Taste and Much More Than Taste!!

"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