Hurry Burry Farm's meat birds are now wholly free-range chickens. All are completely free-range birds and are milk-fed for extra tenderness and flavor. The broilers are kept within electric fence enclosed pastures for protection from predators, but are free to move about, forage for food and exercise as they please. The sun, grass, milk and exercise creates the huge difference in taste between store-bought chicken and Hurry Burry Free-Range chicken. Why eat a bird raised in a sunless chicken factory, injected with water, antibiotics and a multitude of flavor enhancers, when you can have the melt in your mouth tenderness and superior flavor that comes from a Hurry Burry chicken.

 

Why eat pasture-raised chicken? Aside from the taste and quality, there are health benefits as well.

 

 

 

 

 

Pastured Poultry Get a Bounty of Vitamin E from Grass

Standard poultry feed is supplemented with small amounts of vitamin E. But as you can see by the graph below, it doesn't come close to the bounty of vitamin E that chickens glean from fresh pasture. This vitamin E gets passed on to the consumer. An egg from a pastured hen has 30 percent more vitamin E than the kind you buy in the supermarket.

(Lopez-Bote et al, "Effect of free-range feeding on omega-3 fatty acids and alpha-tocopherol content and oxidative stability of eggs." Animal Feed Science and Technology, 1998. 72:33-40.)

Switching to grassfed products helps balance the essential fats in your diet

There are two types of fats that are essential for your health-omega-6 and omega-3 fatty acids. The typical western diet is overloaded with omega-6 fatty acids and deficient in omega-3s, upsetting a critical balance. Look at the graph below and you will see that fresh pasture has two times more omega-3 than omega-6 fatty acids. Grain and soy, on the other hand, have far more omega-6s than omega-3s.

Therefore, when you switch to grassfed products, you are helping to correct the gross imbalance in the western diet. Eating a balanced ratio of essential fatty acids is linked with a lower risk of cancer, heart disease, diabetes, obesity, and mental disorders. (To learn more about this essential balance, read The Omega Diet by Simopoulos and Robinson, HarperCollins 1999.)

Antibiotic-resistant bacteria not found in free-range chickens.

One of the problems with raising large numbers of animals in confinement is that disease is more common, resulting in a greater reliance on antibiotics. Over time, the bacteria mutate and become resistant to the drugs. When we humans become infected with these antibiotic-resistant bacteria, there are fewer effective medications available to treat us.

A survey of E. coli bacteria isolated from poultry raised in a state-of-the-art confinement poultry operation at a university found that all the bacteria were resistant to the commonly used antibiotics, Tetracycline, Streptomycin and Sulphonamide (Sulphafurazole). By contrast, all the strains of bacteria isolated from free-range birds were sensitive to the drugs.

(Ojeniyi, A. A. (1989). "Public health aspects of bacterial drug resistance in modern battery and town/village poultry" Acta Vet Scand 30(2): 127-32.)

US confinement-raised poultry not good enough for the Russians

Early in March, 2002, Russia imposed a ban on the importation of all poultry from the United States. Vladimir Fisinin, vice president of the Russian Academy of Agricultural Sciences, explained his government's position in the March 20th issue of The Moscow Times: "I would like to note that American farmers are injecting chickens with antibiotics used to treat people. This is prohibited in Russia." According to Fisinin, US poultry producers use such large doses of these drugs that they accumulate in the tissues of the birds. "It is dangerous," he said, "especially for children and older people."

Fisinin also asserted that giving antibiotics to chickens fosters the growth of drug-resistant bacteria. US medical experts agree. In a study in The New England Journal of Medicine, researchers randomly selected 407 chickens from 26 stores in Georgia, Maryland, Minnesota, and Oregon. More than half of the chickens were tainted with antibiotic-resistant bacteria.

(McDonald, L. C., et al. "Quinupristin-Dalfopristin-Resistant Enterococcus Faecium on Chicken and in Human Stool Specimens."N Engl J Med345, no. 16 (2001): 1155-60.)

Cipro's sister drug, Baytril, is being wasted on chickens

Infected poultry are now being treated with Baytril, a drug very similar to the anthrax-fighting antibiotic Cipro. The FDA, health advocates, and an editorial in The New England Journal of Medicine have all urged Bayer, the producer, to withdraw the drug from the poultry industry. Bayer, veterinarians, and commercial poultry producers are in strong opposition. If Baytril is withdrawn, they argue, the United States will have to alter its poultry-raising practices.

That is exactly what needs to happen. It makes no sense to raise chickens or any other animals under conditions in which infection is routine, requiring the routine use of antibiotics.

Bayer officials say they need more proof of damage to humans before they will stop supplying Baytril to chicken producers.

Commercial poultry operators load the Delmarva Peninsula with arsenic

Operators of large poultry operations feed low levels of arsenic to their chickens in order to enhance the birds' appetite and increase their feed efficiency. On the Delmarva Peninsula (Delaware, Maryland and Virginia), 600 million chickens produce more than 1.5 billion kilograms of raw manure annually, which translates into an annual load of 20 to 50 thousand kilograms of arsenic.

Pastured poultry farmers do not feed arsenic or other artificial growth stimulants to their chickens.

("Environmental Fate and Transport of Arsenical Feed Amendments for Animal Agriculture." Cherie V. MIller, U.S. Geological Society.)