Room to Grow

I was able to get away down to Dallas last week to attend the American Pastured Poultry Producers Conference… It's by far my favorite conference and it’s a great time talking with other farmers and poultry processors. There is always a really good energy with other small farms because we are all genuinely looking to share information and help each other. I’m able to sit and learn things from farmers raising 100,000 chickens and at the same table pass along what I can to a farmer raising 1,000 chickens. Every time I go to that conference I feel like I bring back something that revolutionizes our farm!

One big topic of conversation (and admittedly a little complaining goes with it aha) is always what determines “pasture raised” and how that term has been stolen by industrial ag already.

There’s a key term that we use called “stocking capacity” (or stocking rate). We use stocking rates to help determine our daily grazing with cattle, but it also applies to raising poultry as well. Stocking rate is simply looking at how many acres or square feet there is per animal. For us that calculation involves how much pasture space there is but for the industrial guys it’s measuring how many chickens they can fit into a building. An industrial poultry farm will keep their birds at .6-.8 sq ft per bird whereas at Alden Hills we run at over double that!

One interesting nuance about raising poultry on pasture though is that the 800 sq ft that our chickens get each day is a brand new, untouched 800 sq ft of pasture.

When chickens are raised in barns with outdoor dirt yards then they may have a very large stocking rate BUT it’s the same piece of ground all year. If I calculated stocking rate a little bit differently and factored in all the acres that I move my chicken coops over in the course of a year then my stocking rate would be closer to 50 ft per bird. I would like to see an industrial poultry farm try and match that number! Pasture-raised poultry is all about MOVEMENT. We can see how it’s not enough to just have a lot of space for them but it’s about the QUALITY of space that they do get.