"All my kids wanted to eat for dinner was your chicken!"
"I had two chickens in my fridge, one store bought and one from your farm. I had to make them both because we had guests. We could actually taste the difference! Yours was far superior!"
These are the kinds of comments I hear about the chicken we produce on our farm, Cristo Rey Farm.
For myself, I would say that it tastes like the chicken I remember from my childhood, that it has an actual taste- chicken that tastes like...chicken. Nowadays buying a supermarket chicken is like buying a texture and whatever you put on it is what it tastes like. Our chicken tastes clean and fresh and well, chickeny and it is moist and succulent and down right (if I do say so myself) delicious.
What is the reason for this difference in taste?
Our chicken is pastured which means that the chickens get to be chickens and do what chickens do best: scratch the ground and eat bugs and grass and whatever goodies they can find.
We move our chickens every day (and sometimes even twice a day) to fresh grass so they can eat as much fresh green material and bugs as possible. They are in the fresh air in protected shelters in small groups, getting plenty of sunshine, not in an over-crowded barn breathing musty fecal air and subjected to continuous stress. As we move them, they fertilize our pastures with their nitrogen rich manure; nothing is wasted and there is no toxic run-off to pollute our bay. We supplement their foraging with non-gmo feed, a ration of grains, kelp, minerals, vitamins and probiotics and finally process them humanely in an outdoor fresh air kitchen.
All these things make our birds very different from what is available at the supermarket.
The difference is in everything- not just the delicious taste:
How they live, what they eat, how we process them and what our customers are supporting. Joel Salatin of Polyface Farm (and whose farm we model) has a list in his book about pastured poultry that explains the differences between pastured and conventional chicken (including the store-bought organic brands). Feel free to ask for details about any element on the list in the comments section and we will be glad to explain more fully:
Cristo
Rey Farm Chickens Conventional Chickens
Unvaccinated Vaccinated (immuno-suppressant)
Full
beaks (no cannibalism) Debeaked (cannibalism problem)
Probiotics
(immuno-stimulant) Antibiotics (immuno-suppressant)
Composting
litter in brooder Sterilized litter (sanitized through
(sanitized through decomposition) toxic fumigants and sprays)
Carbon/Nitrogen
ratio 30:1 Carbon/Nitrogen ration 12:1
Practically
no ammonia vapor (smell) Hyper-ammonia toxicity
Brooder
skylights No skylights
Rest
at night (lights off) Artificial lighting 24 hours/day
No
medications Routine medications
No
synthetic vitamins Routine synthetic vitamins
No
hormones Routine hormones
No
appetite stimulants Routine appetite stimulants (arsenic)
Natural
trace minerals (kelp) Manufactured and acidulated
trace minerals
Raised
in small groups (300 or fewer) *Huge groups (10K or more)
Low
stress (group divisions) *High stress
Clean
air *Air hazy with fecal particulate
(damages respiratory tract and pulls
vitamins out of the body
which overloads the liver)
Fresh
air and sunshine *Limited air and practically
no sunshine
Plenty
of exercise *Limited exercise
Fresh
daily salad bar *No green material or bugs
Short
transport to processing *Long transport to processing
(stress reducing) (high stress)
Killed
by slitting throat (see Leviticus) *Killed by electric shock
(inhibits bleeding after throat is slit)
Carefully hand eviscerated Mechanically
eviscerated (prone to
breaking intestines and spilling feces
over carcass)
Processing uses only 2.5 gal/bird Processing
uses 5 gallons of water/bird
Guts and feathers composted Guts
cooked and rendered then
and used for fertilizer fed back to chickens
Effluent used for irrigation *Effluent treated as sewage
Customer inspected *Government
inspected
No injections during processing Routine
injections
(anything from tenderizers to dyes)
Low percentage rejected livers or carcasses High
percentage liver
rejects or carcasses
Dead birds fed to Dead
birds incinerated or buried buzzards or composted (possible water table contamination)
Sick birds put in hospital Sick
birds destroyed
pen for second chance (most get well)
Manure falls directly on growing forage Manure fed to cattle or spread inappropriately
Fresh air and sunshine *Toxic
germicides
sanitize processing area to sanitize processing facility
Cooking loss 9% of carcass weight Cooking
loss 20% of carcass weight
Long keepers (freeze more than a year) Short
keepers (freeze only 6 months or less)
No drug-resistant diseases Drug-resistant
diseases (R-factor Salmonella)
Low saturated fat High
saturated fat
No chlorine baths Up
to 40 chlorine baths (to kill contaminates)
No irradiation FDA-approved
irradiation (label not required)
Environmentally responsible Environmentally
irresponsible (hidden costs)
Promotes family farming Promotes
feudal/serf agriculture
Decentralized food system Centralized
food system
Promotes entrepreneurial spirit Promotes
low wage/time-clock employment
Rural revitalization Urban
expansion
Consumer/producer relationship Consumer/producer
alienation
Rich delicious taste Poor
flat taste
Edible Inedible
*
Also applies to nearly all “certified organic”
Moving one of our earlier model chicken tractors to fresh pasture:
Thank you for supporting your local farms and
families. It feels good to get back to what is truly American- growing
family and community businesses not corporations, to be a part of really
enhancing the environment and to go beyond simple sustainability to
regenerativity. We need to do more than just sustain in America, we need
to grow and flourish and expand in a way that makes us, our communities and our
environment healthy and well!!
Ed and KC Schnitker
Cristo Rey Farm
Leonardtown, MD
