Grass-Range Poultry

We do raise and sell poultry, but in very limited quantities. The purpose for raising poultry is to supply our own kitchen, but we always aim to produce a bit more than we need. The excess gets packaged and sent out on a seasonal and “as available” basis only. Our main farming business is centered around Bison and Free-Range Hogs, and while we did raise poultry commercially a number of years ago, we have decided that we would prefer to instead build our business around our bison and hog operations.

Poultry products are usually only available at the farm retail store. When we have more than the store can carry, we will periodically send it out to the farmer’s markets as it is seasonally available, but this is very rare.

Since poultry is not an inventory product for the business operation, we are not able to take orders, supply for special requests, nor guarantee that a visit to the farm will yield the types of cuts that you might be searching for specifically. It is all sold on an “as available” basis only.

Holiday turkeys have been available for the past few years, but this is something that we decide on a year-by-year basis. Lately we have been maintaining a small breeding flock of about 6 Bourbon Red turkeys and we hatch their eggs in a small incubator. As long as they are prolific, it seems that we will maintain a moderate supply of turkeys for Thanksgiving, Christmas and Easter. Bourbon Red turkeys take 9 months to grow and are very difficult to have plump by Thanksgiving since they hatch naturally starting at the end of March and continue to lay and hatch all the way through October. This results in a moderate supply of Thanksgiving birds, a medium supply of Christmas birds and a large supply after December. You will often find that we have turkey meat available starting in Feb/Mar and into the Spring and Bourbon Red Hens in the 8-10 lbs. range available for Easter.

Since starting to raise and sell grass-range poultry in 2000 we have learned that there is an extremely underserved market demand in this region. We have strongly suggested free-range poultry to every new small farmer that has ever asked us for ideas on what to raise for direct retail sales. We invested in bison from day one and added poultry a couple years after that, then we realized that we could not sustain a well run bison and grass-range poultry farm, so we had to pick one and drop the other. It was an easy choice…bison. We added a commercial free-range hog operation at the same time that we added our commercial grass-range poultry operation (plus commercial goats and commercial rabbits), and came to the conclusion that we could maintain the free-range hogs on a sustainable basis along with our bison operation, but that the poultry, rabbits and goats were impossible. We have many customers that will remember the days where we supplied a very wide range of these products, but our evolution has brought us to our current farm plan for which we now find sustainable, manageable, pleasant and consistent…all very important for longevity and sanity.

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