Is chicken the best meat to eat?

If you’re anything like me, you heard years ago that beef is bad for the environment and that eating it would give you heart disease.  So you swore it off.  Maybe you even went vegetarian (like me) for some period of time, thinking that you were saving the planet and adding years to your life.

But being vegetarian wasn’t working, and you were craving some type of meat, so you chose the lesser of the evils…chicken.  You patted yourself on the back for saving the world, but never really learned anything about the actual impact of chicken production.

Then someone gave you a book about the chicken industry.  You learned that even certified organic, free-range, natural, cage-free chicken is still raised in a warehouse with 20,000 other chickens.  They might have a small door to a tiny outdoor area, but it’s so foreign to them that they never go out there.

The chickens are so densely packed that the volatile, nitrogen-rich manure off-gasses nitrous oxide and methane into the air (two potent greenhouse gasses), because there is nothing to absorb it.

Your brain exploded.  You nearly went vegetarian again, but then you thought, “There must be a better way.”

And then someone else gave you a book written by a kind of crazy farmer from Virginia that explained another production method that puts the chickens out on green pasture, protects them from predators, allows them to hunt for bugs and graze on green forages as chickens naturally would in the wild, and evenly fertilizes the pasture with their rich manure in a quantity that can be easily absorbed by the grasses.

Ok, maybe ALL of that didn’t happen to you, but it DID happen to me.  And that is why we love our chicken so much.  We finally found a solution that we can feel great about.

The environment is cleaner.  The animals are healthier.  And the meat is more nutritious…and delicious.  I’m mean, let’s be honest - supermarket chicken tastes like nothing…well…whatever you put on it.  But it has NO flavor of its own.

We’re so happy to be working with Justice Homestead to bring you this wonderful chicken that you can feel great about eating!

(And don’t think that I’ll leave the bad rap about beef just hanging there.  I’ll gladly dispel that notion as well, but I’ll save that for another day.) 

- Farmer Ben

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