient and can feed more cattle on a fixed size pasture, even without chemical inputs or concentrated feeds (i.e. grain). It just takes patience and a watchful eye to judge when a paddock is ready for cattle pressure and how much pressure it can take. 

So here we are in Phase 1, the winter season, feeding the cows with stored hay and the ground with evenly-distributed manure, getting ready for the spring flush. The first video shows Matt’s nifty homemade hay-unroller. The second video shows Matt moving the fence so the cows can eat their breakfast.

Farmers’ Hands – Day-to-day tasks of two sustainable farmers

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By Jerica Cadman

Farming can be described with a vast variety of words, and Matt and I often reflect on how different farming is from “real life,” because not too long ago, we exited the corporate/university world to enter into a life of working with the land for a living. It is a life of uncertainty, excitement, disappointment, worry, hope, and sacrifice, full of interesting people, hard work, long days, and unbelievable experiences. If I had to choose one word to describe the farming life, it would be “diverse.” So I thought I would share an up-close-and-personal view of one aspect of the diversity of activity involved in livestock farming. It is a story of how two farmers use their hands.

Matt’s Hands

Despite the fact that he had no livestock experience, Matt was considered a jack of all trades well before he started farming. He was a mechanical engineer with a keen interest in design for manufacturing. In fact, his passion for manufacturing was so great,  that before he was even a “senior member” of his would-be senior design project (Formula SAE) in college, he functioned as lead welder and co-lead machinist. Now, pulling from a variety of sources, he has learned even more skills that allow him to care for all his animals on a daily basis.

Probably the most rewarding of the activities he does using his hands is when Matt brings life into the world during the occasional assisted delivery of calves and piglets. But it is a mix of anticipation and anxiousness while we are waiting for the birth, wondering if everything will go smoothly, and occasionally having to step in and help. Sometimes it doesn’t end well. We’ve lost calves, piglets, and mother cows and sows. There are times when death is inflicted intentionally, such as when we have an injured animal that is beyond help. Sometimes it is out of defense, when dangerous wildlife are threatening our livestock. Yet many times the choice to kill is not black and white—we only have to hope we made the right decision at the time.

Every day, twice a day, even on Christmas, Matt uses his hands to milk three Jersey cows. To do this well, he has to be scrupulous, timely, and consistent—milk cows like everything to be the same all the time! But Matt also has to be gentle and reassuring to the cows so they give plenty of creamy milk. When that’s over, he moves on to more brutish tasks like digging holes and irrigation trenches, hammering nails, driving in fence posts, manhandling various equipment into submission, and occasionally even “testing” the electric fence when he accidentally comes too close.

With his hands he skillfully welds together steel. Sometimes he cuts it apart. Sometimes he touches the ground to gauge its dryness or the grass to judge its lushness in order to better manage his livestock.

At the end of the day, he comes home, and most of the time his hands are covered in calluses, dirt, nicks and scratches, sweat, sawdust, oil and grease, metal shavings, and sometimes even blood, manure, or afterbirth. Matt cleans up and we sit down for dinner, and every night he holds the hands of his two young sons, Shevi and Axl, and his wife, and thanks God for the good food we will eat and the safety and blessing that God has given us.

Matt's Hands

Matt’s hands with a few typical end-of-day scratches and nicks.

 

Someone recently asked me to share more of my personal life as a farming wife and mother. So perhaps this is a good time to share what my hands do as well.

Jerica’s Hands

I’m sure many reading have children of their own and are familiar with the never-ending tasks of a mother. The changing of diapers, folding of laundry, sweeping of floors, cleaning of dishes and furniture and faces and floors, preparation and storage and clean-up of food, kneading of bread, measuring of ingredients, the whisking, the scrubbing, the stirring, and on and on.

