09/29/2026
It's a farm, not a grocery store.
It was a cold, rainy market. My fingers were freezing and I was exhausted from processing chickens all week. Someone walked into my tent, looked at the coolers and said, "must be hard to stand here with nothing to sell ". I pointed to the coolers full of fresh chicken to which they said, "I only wanted ground beef". My heart sank. I am grateful that they like the beef and this interaction plays in my head on repeat. What do you mean I have nothing? I have hundreds of hours invested in getting these chickens to the market. I grow and harvest each one. I package and weigh and inventory them.
To treat a farm like a grocery store misses the point of it. Our animals grow on biological timeliness, not a factory schedule. I would love to always have every cut of every protein we offer but that isn't reality. We work with natures cycles. We grow our chicken when the season allows it, we don't try to start them when it will be too cold for them. We could do what the factory farms do. We could get big poultry houses and stuff them with birds that never see the sunlight. We could put our cows on feedlots where they don't touch grass. We could do things faster- we could pump everyone with hormones. We made the choice a long time ago that we will not.
We are not a grocery store- we are a pasture raised farm. Our animals know sunshine, fresh air, grass and love. A casual comment in the rain has a way of sticking. I struggle with tying my personal value to our daily sales. I know my worth isn't measured in the cash drawer total, but when I pour my life into every single pound of food on the table, it's hard to separate the two. We feel the gap when we don't have what you are looking for- not just because of the sales, but because we want to provide for you. But we will never compromise how we do it just to fill a cooler faster.
