Castration of male animals is a common practice in the livestock industry. Said to reduce aggression, the practice likely came about with the confinement of cattle in crowded conditions where the animals aren’t free to roam and express natural instinctive behaviors. As Will Harris says, you just can’t keep a bunch of bulls in confinement; it’s like the worst prison movie you’ve ever seen.
Today, there are only two businesses in the town of Bluffton, GA: a post office and a seasonal peanut elevator. The only thing you can buy in Bluffton is a stamp, and the only thing you can sell is a truckload of peanuts. However, this won’t be the case for long. We’re on a mission to revive our little ghost town, building by building.
Every week is Pastured Poultry Week at White Oak Pastures, but we love partnering with chefs to really get the word out. On July 11-18, chefs in Atlanta, Savannah, and Brunswick will feature pastured poultry on their menus to celebrate humanely and sustainably raised pastured poultry.
Recently on our blog we’ve written about the power of browsing and land clearing through small ruminant animals. Meanwhile, grassfed goat has been out of stock in our online store for a while. We’ve been able to enjoy having our goats on the farm, but haven’t been able to share their goodness with you. Today we’re excited to have grassfed goat back in stock for our online shoppers, and to share Chef Reid’s delicious lemon herb goat meatball recipe!
A byproduct of our red meat abattoir is a lot of intestines and guts. It’s not as much waste as there would be in an industrial plant that processes up to 100 times more animals than we do, but it’s still a lot. Most people would throw all those intestines away. We’re full-circle at White Oak Pastures, so we feed ‘em to black soldier fly larvae, which our poultry devour, and then fertilize our land with their feces. Win win win win win!
We are excited to introduce you to a special member of the White Oak Pastures family, Lisa Brown. Lisa started working with us in 2012, when we were still beginning to learn the poultry business. She started out in the processing side of our on-farm poultry abattoir as a feather plucker, and then took the initiative to learn all aspects of the plant. Four years later, Lisa is our Poultry Plant Manager, leading the day-to-day operations and overseeing our 10 artisan butchers in our abattoir. We are proud to continue learning and growing together with Lisa.
White Oak Pastures’ chickens and guineas live unconfined on pasture, hunting, pecking, scratching, and dust bathing. This leads to stronger, healthier, and in our opinion, tastier birds. It also means these birds use their muscles, and we need to take this into consideration when cooking a pasture raised animal. Apply some of the same principles we use when preparing grassfed beef, such as marinating or seasoning one to two days in advance to help tenderize those more active muscle fibers.One of the easiest ways to cook a chicken or guinea is by slow roasting it. Cooking poultry with the bone in adds more flavor and nutrition to the meat and the broth you have left. We recommend the following recipe when roasting our pastured chickens and guineas.Ingredients