Then there’s the mothering side of my “job,” when my kids bump their heads, I rub them, and when we cross the street, I hold their hands, and when they can’t quite master the spoon at lunch, I sit and feed them. I teach them to clap and to play and to put their toys away. I let them help pack eggs and sometimes there are casualties, so we clean those up. My hands have to move quickly as I try to thwart accidental crashes or drops or to correct the erroneous really-dirty-egg in the carton—it goes into the “personal” basket. But I do a lot more than that.

I consider myself the sales manager of our company, Shady Grove Ranch, and I spend much of my time talking with customers, jotting down orders, programming cash registers, and counting change in preparation for farmers market. I also am in charge of developing materials like price lists and sampler packages and website information and informational articles. For this I need pictures, so I frequently walk around the ranch with a camera, shooting photos of our animals and people in action. I am not an organized person by nature, so I spend a lot of time trying to figure the best way to organize my office and my desk. Sometimes it takes a lot of re-work!

Sometimes I am able to get out and work alongside Matt, moving cattle, building fences, working on projects, repairing structures… I hammer, drill, saw, staple, pry, dig, and even occasionally weld (I am a welding engineer, after all!).

Before I had my two children, I would milk cows daily, morning and evening, so Matt could spend his time doing tasks that only he could do. I grew attached to the cows and enjoyed the work, monotonous as it became over the years. I enjoy getting out and being part of the “fun” part of farming, as do most people that get to spend a little time helping us with projects at the ranch.

But most of my part in the “real” farming is the paperwork side of things. I never knew how much there really would be when running our own business. Farming is a full time job and then some, and I am thankful that there are two of us (plus Matt’s parents and our farm hand!) to take it all on.

A lesser part of my job happens sporadically when Matt calls me on the radio and says breathlessly, “Can you help me?” These times are usually emergencies, when Matt needs help to cut a cow out of the herd for medical intervention, or to rescue chickens from a sudden weather threat, or to recapture escaped cows, or to aid in delivering a baby animal, whether that happens out in the pasture or in the squeeze chute or at the vet’s office when things get really desperate. It is fortunate that these are the times that work best with two sets of hands, because two sets of hearts are there also to catch each other if things don’t go well.

I’ve always been a bit of a tomboy so my hands were never particularly delicate. I grew up riding horses and exchanging the mucking of stalls for lessons, so I’m used to hard work and lots of dirt. I find myself laughing silently at farmers market when I notice, as I’m pointing out something to a customer, a little bit of dirt still under my fingernails. Being a woman, I get a little embarrassed and try to remember not to point with that finger anymore. But it comes with the territory, I guess. It’s like I always say about our unwashed eggs: The dirt is there to prove that they’re real!

Garden Tour – March 2013

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Well, I know I love looking at pictures of gardens, so I thought I’d share ours. It is coming along well, but we haven’t eaten anything (except the herbs) yet. Hopefully this year marks the start of a regular harvest from a spring and fall garden in East Texas. We also hope to keep expanding it enough each year to eventually have some extra for you! In the meantime, check out what we have growing this spring.

What do you have growing right now?

 

Who is Top Cow at Shady Grove Ranch? Part 1

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Who is top cow at Shady Grove Ranch?

This is the first of a series of articles on our favorite breeding cows at Shady Grove Ranch. We have invested a lot of time and energy into our grass-fed beef herd and would love to share with you about some of our favorite personalities in the herd and why we like them so much.
The first is without doubt our favorite cow. We called her Gordita because she’s the fattest 100% grass-fed cow Matt has ever encountered. Here is her story.

Gordita

We bought Gordita at a discount because she is an unknown breed of unknown age, purchased from a colleague who was caring for the herd of a recently deceased friend of his. The colleague needed to get rid of some of the cows and was selling them for a very fair price despite their good condition (nice and fat on the lush green pastures of central Texas) and excellent naturally grass-fed rearing standards. We had actually worked with this colleague as part of our own farm internship experience and knew his standards for cattle-rearing were similar to ours (minerals, rotation, no chemicals, no grains, etc).

