About the (awesome) tiny icons used in the menu bars:

Lush Green Pasture

Pasture raised meats are much better for the environment and our health. It helps that they taste amazing too! Recent studies show that pasture raised meats of all sorts have significantly healthier fats, vitamins and minerals. These health benefits don't appear by magic: they are because the animals graze and eat the green actively growing grass.

That's why we don't raise chickens in the winter. While others think a factory-style barn filled with hay or a patch of bare dirt was once green counts as "pasture", we don't.

Truly pasture raised meats are healthier and tastier. Taking even a little shortcut will spoil the effort.

Space to Roam

Chickens are social and actually fairly intelligent creatures. They love to hunt and keep track of up to 1000 other individuals. With a larger flock, like in a factory, they start to fight. Our largest flocks are 600 birds and we always provide them with lots of space to hunt for grass hoppers, worms and the tastiest clover leaf imaginable.

It bugs me to see regular factory farms label their chicken as "free range" and charge more for them. Meat chickens are always raised without cages. Those local "free range" family farms are no different than every other factory. When they decide to show images of their barn, they show it after 95% of the chickens have been removed. It is rather deceptive and disappointing.

That's why we started our farm: to raise animals the way we expected they would be raised. No fake marketing, just honestly meeting the expectations we all have in our mind when we shop for food. Somewhere in the back of our mind, we all know they are cutting corners we'd rather not hear about. Not us. We're never going to cut any corners.

Organic Grains

It costs 2-3 times as much for us to use organic feed. When we started out farming, I couldn't believe how hard it was to just find organic chicken feed to buy. Every local feed source was conventional GMO based.

I always assumed my nice local farmer at the market would obviously use organic grains. It turned out that almost every small local farm uses conventional grains (even if they are "non-GMO") because it is just so difficult and expensive to source organic grains on a small scale.

Slow Growth = Flavor

Our chickens are healthy in every sense of the word.

The Cornish-Cross breed of chicken that everyone else uses (factories and small farmers alike) was what convinced me that I needed to raise my own chickens in order to taste what chicken was meant to be like. Before we had our farm, I would tour other farms as a consumer. Those birds were engineered to grow as few feathers as possible. They didn't even really look like chickens. With factory farming, feathers, strong bones and healthy organs are a "waste".

Slow-Growth Difference

The slow-growth breeds we use take over twice as long to mature; they are healthy and balanced in their growth. The flavor is outstanding, really a dramatic difference.

In order to be so healthy, our slow growth breeds eat twice as much feed per pound of chicken as the factory-style ones do. Fortunately our group always invests much more into the care of our animals, so the price of our chicken is much closer to that of the organic factory chicken in the stores than one might expect.

No Drugs

Our chickens are healthy in every sense of the word. They never receive antibiotics or other shortcuts most chickens endure to speed up growth.

As consumers, we really shouldn't trust the big companies to provide us with safe meat. After all, they spent decades feeding chickens arsenic to make them grow faster because hormones were illegal. Only after consumer groups sued the FDA (because of the high levels of arsenic in the resulting meat) did the FDA give in and ban this practice in 2015. The industry will find another un-healthy shortcut that will make news in a few years.

In the meantime, we'll just avoid all of that and keep raising animals the way nature intended: free of drugs, antibiotics and other shortcuts.