Why Pasture-raised Poultry?

We are very excited to be adding pasture-raised chicken to our farm this year.  We are coming up on two years of when we started Living Pastures Farm and to date have been entirely focused on grass-fed beef.  A lot of soil regeneration can be accomplished with cattle alone, but a diversity of animals is even better.  So why pastured-poultry as our next regenerative tool?  Here are our top five reasons:

We love eating pasture-raised chicken

We cook at least one whole chicken a week.  Just as we find grass-fed beef to have a much richer and deeper flavor than grain-fed beef, the flavor of pastured-chicken is significantly better than industrially-raised chicken.  Industrially-raised chicken is rather bland and mostly just takes on the flavor of whatever you use to season the chicken, whereas pasture-raised chicken has great flavor apart from the seasoning.

Chicken is also a versatile leftover: sandwiches, soups, casseroles, enchiladas, etc. 

We have a lot of experience with pastured-chicken

Prior to starting Living Pastures Farm we worked at another farm and raised lots of pastured-poultry.  It has been fun to bring all that knowledge to our farm and make some of our own tweaks to the process. 

Pasture-raised chickens are acreage-effective

You can raise quite a bit of chicken on a small amount of land.  Whereas we lease several different properties to graze our cattle on (and are very grateful to be able to do so!), we have more than enough space adjacent to our home to raise all the chickens we could want to raise. 

Natural fertilizers

Pastured-poultry, when properly managed, can have a significant positive impact on soil health.  Because chickens are not ruminant animals, they cannot thrive off of the pasture alone. So we provide the chickens with a locally milled non-GMO feed in their moveable shelters. The chickens pass some of this feed through their bodies and onto the pasture. In this way they are adding new nutrients to the soil. The chemical structure of the nutrients in the manure make it much more readily available to the soil micro-organisms than synthetic fertilizer – this keeps the micro-organism <-> plant nutrient cycle going. Synthetic fertilizer can “short-circuit” the plan <-> soil nutrient cycle and weaken soil health.

By moving the chickens to new pasture every day we can spread out their nutrient impact so that we do not overload any one spot with nutrients. The daily keep the chickens from overgrazing any particular spot.  One of the keys to soil health is keeping the soil covered, either with standing forage or with trampled forage and manure.  If you leave any animal, including chickens, in one place too long they will turn that spot into mud. 

Child-friendly

The chickens are safe and fun for small children to be around – not so much with the cattle.