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This is a recent shot of Gordita on winter pasture at Shady Grove Ranch. She is about 8 months pregnant.

Since we were just starting out, discounts were certainly welcome. We planned to grow the batch and gradually butcher the finished ones.  Since this funny-looking, part Brahma, big fat lumpy old momma cow was already extremely “finished,” she first on the list for the “hamburger factory.” But Matt has a keen eye and suspected that she was pregnant. He decided to wait and see what would happen.

A few weeks after we moved, Gordita gave birth to the very first calf ever born at Shady Grove Ranch– a pretty, spry little heifer that we named Tiny. Tiny is our loveliest heifer in the herd, and we eagerly await meeting her first calf, due later this spring.

Here is a photo of Tiny shortly after her birth. She was the first cow ever born at Shady Grove Ranch, and what a lovely cow she is!

Here is a photo of Tiny shortly after her birth. She was the first cow ever born at Shady Grove Ranch, and what a lovely heifer she is!

Will Tiny give us an outstanding new herd sire? Or a lovely future momma cow that has genetics perfectly adapted to our grass-based operation in East Texas? We’ll see. Farming is all about waiting to see…

Speaking of waiting, in our 3 years at Shady Grove Ranch, we have only a short glimpse at how well our cows reproduce. The reason is that cows only produce one calf per year, and that only when they are in excellent health. If one of our first cows were really good, she would have had 2 calves by now and would be carrying a third, typically breeding back within 2-3 of months after calving. That is true of just about all our momma cows, but Gordita is extraordinary.

Recall that Tiny, her first calf (to us), landed about a month after we moved onto Shady Grove Ranch. Her next calf, Mini (to carry on the traditional naming scheme), was born 324 days later (a cow’s gestation is 283 days). This is astounding because that means Gordita bred back in the astonishingly short length of 41 days after calving, despite the fact that she had just changed farms a month or two before. This indicates outstanding reproductive health and adaptability!

Just over ten months after Mini was born, Gordita went missing. She had broken through one of our fences and was acting a bit strange. Matt moved her back into the paddock with the rest of the herd. The next morning during Matt’s routine cow checks, he noticed that Gordita had some birthing membranes emerging from her rear-end. Perhaps she was about to calve. She was eating hay with the others, so he decided to check on her again in an hour. Experienced cows typically have their calves without assistance within an hour of when they start labor.

Matt returned to check Gordita. No sign of a calf. He decided to take her to the vet. He had planned to take animals to the butcher that day, so he loaded Gordita onto the trailer with the rest of the cows, and off they went. He dropped Gordita off first to allow time for the vet to examine her. When Matt returned, the vet came up and said, “Ain’t nobody home!” Gordita had already calved. She must have had the calf in the paddock to which she had escaped.

When Matt got home he and Zack searched the paddock where Matt had found Gordita the previous day. What he found very much surprised him: twins, male and female.

Having twins is quite rare for cows, and neither of them survived. We don’t know why—perhaps they were stillborn. It appeared that they never stood up after they were born. It was a disappointing day to be sure.

Now we were faced with a decision. From an economic standpoint, a cow MUST produce a calf every year in order to remain profitable. Cows eat way too much to be kept as pets. It is a hard truth, but it is like so many other truths in farming and life. Gordita was now on the cull list. It seemed she was getting too old to bear calves—we really didn’t know how old she was. We were a bit shaken by this decision because she is such a great cow and had given us two beautiful heifers in two years before this.

Matt called a friend and mentor who has been in the grass-fed cattle business for 30 years. His advice was a reminder that one of the best grass-fed herds in the world was produced out of five top-quality cows. If you have a fantastic cow, he said, you might want to give her a little grace from time to time.

Gordita is still with us, very pregnant, due to calve again in early March. Maybe if she gives us another heifer, we will name her Grace.

Gordita is simply lovely. She is smart, mellow, fairly friendly for a beef cow, and very motherly. Here is she is about 8 months pregnant--do you think it will be a bull or a heifer?

