Why do you make eating meat a priority? Here's my origin story.

Let’s set the scene: late 2014, in Durham, eating at a now-defunct farm-to-table restaurant. 

I was heavily pregnant with our first child. In fact, I’d be giving birth in just about a week. And for the entirety of our relationship, Joe had known me as a vegetarian. And a pretty firm one, too. I’d yet to find a meat-based meal that seemed tempting. 

But somehow, when the waitress arrived to take our orders, something instinctive within me prompted me to say: “I’ll have the chicken sausage and gravy biscuit, please.” Joe nearly fell out of his chair in shock. 

That something instinctive in me was my body reacting to a problem I already knew about: struggles with anemia, particularly during my pregnancy. My body spoke up to let me know what it needed. (And it took many years to heal the nutritional deficiencies I’d developed.) 

So, just like that, I started eating meat again. But I faced a dilemma. 

How could I put aside the things that had made me give up eating meat - the concerns about animal welfare, the desire to not support CAFO operations, the belief that agriculture should support and nourish the land - while also getting the nutrients I needed? 

This is an important part of our farm origin story. We learned that eating meat was essential to a healthy diet for us. But we didn’t want to set aside our values. So we started raising meat that could meet those values. 

And the place that we started is still the heart of our farm: non-GMO, pasture-raised chicken. 

We started a few years after that dinner in Durham with one mobile shelter of chickens. Our friend Dustin helped us build the shelter and taught us how to move the birds every morning to fresh pasture. 

We pulled the shelter across the pasture every morning for eight weeks. And then, Dustin came over and taught us how to butcher the birds, humanely and efficiently. That first time, it probably took us eight hours to process 50 birds. (We now do 300 birds, whole birds and parts, in about four hours.) 

And this was surprising, too. I thought I would find it disturbing to participate in butchering our chickens. I thought that it would bother me to kill animals that I’d worked so hard to raise. 

But I’ve actually found that I am quite comfortable with butchering our own chickens, because we’ve invested so much in giving them a good life. I can truly know that our chickens only have one bad day. I know that we use the most humane methods to minimize pain and suffering. 

And I also know that eating this meat is a healthy part of our diet, and that the life we offer our chickens is better than the life any chickens in a barn would experience. 

We started our journey into eating meat again with chickens. And it’s still the meat that I recommend to our customers who are starting to eat our food. 

Chickens who are raised on pasture produce meat that’s unlike what you’ll find in the grocery store, or at least from birds who have spent their days confined in a chicken house. 

It’s not just the nutritional differences - that pasture-raised chickens have higher vitamins and minerals for you in their meat. 

It’s also that being outdoors, getting sunshine, exercising, and foraging for bugs, produces meat that’s flavorful, juicy, and has great texture. 

And because we still commit to processing our own chickens, we ensure that we’re staying true to our values. Our chickens have a healthy life and a humane death. 

We hire a small group of local workers, and pay them well, so that we can support the community that we live in. We’ve grown close with those workers over the years, even having Thanksgiving dinners together and attending graduations for their kids. 

And we remember, every month, why we do this, and where we started. 

We’ll be processing chickens again in just a few weeks. And it will be a special opportunity to order fresh chickens for pick-up on June 20, the day we process. 

It’s an excellent way to get more connected to the food you’re consuming - to pick up fresh chicken that’s been butchered that day, on the very farm you’re picking up from. It doesn’t get much more connected to your farm, and farmer, than that. 

Pre-orders for fresh chickens open on June 8. Be on the lookout for the order link in our newsletters.