Pastured Chicken!
Within the first couple weeks of meeting customers when we purchased this business, we heard from several people that they would love if we offered pastured chicken at the Grass Fed Cattle Company. You asked, and we listened! We are going to start offering pastured chicken and you can reserve your chicken today! Curious why we think you should buy chicken directly from our farm? We hope this newsletters answers all your questions, and if not, please reach out!
Pastured chickens consume a different diet than traditionally raised birds. Since they are monogastric animals rather than ruminants, meaning they have a one compartment stomach instead of a four compartment stomach like a cow, they still require grain to grow because they cannot digest grass and hay as well as cattle can. However, being on pasture allows them to add to the diversity in their diet by consuming grass and insects, which adds to the flavor and nutrition in the meat! Sometimes chicken can taste only like the sauce you happen to use, but we are excited to raise chicken with fantastic flavor because of what we feed them, not just because of the sauce we choose to use.
Additionally, chicken manure is an extremely beneficial fertilizer source. We know that sounds weird, but it has the incredible ability to improve our soil in a very natural way! Chickens instinctively peck, scratch and eat insects and fly larvae. In turn, it will help us reduce parasite pressure on our beef cattle.
When we mimic nature and get a diversity of plant and livestock species on pasture, they create beneficial symbiotic relationships that improve the land, livestock, and create flavorful, nutritious food for our tables! Nature really has it figured out, so we'll let it do the hard work!
That’s why we’re excited to start raising chickens on our farm and start providing chickens for you and your family! I’ve been spending rainy days in the shed building chicken tractors, which sounds much fancier than it really is. A chicken tractor is a large pen with protection from wind, rain and extreme sun. It gives chickens space to use their natural instincts and is easy for us to move so our chickens get to explore a new part of the pasture each day! Our first batch will be just 150 chickens, and from the conversations we have had we expect them to go fast! To preorder yours today please fill out our form or email us directly with your preorder and any questions you have. We plan to raise a second batch later this summer meaning we will have capacity to produce up to 300 chickens this summer. If you and your friends and family want more of our chicken, I’ll start building more chicken tractors for our second batch so please reach out as soon as possible to get on our list for local pastured chicken! We are so excited!