meat calendar

Most places where you go to eat..restaurants and fast food places..get their meat delivery from a corporate entity. Big trucks, frozen solid meat, chicken. The food usually arrives in prepacked portions, so that it can be microwaved and served. Many times the sauce is already made and included in the package. You can be secure in the knowledge that animal lived in a feed lot and ate GMO feed..the grains that are genetically encoded to survive multiple drenchings of herbicides, fungicides, insecticides..and the restaurants usually takes certain cuts of meat and refuses others.

We grow our birds out on GMO free feed. The moveable pens allow us to guide chickens to fresh grass every day. The feed is consumed in about 10 minutes, and the rest of the time is spent for the birds clipping off blades of grass, scratching up the roots, eating anything that moves. And when full size we sell a whole bird, not parts. We don't offer chicken sausage, or jerky, or nuggets..just whole, ready for the oven birds.

This would typically eliminate any restaurant from doing business with us. Our way of growing is..odd..by industry standards, because we don't grow birds in the winter, when grass is not growing. If you are mowing your lawn we are growing birds..if not we are not. The exception is our flock of laying hens..they stop laying in winter, but are still in outdoor pens and moved daily.

A few eateries have asked to have our birds this season. Places that cook up the entire bird, know what to do with chicken feet, and with the prettiest livers ever. And the food is ridiculously delicious. Places that do the same with an entire steer or pig, cook up every piece of it.

I'm told we have made it onto the meat calendar. I have to admit, there was a sizable portion of my life when it never occurred to me that a meat calendar existed, for anyone. Now we are proud to be on it.

It is time to build more pens. No question about it. We have a schedule to meet.