Old Country Broadbreasted Turkey (similar size and appearance to the common Thanksgiving turkey, but pasture-raised by our strict standards)

• Price: $6/lb
• Weight Range: 18-25 lbs (Choose between Small, Medium, or Large)
• Fresh or Frozen: available on a first-come, first-serve basis

Heritage Turkey (smaller and lankier than the common Thanksgiving turkey, but deeper flavor and darker meat)

• Will be one of five breeds: Bourbon Red, Blue Slate, Narganza, Midget White, or Spanish Black
• Price: $8/lb
• Weight Range: 10-16 lbs (Choose between Small, Medium, or Large)
• Fresh only: available on a first-come, first-serve basis

To Place Your Order, stop by one of our DC market stands @ Arlington (Saturdays 8-12) or Dupont Circle (Sundays 8-1) – or get in touch with Colin Boggess (contact info below)

• Make $40 deposit (cash, check, or credit card)
• Specify Breed (Old Country Broadbreasted or Heritage)
• Specify Preferred Size (Small, Medium, or Large)

Pick-up Details

• November 17th & 18th (the weekend before Thanksgiving)
• Two Locations: Dupont Circle FRESHFARM Market (Sunday 8-1) or Arlington Farmers Market (Saturday 8-12)

Broiler chickens are very different from egg layers. Joel Salatin calls them “Racecar birds” because they grow very fast, but a slight mistake can have dire consequences. The layers are pretty forgiving, but they take five months to lay their first egg, and then they lay for one-two years, 3-5 eggs a week. Broilers go from day-old chick to ready-to-cook in eight weeks. But simple mistakes like overlooking a clogged waterer or neglecting to prop up the chicken pens for ventilation on a hot day will cost a lot of time and money when a hundred birds die two days before slaughter.

How to Raise a Broiler

By now, most folks have heard of “Pastured Poultry.” This phrase, popularized by Joel Salatin and others, means that the birds were actually raised with their feet on the grass from the time they were old enough to stand the elements (about 2-3 weeks old) until harvest. That’s about 30-40 days on the grass. It’s not that long, but in that time, the chicken gains about five pounds. That means about 90% of its growth occurs on the pasture.

In Joel’s model, the chickens are raised in movable pens, about ten feet by twelve feet, partly covered with aluminum and partly with poultry wire. These pens hold up to 90 chickens each. They get moved one pen-length every single day with a special pen dolly that rolls under the back end of the pen while the operator pulls on the front end. This way the pathogens and manure never build up, and the birds have fresh grass every morning.

What about Day-Range?

There is some debate over the best way to raise a pastured chicken. Many people have scrapped Joel Salatin’s model and tried a sort of “day-range” model, which is an attempt to reduce labor. The idea of day-range is that the chickens have a permanent or infrequently-moved house with some form of mobile paddock. Some growers will move the feeders around each day to get the chickens to migrate to different areas of the paddock. Others set up small paddocks of electrinet each day for the chickens to range in.

Many of these models seem to work from this standpoint: they significantly reduce production labor when compared to the pen model, and they produce a fat, low-stress chicken that has the nutrition and flavor of a pastured bird.

Issues with Day-Range

However, there are two major issues that the day-range models fail to recognize. The first issue is pathogens. The liver is the filter of an animal, and the more pathogens in an animal’s environment, the worse the liver looks. In Joel Salatin’s chicken livers, and I’ve seen thousands of them, at least nineteen out of twenty are perfectly colored and smooth. The few that aren’t are usually mildly discolored.

In the day range birds I’ve seen, most of the livers are spotted, with a much higher degree of discoloration. That doesn’t necessarily make them inedible, and it doesn’t mean the meat is compromised. It just means those livers were working overtime. That goes along with the higher pathogens and anaerobic (lacking oxygen) conditions of a fixed location. The reason this is so important is that it builds over time. While the day range system may work great the first year, and the second, the pathogens in the paddocks and houses can increase until things become hazardous. This can be addressed, but because it happens slowly, it’s easy to overlook or underestimate.

