Scaling Up Our Pastured Poultry from Backyard to Commercial

Reader Contribution by Kristen Kilfoyle
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Hello everyone! First of all, I would like to apologize for not writing a blog post sooner. Hopefully the title of this post explains the reasons why I have been seemingly missing in action…

Since I haven’t written in a few months, some of you may forget who I am. Just kidding! (Sort of.) Anyway, last summer while I was interning for Joel Salatin at Polyface Farm (read my posts from that experience here), Dan held down the Sugar River Farm fort back in New Hampshire. While working full time, he also managed to run a coop of meat chickens and rotated five pigs through pasture.

Preparing to Raise Chickens Commercially

Through the generous support of friends, family and neighbors, we sold pretty much all of our product and planned to ramp up production now that I was back from Virginia with a brain full of relevant knowledge.

Then came the spring and it was time to build coops. Over the winter, we managed to secure a contract with an up-and-coming company in Massachusetts to raise chickens for them. This company essentially makes agreements with local farmers to raise animals for them following their pasture-based, humane handling model, specific to each type of animal (beef, pigs, chicken, turkey and lamb), which they then deliver to their customer’s homes. This company ended up pre-ordering a significant amount of chickens per month from us, which necessitated the building of six new coops.

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