Wednesday, February 2, 2011

Organic Free Range

I'm reading Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma after having put it down some time ago. I was a little bored by the corn fed nation theory as I'd just read a couple of his other books and the theme was repetitious. And in my case, he's preaching to the choir. However, now I'm curious about his take on grass fed, free range and industrial organic food. An organic label says very little about how a plant or animal was actually raised. The term "organic" has nothing to do with the conditions in which an animal is raised, in fact, in order to satisfy the volume required to sell to most food retailers, it has to be raised in mass quantities, thus degrading living conditions and overall quality. Makes me feel good about our little free rangers and funny about the Google ad for Purina poultry feed I see on the right side of my blog.

We'd like to follow the Polyface Farms model of rotating chickens from one area to another on our humble little 3/4 acre, but haven't figured out how to make a portable fence that is big enough to free range 15 chickens without the grass suffering too much and rotation not have to be too frequent. Ah, a pondering for another day...all in good time.

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