Gordita is simply lovely. She is smart, mellow, fairly friendly for a beef cow, and very motherly. Here is she is about 8 months pregnant–do you think it will be a bull or a heifer?

 
Thanks for reading! The next article will feature our Black Angus momma, and we need your help to name her once you hear her story!

Bird’s Eye View of The Life of a Chicken

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Bird’s Eye View of The Life of a Chicken

Among the misunderstandings that abound concerning industrialized products, probably food production has some of the most. Marketing committees have developed clever ways of giving facts and presenting half-truths so that the pleasant pastoral images evoked when a shopper sees “Farmer Joe’s Free-Range Eggs” on a label that he or she feels comforted to know that the hens that gave those eggs was roaming merrily about a meadow in Farmer Joe’s backyard. Consumers are instinctively concerned about where their food comes from. If they thought it came from the farm equivalent of a torture chamber, they might not buy.

This article will give you a brief glimpse into the different “species” of production chickens from the perspective of the chicken. This is a fiction, of course, but there are lots of facts about food production within. Keep in mind that chickens that produce eggs are entirely different in breed, feed ration, rearing technique, and productive age, from chickens produced for meat. Most folks don’t know this and assume that the juicy, fried chicken they are eating was once a laying hen, if they think about it at all.

You will meet 6 chickens:

  1. Grim Gertrude, the commercial laying hen;
  2. Tricky Tina, the Free-Range or Cage-Free commercial laying hen;
  3. Mediocre Molly, the fixed yard hen;
  4. Lucky Lucy, the pasture-raised laying hen;
  5. Juiced-Up Jerry, the commercial meat chicken;
  6. Frisky Freeman, the pasture-raised meat bird.

Here are their stories.

Grim Gertrude, The Commercial Laying Hen

My name is Gertrude, and I’ve never seen the sun. I live in a big house with 80,000 of my sisters. I live in a cell with a few other gals, but I can’t move around much, so I don’t know how many of us are in here. Besides, it’s dark most of the time, so we just sit around eating and laying eggs every 30 hours or so. When I get bored, I pick off my neighbor’s feathers, or maybe some of my own. I can’t really stand up or stretch my wings, so there’s not much else to do.

When I was a chick, they cut off my beak so I wouldn’t hurt my neighbors. It’s not that I want to hurt them, but being so close and unable to move all the time can make you feel a little crazy. Not having a beak makes it hard to eat, but since all I eat is mash, it’s not too bad. We have access to it all day long, and there is something in the food that makes me crave more.

I never get to sit on my eggs. As soon as they’re hatched, they roll away to a big conveyor. For the first 3 or 4 weeks after I started laying, the eggs were probably sold as powdered egg product because they are small and irregular-shaped. Now that I’m middle-aged, my eggs, as long as they meet size, color, and density criteria, are sold to folks who crack them and cook them. But if I ever have a misfire, like a double-yolk or a soft-shell egg, those are never sold directly to customers. Customers don’t get to see all the variety I can produce.

I’ve never seen a rooster before, but I’ve heard that they make a hen feel secure. We don’t need roosters to make eggs, so the manager doesn’t bother to keep any. It would be a waste of feed, after all. When I was a chick, I was hatched in a big, warm box. For every future (female) laying hen that was hatched, there was a cockerel (young male chicken), too. There is not much use for roosters of a laying variety, though, so they immediately were sent off to the dog food company.

It smells pretty bad in my house, but I don’t have to live in it too long. My lifespan is 5 years or more, but my useful productive life is only about 2, so my sisters and I will probably end up in some canned chicken soup when the time comes. I wouldn’t make it as a meat chicken—my connective tissue is more developed and would require slow-gentle cooking, and my meat is more stringy because I am older. So into the soup can or pet food cookery I go. There is no waste in commercial food production, you know.

