Fiber · Breeding Stock · Meat · Vegetables
Available at:
Green Fence Farm, Greenville
Selected DC locations
Green Fence Farm is proud to offer pastured raised broilers. These are whole chickens, raised on our Greenville, VA farm in mobile chicken pens that allow them access to fresh grass daily. The chickens are processed at 8-12 weeks of age by our family at our farm, humanely and cleanly. They come to your table chemical free, antibiotic free, disease free, and guilt free.
Pastured chickens are just better. They taste better ─ firmer, juicier, delicious. They are chicken the way it is meant to taste.
If everyone in the U.S. ate just one meal (any meal) a week with food entirely from local sources, we would save 1.1 million barrels of oil a week.
Frequently Asked Questions
Should I worry about the safety of chicken not inspected by the FDA?
Under VA law, small VA farms can process a limited number of chickens each year without inspection. Do you really trust the government to guarantee the safety of your food? Have you been reading the papers lately? We offer you one better than inspection ─ come to our farm anytime and see for yourself our clean and healthy operation. Plus, we eat our own chicken and feed it to our kids.
Can I get chickens cut up from you?
No. We are concentrating our energy on providing you with the best, most natural chicken we can. Any time we spend on extra processing is time we aren’t raising healthy, happy chickens. Plus, you need the back and neck we provide to make the best chicken soup you’ll ever have.
Isn’t more than $4.00/pound a lot to pay for a chicken?
It’s a lot to pay for any old chicken ─ but it is not a lot to pay for a chicken that has been hand moved to fresh pasture every day, that’s been cared for without chemicals or drugs, that’s been dressed by hand and with greatest care. These chickens are to the cheap ones you buy in the store what caviar is to fish egg bait.
Why don’t you have the size I want?
We slaughter about 75 chickens at a time – that’s all our family and any friends we have hoodwinked into joining us can handle in a day. Like life, in every chicken pen, there are those who eat with gusto and those who don’t. Sometimes we run out of one or the other.
so our customers and family won’t think the silence means we have locked ourselves in the goat pen (again!) and call 911.
Pastured chickens are better than organic. The feed they get contains no antibiotics, chemicals from China, or other things chickens wouldn’t normally put in their bodies.
Pastured chickens are better for you. Because they eat a diet of, basically, salad, our chickens are high in Zinc, Vitamin A, and Vitamin E. They are also low in saturated fats and high in the Omega -3 and Omega 6 fatty acids that are so important in preventing heart disease and lowering cholesterol levels. Equally important is what you won’t find in our chickens: antibiotics, arsenic (the commercial chicken industry routinely uses high doses of arsenic to, let’s say, “clean out” their disease ridden birds), bleach, or fecal contamination.
On average, industrial chickens travel 1500 miles to reach our dinner table. Massive amounts of oil are needed to produce the synthetic fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides that go into the corn industrial chickens are force fed. More gas is guzzled in factory processing, packaging and refrigeration. In contrast, our locally produced chickens come from just down the road, require little packaging (so bear with us on our minimalist plastic bags), and no synthetic inputs.
Pastured chickens are better than free range or cage free chickens. Our chickens don’t just have a piece of dirt to scratch around in, a prison yard like escape from an overcrowded hen house. In their unique mobile chicken houses, they are moved to a fresh patch of pasture everyday where they can graze (yes, chickens graze), eat any bugs stupid enough to wander by, and fertilize our fields sustainably.