Every spring, we order chicks from the hatchery and raise pastured broiler chickens. They have their own mobile chicken coop which is opened at dawn and closed each night because owls and coons like our chicken too. The birds cruise the pasture every day and spend most of their three month lives pecking, scratching, and busily scurrying about like...chickens. The bugs they find are supplemented with an organic grain mixture from crops we grow on our farm. The result of all this effort is a exceptionally tasty nutritious chicken that has had a long summer to love life, green grass and sunshine.

The chickens are housed and moved around the fields in our newly constructed chicken tractors (essentially a chicken coop on wheels), so that they have consistent access to fresh grass and bugs. We are very excited about these birds, as we have a new breed – the Freedom Ranger. You’ve probably heard about the sorry state of the chicken industry in this country. More and more people are coming to understand that the problems that industry faces are not just relating to scale and practice – they go all the way down to genetics. The commercial standard chicken is the Cornish Rock Cross, a hybrid breed that famously grows to twice the size of a traditional chicken in almost half the time. Cornish X’s also have disproportionately large breasts to meet the market’s demand (created by producers as much as anything) for white meat. Bred as monstrosities, these birds no longer have the ability to limit their own consumption (there is a snarky social commentary in there somewhere) and will actually outgrow their own skeletons until they become too fat to stand. The industry calls it “going under” when a bird collapses under it’s own weight.

In the past, we thought we could raise these Cornish birds responsibly – we simply wouldn’t give them the unlimited access to food that allowed them to reach this sorry state. Amazingly, this was not the case. Even with a tightly regulated food supply, a few of the more ambitious birds managed to tip the scales and go under.

We did our research and have decided to raise the Freedom Ranger, a slow-growth breed derived from French heritage stock developed in the 1960’s to meet the exacting standards of that country’s Label Rouge program. The Label Rouge system was created by the French Ministry of Agriculture as a way to ensure that chefs and consumers had access to real poultry raised using traditional, sustainable methods. They even employ a hilariously named “hedonic test” every year to confirm that Label Rouge is delivering the flavor preferred by the French public.

If you have ever fried, roasted, or barbecued a real home-grown, free-range chicken, you know what a delicacy it is. Unlike those factory farmed sci-fi birds, our chickens spend all day every day outside eating bugs and looking for ways to get into trouble. No fences involved. They are fed a certified organic feed that we mix ourselves from crops grown on our farm. These chickens are of the highest quality and will grace just a few select ovens. Let us know as soon as possible if you’d like to order chickens from the next batch, as they are sure to go fast.