 

Tricky Tina, The Free-Range or Cage-Free Commercial Laying Hen

I’m Tina, and I lay eggs in exchange for food and shelter. I live in a big giant house with 80,000 of my sisters. From what I’ve heard, I have it pretty good, because I have a nest to lay in (though it is shared), and I get to walk over to it. My house is really smelly—I guess you can’t expect the manager to clean it out with all us hens in the way—but I won’t complain because I have heard it could be worse. I think there’s even a door to the outside on our house, but I’ve never been able to find it. Our food and water is in here, though, so I guess I don’t need to go out there. Some of the girls have said it’s just another litter yard with a roof and walls. Doesn’t sound very exciting. Besides, with all the other girls in here, it takes a long time to get anywhere, and I tend to get a little lost unless I just stay in my own little area.

Mediocre Molly, The Fixed-Yard Hen

My name is Molly, and I have an owner named Farmer Joe. Morning and evening, he brings food to me and my 30 sisters. We’re usually pretty hungry by the end of the day because we’ve searched our yard high and low for bugs, grass, and seeds. I vaguely recall a time when there actually was grass in here. But we just love eating green stuff so much that we ate it all pretty fast. I can occasionally grab a strand  of grass through the holes in our pen if Farmer Joe hasn’t mowed yet. He sometimes gives us the clippings from mowing—we just love it!

We live a pretty decent life, but it is a little stressful not having space to roam. A lot of my feathers are missing because my sisters pick on me while I’m trying to eat. But they’ll grow back, I suppose. We have a nice cozy little nesting house, but over time it gets to be pretty smelly in there until Farmer Joe cleans it out. I think he uses the litter in the garden. He sometimes gives us scraps from that garden, but we mostly eat food from the local feed store. It hurts our gizzards a little, but we seem to tolerate it. The bag says something about corn and soy.

On Sunday nights, Mrs. Joe lets us out for an hour or so in the evening. We love that time! That’s when we get to find juicy bugs and berries and nuts from the big tree in the backyard. But Farmer Joe worries about the neighborhood dogs, so he pens us back up at night. Mrs. Joe would let us out more often, but she says we’d destroy the garden if we had too much time in it. We just can’t help ourselves.

We lay eggs for the Joes and their friends, and they are fertilized by our rooster. I’ve heard Mrs. Joe talk about how much better our lives are than commercial hens, who are trapped in a big building with no space to roam or scratch. That does sound bad, but only scratching once a week is a little nerve-wracking. I wish we could pick up our yard and move it around!

 

Lucky Lucy, The Pasture-Raised Laying Hen

I’m Lucy, and I live at Shady Grove Ranch. I have about 150 sisters right now, and we share about 10,000 square feet of pasture. That amount fluctuates, but we always have access to grass and sky. We have a big house that moves along on the pasture with us, which is a great comfort to us when we venture to new territory. It’s nice to have a roof to run under when hawks and owls fly by. We also have a big electric net around us that keeps the coyotes and skunks out.

Every day, one of the Cadmans walks down and gives us fresh food, cleans our waterer out, and collects our eggs. They always laugh when we give an unusual egg. We like to keep them on their toes. Each week, they give us a new pasture by leap-frogging the nets to an adjacent area. Every other day they move our nest house. I guess they keep us on our toes, too.

They give us a really nice feed ration that complements our foraging well. Because our diet is forage-based and we are exposed to the elements, our eggs change with the seasons. When we have a lot of tiny green stuff to eat, the yolks turn very dark. When the weather gets really hot or really cold and the grass slows down, we rely more on the ration, and don’t produce quite as many eggs.

If the weather is wet, our eggs get a little muddy when we hop in and out of our nest boxes. When the weather changes suddenly, many of us skip a day laying. In the summers when it’s really hot, we stop laying for a bit and our feathers molt. Once it cools down again, the feathers grow back and we start laying, but our eggs are little like when we were adolescents. That’s ok, though, because the Cadmans don’t seem to mind.

