Why Pasture Raised Poultry?

The answer to this in short is because the benefits to you are multiplied! An additional benefit is that the life of the bird is much more natural, healthy, and humane!

Our pasture fed poultry is better for you because these birds have access to natural grasses, fresh air, clean water and sunshine. They are put on fresh clean pasture each new day. These things make our birds healthy naturally and the meat a naturally healthy addition to your diet.

What do you think?   Is it better to eat chicken raised like this?

photo courtesy of factoryfarm.com

		Or like this?
And like this!

Why It Is Probably A Good Idea To Avoid Supermarket Poultry!
How is poultry raised commercially? Some have called them poultry factories – The place where birds are jammed together either in small cages or crowded together on the floor of a fecal covered pen; ammonia and fecal dust is continually inhaled by the birds so that their beaks, nostrils, and body are covered with it! You ask, wouldn’t birds raised in such conditions get sick? Yes, without the aid of antibiotics they would indeed get sick and die. The antibiotics that keep the birds alive are absorbed into the bird’s meat, and later absorbed into you when you eat poultry raise in this way. In brief, supermarket poultry raised in these conditions give you a product that it would probably be wise to avoid.

Is Anyone Allergic to Chicken?
Some of us Clingman’s are or rather were allergic to chicken. How did we overcome the allergy? We didn’t! But we discovered that the allergic reaction was not to chicken, but to the awful things the supermarket chickens eat and how they were processed after living their short lives in those awful poultry factory conditions. We are glad to announce that we Clingman’s are not in the least allergic to pasture raised poultry! Having abstained from chicken for years, we are glad to now enjoy the blessing of healthy and tasty pasture raised poultry!

Food You Don’t Want To Be Eating!
How supermarket birds are raised:
1)      Close, high-stress confinement living.
2)      Enclosed conditions so there is no or very limited sunlight.
3)      The birds breathe air saturated with fecal dust and with ammonia rising from decomposing fecal mater. This dust lands on the bird’s beaks, nostrils, and bodies. Fecal dust is everywhere, and the birds live their whole lives in it.
4)      To keep the birds alive in these conditions they are give antibiotics, part of which is absorbed into the meat.
5)      To speed growth birds are given hormones; part of this is absorbed into the meat.
6)      To increase appetite and offset effects of bad environment birds are given poisons like arsenic, heavy metals and a “host of other additives that increase meat toxins.”[1]
7)      I will spare you descriptions of the bird’s high-stress truck ride to the slaughter house, how they are mechanically killed, mechanically eviscerated and further processed.
8)      After mechanical killing and evisceration the birds are soaked in large chill tanks that often have several inches of fecal sludge that came from the bird’s intestines broken during mechanical evisceration; this fecal sludge has washed out of the bird’s intestinal cavity.

Joe Salatin, in his landmark book said, “About 9 percent of the weight of department-store chicken is fecal soup. The soft muscle tissue [soft because of the way the birds were raised] is more conducive to insoaking, and the carcass sponges up the fecal-contaminated chill water. Of course, this adds to the carcass weight, but certainly does not contribute any to the health of consumers. This filth is why birds receive as many as 40 chlorine baths – how much of that permeates the meat?...”[2]

Our flocks are raised like this!
	Not like this!
	photo courtesy of factoryfarm.com