The second major issue is that of grass management. If all you want to do is raise a chicken on grass, day-range models might seem great. But the theme of sustainable agriculture is to take care of the land first—of the grass itself—and then the grass will take care of the animals. The day-range model creates shotgun patterns on the landscape: the center where the house was is completely killed, saturated with nitrogen from the manure; the surrounding area is burned with nitrogen, the areas beyond that are mildly fertilized, and the outer reaches are barely affected. That is not good grass management. It’s not really sustainable, either.

Benefits of the Pasture Pen Model

That is the beauty of the pasture pen model. It’s much more even coverage of the pasture. It keeps the birds in sanitary conditions all the time, provides them with truly fresh, untouched forage every day, keeps them in small groups (which reduces pecking-order stress), and best of all, it really builds the fertility of the soil, uniformly, for the whole field. And any given spot of pasture is fertilized by broiler chicken only one day per year, so the pasture gets 364 days of rest. That breaks the pathogen cycle, which guarantees healthy, sanitary, nutritious chicken year after year. That is why our growers raise pastured chicken.

This post was authored by Bev Eggleston, owner of EcoFriendly Foods and “patron-saint” of the local food movement, in response to a recent Washington Post article: “The New Front in the Culture Wars: Food”. Eggleston’s response was originally posted on Roadside Organics. Learn more about Bev Eggleston and a few of the restaurants EcoFriendly Foods sources to in Harvest to Heat!

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It’s hard to deny, “The Golden Arches long ago replaced Mom’s apple pie as a symbol of the all-American meal.” Brent Cunningham and Jane Black got that right this past weekend in discussing the resurgent culture war that pits the First Lady against Sarah Palin in a bitter food fight.

All this political grandstanding divides eaters: heritage turkey aficionados vs. loyal Butterballers. But what it all comes down to is price: the heritage turkey costs $8 more per pound than the Butterball.

But how much of that “extra” cost has to do with the turkey itself? Less than you’d think. Commercial turkey producers enjoy government subsidies and exemptions that make industrial poultry production artificially cheap. Huge federal commodity subsidies cut feed costs for industrial producers. Hundreds of millions of dollars a year is granted to concentrated animal feedlot operations so they can clean up the animal waste generated by the hordes of animals crammed into factory farms. All this adds up to dollars off the supermarket price for your Butterball, and relegates heritage turkeys to organic markets and fancy restaurants.

I lead a cooperative of pastured-only livestock producers. For the past 10 years, our farmers have raised heritage turkeys throughout the Shenandoah Valley. Our turkeys do cost more. Not because they’re raised according to some higher moral standard, but because, without the kinds of subsidies my huge competitors enjoy, they simply are more expensive to produce.

Heritage birds take twice as long as commercial breeds grow to harvest weight. I don’t buy birds grown on subsidized GMO grains. I’m still using equipment salvaged from the 1950s. The volume at my processing facility doesn’t earn me tax breaks. I value my hometown employees so I pay them above market rates. And I have always operated with my heels in debt as my bankers dismiss small farms as lose-lose ventures. How could this ever cover the cost of the $1.99 per pound Butterball turkey?

It simply couldn’t. The only way to grow a turkey for profit at this artificially low price is to re-engineer what nature and history has given us – in other words, throw out traditional animal husbandry and apply an industrial production model. Mechanization. Efficiency. Scale. Forget naturally mating birds and breed highly specialized white meat machines. Take them off the pasture and crowd them into the confines of an indoor feedlot. Then harvest 24 hours a day in multimillion dollar processing facilities owned by American food giants.

EcoFriendly Foods Poultry Farmer, Bill Shutie, of Tall Cotton Farm

Just to put this in perspective. Our largest heritage turkey farm will produce 200 birds a season. A large Butterball turkey factory will produce 200,000 birds per house per season. And most of these factories have multiple houses. At least they got scale right.

The moral of the story is clear; how can sustainable livestock producers compete when the deck is stacked in favor of the Butterball? Especially when the government is at the whim of massive political contributions that sway votes at the top of this “gustatory shake up.” It’s time we all rethink how we price our food. We can all agree that $10 a pound is too expensive for turkey — skewering it in “elitism” before it even arrives at the farmers market. But it’s Congress, not farmers, who can make the difference. We all deserve to know the real cost of the Butterball. So let’s be wary of the political rhetoric that echoes from the now infamous Pennsylvania classroom.