More Than Just Sustenance

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posted on

February 20, 2024

As you may know from reading the description of Polyface stewing hens, these girls are a storehouse of nutrients for us humans. Much of that nutrition is present in the bird’s fat.

After two or three years on the pasture eating grass, worms, insects, and small rodents, she has accumulated a wealth of fat-soluble vitamins (A, D, K), as well as omega-3, conjugated linoleic acid (CLA), and other healthful fatty acids. That’s what makes the fat so deep yellow compared to the pale yellow fat on the Polyface broilers (meat birds).

In contrast to the stewing hens’ longer life on the pasture, the broiler chickens spend only an average of 8 weeks on pasture before they are processed. That’s not enough time to store away the amount of nutrients that make the fat darker yellow. The deeper the color, the more the nutrients and the richer the flavor.

The same concept of fat color applies also to the color of the meat. The dark meat (leg and thigh) has a higher level of nutrition and tastier flavor than the light meat (breast), because there is more fat present in the leg than in the breast.

In certain cultures, people eat chicken leg meat and throw away the breast. This is surprising to many in our culture, who have become convinced that breast meat is more healthful since it is lower in fat than leg meat.

We are slowly re-learning that animal fat is where the nutrition and the flavor reside.

If you prepare a stewing hen by roasting or baking, you will be disappointed in the results. The meat has an unpleasant texture — tough and stringy. Leave the baking and roasting for the broiler chickens. They’re perfect for that cooking method.

For the most enjoyable culinary experience with a stewing hen, make a nice golden stock, then strain it and discard the meat. This is not wasteful because after simmering for 12 to 24 hours, the nutrients from the fat, meat, and bones are in the liquid.

With the broilers, you enjoy juicy, tender meat. With the stewing hens, you glean superior flavor and nutritional value. For best results, make stock with a stewing hen and discard the meat, then roast a broiler and add the meat from the broiler to the stock. Don’t forget the onion, carrot, and celery for additional color and aroma.

This is the perfect sustenance to support your immune system.

May you be deeply nourished,

Susan

Events of The Month

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Duplication

"How does this scale?" Whenever someone asks me that question, the underlying assumption is that production volume requires consolidation, concentration, and centralization. In other words, the only way to feed the world is to make bigger chicken houses in one place, bigger canneries in one place, bigger machines and bigger warehouses. I remember well being vilified by a Smithsonian historian at a food conference where he and I were both on a panel. When I dared to suggest bigger is not always better, he interrupted me and ranted for 10 minutes on why bigger is always better. "A bigger fort was always bigger than a smaller one. A bigger gun was always better than a smaller one." He went on and on about how historical accuracy and authenticity demands addiction to bigger. But biology is not forts and guns. It's not mechanical. Critters have an optimal size. As animal behaviorist guru Temple Grandin says, living things demand energy for three things: reproduction, growth, and immunological function. All three must be in balance. When anyone selects for only one of those traits, the other two suffer. That's why American dairy cows only have two lactations on average. When they milk as heavily as our one-trait genetic selection asks, they don't breed and have all sorts of sickness problems. Nature does not scale through concentration; it scales with duplication. If nature wants more oak, it doesn't make one big tree; it makes acorns. If nature wants more milk, it doesn't make a great big cow; it makes calves. If nature wants more tomatoes, it doesn't make a monster tomato plant; it makes a bunch of seeds that make more tomato plants. Nature scales with duplication. At Polyface, rather than having a chicken house big enough for 15,000 chickens, we have 170 little 120 square foot portable shelters holding 75 birds apiece and giving us cumulative capacity for 15,000. But they're spread out in modules, duplicated, to give us the production volume. We run pigs in groupings of 35-50. A Smithfield confinement facility might house 5,000 hogs in a bigger-than-football-field-sized facility. The stench is unbearable. By spreading these pigs out across the landscape in small groups we get the same scale without any of the ecological, immunological, or animal welfare dysfunction. This could even be said of farming in general. People see the massive corn, soybean, and alfalfa farms in the mid-west and wonder how we would possibly survive without those massive, single-species outfits. The fact is they aren't even producing food. Half the soybeans are exported to other countries; those markets are drying up rapidly with competition from other countries like Uruguay, Paraguay, Argentina, and Brazil. Nearly half the corn goes to taxpayer-subsidized ethanol. The alfalfa goes to Japan and Saudi Arabia to feed racehorses. By and large, all that production isn't even food. The fact is we don't need to produce all those commodities and even if we needed it all for food, we could do it in a more spread out, diversified platform. America has 35 million acres in lawns. We have 36 million acres housing and feeding recreational horses. All of this could be turned into duplicative production, like acorns for oak trees. My point is this: scale as commonly understood in modern American lexicon is completely anti-ecological. The real mechanism for scale is duplication. A more democratized production creating volume through multiplicative nodes is the way nature works. This is why farms like Polyface, with spread out infrastructure in repeated modules offers multiple advantages. Polyface can't feed the world by itself, and we have no desire to build an empire trying to. But thousands of Polyfaces can feed the world. Indeed, they're the only way to do it for the next 500 years. This is one reason why we invest heavily in germinating new young farmers. Our stewardship and apprenticeship programs are all about this kind of duplication. In fact, Aug. 21-22 we're hosting the Stockman Grass Farmer's Launching Young Farmers conference where we'll feature 8 of our graduates who were 20 years old, no money, no land, and at 40 are full-time farming without government subsidies. If you ever dreamed of bootstrapping a farming career, you should come. We still have room. It will be the most profound agricultural conference in America this year. Information is on our website on the education tab. For most of you, the fact that you keep us in business to duplicate production and the farmers who will carry these principles forward, indicates your heart investing in an authentic food and farming model. Thank you for making it all possible.

More Than Just Sustenance

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Events of The Month

Duplication

Smart Cattle Grazing -- Virtual Farm Tour

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