Business Changes: Discontinuing Pastured Chicken

👋Announcement!⭐️After almost 3 years in business, we figured out very quickly what our best and worst sellers were, and chicken was at the bottom of the list. So we made the tough decision to remove them from our business model after our last batch this summer.

Customers did in fact love the meat (we did, too!), but when push came to shove, our beef and our pork continues to bring in the most business, in fact, we sell about 5x's as much pork and beef compared to chicken. For the amount of work that pastured chicken requires, the distance and time to take them to the USDA butcher (an hour and a half away) and for what doesn't sell (mostly the least desirable parts... drums, backs, feet, hearts, livers) we were losing valuable freezer space to the majority of these items while breasts and tenders were the only thing that would sell. In fact, we wound up giving away the majority of these items to free up space, and when you're a small farm start-up, you can't give away most of your product and expect to survive. We're a business, not a charity.

Compound that with wild swings in the hatchery supply chain in early 2025 and having a very difficult time for several months trying to source chicks (which what we did acquire didn't survive long on pasture, nor did they reach an acceptable dress weight), it was a pretty easy decision for us before we scaled up with more infrastructure to support more pastured poultry.

Now... we will however continue to produce our Thanksgiving turkeys and our egg laying flock, though we're going to be reducing the amount of layers we have as we have more eggs than we can sell, especially since egg prices have stabilized in the grocery stores. (We went from selling 80 dozen per month, to about 30 dozen per month). We feed A LOT of our eggs to the pigs and the dogs because of this, so drawing down the laying flock makes the best sense at the moment, too. (If you want some cheap layers with another year of laying in them, message me!)

As for our farmers markets, we were exclusively only able to sell chicken at the Argyle Tx Farmers Market, so now that we will no longer be raising pastured chicken, we will be departing from Argyle next year and instead be picking up the Justin Farmers Market as their pastured pork vendor. We have one more special artisan market at the Argyle Farmer's Market on November 22nd that we have tentatively penciled-in depending upon how many Thanksgiving turkeys we move over the next month, which they're moving fast and we may be sold out by then. I only have 6 unreserved turkeys left in stock out of the 30 we butchered last week. I have another 30 going to the butcher on Wednesday, but these are much smaller, and will likely be made into cuts and grind.

As for what we have left in the freezer as far as chicken goes... well, it's backs, livers, hearts, and feet. The same stuff we've been giving away all year and it still looks like we'll be giving it all away. We're also about to deeply discount our chicken broth to 1/2 off... another business venture that didn't sell and it needs to go into the freezer by December if you buy some. The lard has surprised us and we actually completely sold out once already this year and had to have another batch made in July.

Sorry to disappoint some of you, but when we took as many hits on poultry as we did this year, it made sense to cut our losses now before trying to scale up (which we actually had plans to do this year until we couldn't find chicks and got such abysmal dress weights). We took it as a clear signal to pull the plug now before we dug ourselves into a hole trying to sustain a chicken enterprise.

For those looking for pastured chicken raised on the same feed and with the same practices we used, please check out Windview Chicken Ranch and Roman Heritage Farms. They have the capacity to keep everyone well-stocked on chicken as they've been in the chicken game far longer than we have. They're both good people with good product and we're happy to call them our friends in this farming venture! So check them out.

In the mean time, we still doubled down on our pork and beef herds this year with many more females to keep up with demand, so that's not going away.

Rock on, foodie rebels. 🤘🤘