No matter your scale, whether you have 1 chicken or 100,000, chickens can and should be raised on pasture.  Remember, like all domesticated animals, chickens originally were out surviving in the wild.  In many ways chickens are still very similar to the junglefowl of their ancestry.  They love to scratch and peck, forage for plants, dig for worms and chase down flying insects.  They love to dig out bowls in the ground where they enjoy communal dust baths while they gossip and relax in the sun.  Chickens naturally seek out the darkest and most secretive spots to lay their eggs, but they also want to socialize while they are doing it.  Once the sun sets below the mountain and they have had their snack before bed, chickens naturally seek safety looking for a place to roost.  Chickens are creatures of habit and are surprisingly structured in their social life.  Once bonded to a particular roost or nest box a chicken will return to sleep or lay eggs there the rest of its life.  Think of the age-old sayings “who rules the roost” and “pecking order”.  These of course come from observing chickens!  There are aggressive chickens and timid ones, fat ones and skinny.  There are friendly chickens and grumpy ones and when they have plenty of space to roam around and live their lives it all works out harmoniously!  Of course, it is a bird eat bird world out there and if these birds are locked indoors and overcrowded, they often will go insane and turn to cannibalism.  Ever wonder why chickens in factory farms have their beaks cut off?  My opinion is that its our job as farmers to consider the land and our animals and our relationship with nature and do the best we can to keep the balance of things.  Livestock when given the opportunity to express their true nature tend to thrive and be healthy and content. Our farm has been raising livestock on pasture for over 30 years and we have no need for veterinary visits, antibiotics, de-wormers, fertilizers, pesticides, growth hormones, none of that!  Our animals are just thriving in their natural environment and the environment is thriving all around us as well!  The food that is produced in this way is so rich and full of nutrients that it really provides us with a superior and even medicinal quality that keeps us physically and mentally healthy.  I call this a Win, Win, Win, Win system!  Win for the animals, for the land, for the farmers and for everyone’s health!  So why are 95% of all chickens raised indoors on industrial scale farms?  Mostly because the large companies who monopolize the food industry want to maximize profits while minimizing risk.  They do this by eliminating as many variables as possible, including the weather and the need for skilled farmers.  These modern chicken houses are fully automated, everything from feed, water, ventilation, temperature control, nesting boxes that roll onto a conveyor belt that goes directly into the packing facility without a single person touching them.  Eggs are washed, graded and packed by robots.  From an efficiency point of view this is an amazing system that has the ability to produce eggs for as little as $2 per dozen.  A facility with millions of birds can be operated by only a few employees and when you are packing millions of eggs per day even a profit margin of a few cents per dozen can make a lucrative enterprise.

But let’s take a closer look at the costs of this system.  Sure, there are up-front costs of building the facility for millions of dollars but that’s not what I’m talking about.  The most obvious cost is the animal welfare.  One look inside a facility like this and even someone with no prior animal welfare knowledge knows that this is NOT GOOD.  Animals living in multi-story prison like buildings with no natural sunlight or fresh air cannot be a good thing!  Chickens must be contained to cages or have their beaks cut off to keep them from killing each other.  Disease runs rampant in these places and the only way to contain it is by pumping medications and antibiotics into the feed and water systems.  Then look at the environmental cost.  Building the facility requires lots of energy and raw materials.  Running the facility takes even more energy, just imagine the ventilation system required to pump fresh oxygen into buildings with millions of birds.  A fellow I talked to who used to manage biosecurity on an egg facility with 7 million hens said that if the power went out for as little as one hour all the birds will suffocate and die.  So they have to have massive backup generators for their backup generators.  Then there is the massive amount of manure that has to be removed, stored, and transported to be spread on other farms.  This manure (which is an approved Organic amendment, that ends up fertilizing much of the Organic produce consumed by dare I say hipster vegans, don’t get me started) is full of water-soluble nitrogen and toxins from all the medications and feed additives and most of this ends up polluting the soil, streams, rivers and eventually the ocean.  The Farmworkers that do the work in these facilities on a daily basis are breathing in all the toxic fumes, picking up truckloads of dead birds, handling mountains of manure and when Avian Flu inevitably comes in they are required to euthanize the millions of birds either by shutting off the ventilation or “more humanely” spraying a foam that suffocates the chickens, then they are scooped up by the dump truck load and piled up to be burned or composted.  Needless to say these are not ideal working conditions.  And all of this is done in the name of efficiency and corporate profits.  The result is a lot of cheap food for American families.  This cheap food is lacking in many nutrients and can contain various toxins that lead to all kinds of human health problems.  When we compare the savings from this efficient system to the costs paid by the Animals, the environment, the farmworkers and our human health do we still think that this cheap food is worth it?  I sure don’t think so!  So how do we transition away from this pervasive industrial model?  The answer is complex.  Economics paly a huge role.  Hens raised outdoors on pasture will never produce as cheap of eggs, in fact our costs are about double that of the industrial model.  These costs mostly are incurred by lower production rates because of fluctuations in temperature, weather events and natural lighting fluctuations, feed conversion (there is a certain amount of feed waste that happens on pasture that is prevented in the automated indoor systems, predation, and labor.  The other economic consideration that we just cannot compete with is the economy of scale, the ability for the factory farms to reduce input costs by purchasing massive volumes (literally train loads of grains milled in house), being vertically integrated and also the ability to operate on smaller profit margins due to the massive number of units produced… a profit of $0.25 per dozen is not bad if your company is producing  hundreds of millions of dozens per year.  Also a company this large is able to take advantage of supply shortages by jacking the price way up and making sometimes hundreds of millions of dollars of extra profit in a short amount of time and then storing some of this money away into the war chest to cover times when there is an oversupply of eggs and the price bottoms out (this exact thing happened over the course of last year due to shortages from Avian Flu and now a glut of eggs due to oversupply as a result of anticipating another bad year of Avian Flu that didn’t happen)  Because of these considerations and because the smaller scale pastured producer is inherently providing lots of unpaid services by giving back to the environment, providing livestock with good lives, providing people with good jobs and producing food that is much healthier.  The cost of our food is just going to cost more and the economic reality in our country is that about ½ the population is doing pretty well financially and can easily afford our food and the other ½ can barely even pay rent and put gas in the car and I predict that problem is only going to get worse.  We also have a political problem and an educational problem. The political system is built on a foundation of helping out the large corporations, surprise surprise, many of the owners and benefactors of these corporations are politicians themselves!  And so traditionally the political system has spent lots of money and written lots of regulations that are all aimed at keeping the industrial food cheap and the industrial farms in business with very little competition.  The political system is also responsible for the ever-widening wealth gap and the ever-increasing population of folks who are living in food insecurity.  Like my friend Will Harris says, “let us work on fixing the agricultural system and y’all can work on fixing the economic system”.  As if we didn’t have enough responsibilities as small scale regenerative producers, another responsibility that we have is to educate the general population and do our best to educate politicians about these struggles that we face and the costs that we all are paying collectively by continuing to rely on the current industrial agricultural system.  We also have to educate folks about the unfortunate truth that you no longer can trust labels at the grocery store.  Just because a label says Pasture Raised or Grass Fed or even Organic, does not mean that you’re actually getting the real thing.  We need highly educated consumers and food buyers who are committed to revolutionizing the food system.  I am encouraged by the positive change that I have seen over the past 10 years.  More and more people are waking up to the realization that they want to be healthy and want the planet to be healthy and in the midst of this time of global crisis one of the most impactful things we all can do is to participate in and support the regenerative agriculture movement.