The Beginnings of a Better Broiler

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posted on

May 12, 2026

By Chris Walker

I'm warm and toasty as I write this, with rain falling softly on a tin roof, and it occurs to me that here in the Polyface brooder is the natural way to begin a barnyard blog about baby birds!

Have Yolk, Will Travel

I hope you're reading this over breakfast with some of those lovely, pastured eggs we talked about; I want you to consider the magic of egg yolk. As a chick develops inside a fertile egg, that beautiful yellow yolk becomes all the nourishment the little one needs for three days. That's right - a baby chick is born with a full stomach. Unlike mammals who nurse their young with milk, a chick has to wait patiently for its nestmates to hatch so they can all venture out to find food together.

Anyone who has started a backyard flock via a mail-order hatchery has got to appreciate this incredible ability - it allows us to send day-old chicks across the country IN THE MAIL. Now that we have grown to ordering THOUSANDS of broiler chicks at a time, we don't use the USPS. We get a special delivery van straight from the hatchery full of (surprisingly noisy) little peepers.

Going Broody

A healthy start is crucial for healthy meat birds, and preparations begin long before the first chick pips (makes the first crack in its shell). We nurture these birds in a chicken-appropriate environment: dry, warm, comfortable, and biologically active like a natural nest... But the nests we make have to hold 1,000 chicks!

Without a mother hen to keep the fuzzy things warm and dry, we have to take over. Before their true feathers grow in, the chicks need a room that's over 90 degrees! Temperature and airflow are constantly regulated with supplemental heat and large windows.

We have relationships with local woodworkers to recycle fresh fine wood shavings, and these become not just comfortable, absorbent bedding, but also the base of a deep-litter composting bedding pack that helps create our feathered friends' fledgling immune systems.

Inside the Brooder. Photo credit Hank Valentine

Pasture Prep

Careful consideration continues in the pasture. In a few weeks, our broilers are ready to move out to pasture. We catch each one by hand. Using special chick crates, we deliver them to field where our signature fleet of shelters is aligned with every detail in mind. Bins of feed await at just the right intervals to be close enough to hand-feed each shelter. Water routed from our mountain pond system is refreshed each chore-time with automatic float valves. Shelters are staggered diagonally to create maximum airflow and to prevent water runoff from shelter to shelter. The supremely light-sensitive birds always move east, into the rising sun.

Of course, this choreography includes the cows - it's especially fun to be out moving shelters in the morning when the cows come though! Every so often their paddock rotation brings them in front of the broilers to mow the grass to just the right height. The birds move best though shorter grass, but they also love eating the tender shoots that begin to regrow in the first few days after a cow-clipping.

First Moves

When we pull the shelter, and the little guys make their first journey into new territory, it's fun to see them rush ahead into grass as high as their heads looking for little morsels. Shelter after shelter we make sure each group gets a fresh start every morning.

It's more than a little awe-inspiring to watch our current armada of over 50 little chicken ships make their way - 12 feet further ever day - across the pastures gleaning grass, bugs and fresh air. We're growing a better, cleaner meat bird while direct-applying fantastic natural fertilizer at hundreds of pounds-per-acre.

All of this attention to detail is management intensive. It takes experienced eyes and hands to make it all go smoothly, and it takes more farmers to raise real food the right way - and thats a good thing. Good farmers need a solid start too, and while our chicks are making their first moves out in the pasture, we're learning to manage all the moving parts. There's a lot we need to consider, to pay respect to the beautifully complex natural system we rely on for our sustenance. The little chicks take their first steps into the grass. Our team of summer interns, our "Stewards," pull their first row of shelters. My Apprentice colleagues and I make our first foray into farm leadership.

We're all excited to make some first moves.

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.

The Beginnings of a Better Broiler

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