Everyone loves chicken.
Chicken is fantastic. It’s easy to prepare, has great taste and texture, and is something that even picky eaters (like our kids) have no problem eating. In our home, we eat chicken a few times a week- it’s one of the key staples of our diet.
Not everyone likes the way commercial farmers raise chickens.
We’ve all seen the photos, read the articles, watched the movies, and tuned in to the news stories. Each year, around 9 billion chickens are processed for meat in the United States. That’s billion with a ‘b’. Because of the scale of operations, the chickens live a miserable life. It hangs out with 30,000 of its closest friends in a window-less chicken house where it is eventually forced to stand up to its knees in feces. They are packed in so tightly that they stand shoulder to shoulder and can barely move. They are fed the lowest quality GMO and chemical laden food that will suffice for them to grow. They never see the light of the sun or feel grass under their feet. Medications are added to the water supply to keep the birds healthy and farm workers are required to disinfect their shoes when walking in and out of the chicken houses to avoid spreading bacteria and disease.
It gets even worse when the chickens are processed for meat a few months later. Because of the terrible conditions that commercial farmers raise their chickens in, and because of the serious risk of bacteria like Salmonella and Campylobacter, chickens processed in the United States are washed in a concentrated chlorine solution as part of the butchering process. This is what gives most store-bought chicken that distinct bad ‘chicken smell’.
We take a different approach.
We believe that an animal should live a good life, as soon as it is safely able to- it should have access to the sun and to the ground. A chicken is supposed to be outside. It is supposed to scratch at the grass and the dirt. It thrives by eating bugs and insects. At Our Way Farms, we do this. By using mobile chicken coupes, we are able to keep our chickens foraging on fresh grass while still keeping them safe from predators.
We believe that a chicken should have room to move around and explore. Each of our mobile chicken coupes provides more than enough room for this. We keep our stocking density low and believe that our animals are at their best when they’re not all crammed together in the name of higher profits.
Your food’s food is important.
We’ve all heart the old saying that ‘you are what you eat’. That part’s true. We should all be eating the highest quality food that we can get. There’s another part that most people don’t think about, though. What’s in the food that your food is eating?
A key ingredient in our chickens is their ‘natural’ diet of chemical-free pasture. Our chickens forage daily on a wide variety of grasses that are never sprayed with harsh pesticides or herbicides. They enjoy eating insects, bugs, grubs, and anything else they can scratch up from the grass and soil. This translates into nutrient-dense food that is loaded with trace minerals for you and your family.
Eating grass and bugs isn’t enough. To thrive as a large and healthy bird, chickens need to eat a grain-based diet as well. We aren’t fond of the way that regular chicken feed is made up of GMO grains and we really get upset about spraying them with things like glyphosate and atrazine. Because we’re picky, we get our chicken food from an Amish family in Virginia. It contains organic and non-GMO grains, vitamins and minerals, and none of the bad stuff. Your family should have the best food available. Your food should have the best food available.
Responsibly raised, from start to finish.
How do we know that our chicken is better than the crap you can buy at the supermarket? That’s easy. We’re with our birds from the first days of their life until the very end of the last day. Our family spends time with the chickens each day to make sure that they have food and water and to make sure they’re happy and healthy.
We take pride in making sure that each and every bird has a great natural life, as they were intended to live. When processing the animals on-farm, we inspect each bird to ensure it is healthy. (To learn about how we process animals, click here.) We check the organs to verify proper function. We are with the animals start to finish so that you can feel confident that the packaged chicken you receive is the same chicken that was raised Our Way.