If we get too hot, the Cadmans turn our mister on. During the heat we eat more salt than usual. It keeps us calm and helps our fluids to stay balanced. When the grasses are dry, we also eat more calcium to keep our shells nice and firm. The Cadmans try to monitor our behavior and consumption to provide real-time responses to our needs.

When one of my sisters catches a bug, we play a game where we all chase her around the pen. Sometimes someone else catches her and gets the bug. Sometimes she gets it. We all take turns.

We have a few roosters to take care of us. Since they don’t lay eggs, they can spend less time eating and more time watching the sky for predators.

 

Juiced-Up Jerry, The Commercial Meat Chicken

I’m Jerry, and I will be slaughtered at 7 weeks of age or less. My friends and I live in a big giant house with probably 80,000 other young birds. I grow so fast that I have trouble walking, so I spend most of the time laying on my own excrement. That wouldn’t be so bad, but the air quality around me is so terrible that I have irritated mucous membranes, and when the humans come into my house to clear out my brothers who have died from the high-stress environment, they have to wear masks.

We get plenty of food, but it never really satisfies. Something in it irritates our throats so we eat more to soothe them. My flesh is rosy pink because of the chemicals in the feed. I’ll be proud to be such a pretty roast chicken. I take low doses of medication (mixed into the feed) to help get through the stress of fast growth in an unpleasant environment.

Our manure isn’t cleaned out while we live in this house. It builds up, and, once we are gone, is eventually moved to a lagoon or trucked away to local cattle or crop operations. So you can imagine that it gets pretty smelly in here.

When we are harvested, we are packed into crates on an 18-wheeler and hauled to the nearest processing facility. There, we will be mechanically eviscerated. It isn’t a perfect system, so when the cutters miss and our toxic poop goes flying everywhere, the fix is to dunk our carcasses in bleach water. Nevermind that our flesh is abnormally soft because of rapid growth, unnatural diet, and lack of exercise, causing it to absorb up to 5% of this fecal-chlorine solution. That “moisture” will make cooking our breastmeat more pleasant than it would have been had we been raised the natural way.

We appear to feed mankind at a low cost with little manpower involved using land as efficiently as possible. But the truth is that the money and manpower and land usage are spent elsewhere. Food is food, and it must be grown somewhere.

We chickens eat grain that is paid for by tax dollars, and the workers that care for us are the manure handlers and the grain growers and the businessmen that lobby for subsidies and the taxpayers that allow their incomes to pay for business decisions over which they have no control. The land we live on in such dense numbers is taken up in the corn- and soy-producing states, like Iowa and Ohio. In fact, to raise 80,000 chickens, it takes around 280 acres to grow the grain, and that’s assuming only one batch of chickens per year. Of course, to use these fancy houses efficiently, our farmers do more like 6 batches per year, making the ACTUAL average annual land usage of a poultry farm more on the order of 1,690 acres, plus the space it takes to actually have the houses and the processing facilities, etc. This is not to argue that people eat grains instead of chickens. But perhaps there is a better way to grow chickens for meat…

If I make it through the scalder, plucker, and mechanical evisceration stations at the processing unit without damage, I’ll likely be sold whole. I’ll probably end up at the supermarket with an “all natural” label on me, which doesn’t refer to the way I was raised, but rather that my carcass wasn’t injected with artificial flavors. If I have any tears in my skin, I will be parted out to be sold as leg quarters and boneless skinless breastmeat. Everyone loves eating that because it’s so easy to cook. It’s too bad they don’t try eating broth made with my bones, because that is probably the healthiest thing about me, despite my background.

 

Frisky Freeman, The Pasture-Raised Meat Bird

My name is Freeman, and I live on actual ground at Shady Grove Ranch. My house has about 100 other birds in it and provides us with continual access to grass, dirt, cow pies, and fresh air. We like to scratch around in search of bugs to eat. We also love eating the grass and various forbs in our pen. Tomorrow we’ll get a new patch of grass, just like we did yesterday. That’s always exciting.

We have a guardian dog nearby that scares away the predators. Our farmers, the Cadmans, come to feed us twice a day, and they sometimes take some of us out of these pens so we aren’t too crowded. When it storms, they run out in the middle of the night to prop up our pens so the water can drain. They also put hay around us to keep us warm if it’s windy and rainy.

We all grow at our own paces—at harvest time, some of us will be 5 pounds, but some of us will not make 3 pounds. We have different personalities, you know, so some of us don’t care as much about eating. When harvest time comes, we are placed into crates with enough space that we don’t get overheated. Then we are processed by hand and washed with pure water (no bleach!). We’ll be food for people who cannot eat soy or who want their chicken raised as naturally as possible. Our processors are very careful with us because they know that the Cadmans only sell to customers. If our carcasses get damaged, there is no canned-chicken or chicken-by-product company on standby to purchase rejected meat.

We are a meat breed, so we’re not into flying or frolicking constantly. But we do enjoy chasing bugs (and each other) and flapping our wings and stretching our legs. We live a great life making nutrients that only we can make. And because we get exercise and we grow without the use of antibiotics or arsenic, our flesh is firm and rosy naturally. It won’t be squishy like commercial chicken.

Every year, our farmers try new methods to figure out the best way to raise us. We have to be protected from predators, wind, and rain. Our house also needs great ventilation because it gets really hot in Texas. Our farmers want us to have fresh pasture every day, so our house can’t be too difficult to move. When we eat greens, our fat tends to have more omega-3 fatty acids, and we feel better. They also want us to be exposed to sunlight so our pupils can signal for the production of vitamin D.

We live a good life, despite the fact that we are intended for meat. We get to be chickens instead of machines, eating foods that are appropriate and living in a non-toxic environment. Best of all, we get to nourish people by the hard work we do of producing nutrients that are tasty and easy to digest.

The Feed & Breed Experiment

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A major component of successful sustainable farming is figuring out what strategy works best in your climate for which animals. Pastured poultry is one of the most difficult and unpredictable aspects of our operation here at Shady Grove Ranch. Everything loves to eat chicken: people, owls, skunks, dogs, coyotes, snakes, foxes… Only the first on that list are paying customers! Young chickens also like to die when it rains, when the wind blows, when it gets too cold, and when it gets too hot. It’s not easy being a chicken!

As a result, we are continually searching for the best combination of nutrition and genetics (just like with our pigs and beef cows) to ensure minimal losses and nice plump, healthy meat chickens. Our first batch of broilers are in the brooder now, working on growing their big-bird feathers, and almost ready to be moved to pasture. We purchased two different types of feeds and birds from two different breeders, so we have four combinations of broilers to test which combination performs best for us here in East Texas. Matt keeps close track of mortality rate, unusual events, and feed consumption rate, and will compare the input costs to final harvest in August.

Despite the severe weather patterns we’ve been experiencing over the 18 months, it’s important to maintain our standards without reducing the quality of our products. Matt’s and Jerica’s engineering degrees really come in handy around here where it’s all about learning how to fit the pieces of the puzzle together!

It’s Turkey Time!

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July seems like an odd time to start talking about Thanksgiving, but it’s the time when we order the baby turkeys (called “poults”) to start growing them in time for the November harvest! We’ll grow you a turkey, too, if you would like. They are raised like our chickens: totally on pasture without medications or growth stimulants, and supplemented by a non-soy, non-GMO feed. They live their lives rotated across our pastures, enjoying their freedom to roam, and foraging on grasses, seeds, and bugs. We never feed antibiotics or arsenic-based growth stimulants.These birds are beyond “free-range.” They are truly on pasture, not in a dirt yard, foraging away to their hearts’ content!

We require a $50 deposit per bird and can reserve any size you want between 10 and 20 pounds. They cost $5.75/lb and include the giblets.