Food Safety Starts with Sanity
A view of our pasture-raised chicken, grown slow and with care by our co-op of farmers across America's heartland.
Friends,
Big Chicken processes more chickens in one day than we do in an entire year. They call it efficiency. I call it insanity with a side of chlorine.
The Trump administration wants to make it the new normal: 175 birds per minute at poultry plants, with company employees replacing federal inspectors. That's three chickens every second. By the time you finish reading this sentence, 15 birds just flew past an inspector who's probably wondering why they bothered showing up.
Last month I told you about the small processors keeping real food alive - folks like Cypress Valley who take time to ensure quality and dignity. This is a reminder of why they matter more than ever.
Christopher Lopez, a former USDA inspector, laid it out plain: fingers locking up from gripping knives all day, six seconds per pig head, and company workers making contamination "disappear" when he wasn't looking. His exact words: "They might do it in the name of efficiency, but not necessarily in the name of food safety."
Here's the kicker - these plants process 500,000 chickens daily without stopping to clean equipment. Meanwhile, the U.S. has 10 times more foodborne illness than the UK. In 2018 alone, 12.1 million pounds of ground beef were recalled for salmonella.
That's exactly why we partnered with Cypress Valley Meat Company to build Natural State Processing. With fewer than 30 small traditional facilities left that'll work with independent farmers like us, we had to create our own solution. While Big Chicken races through 175 birds per minute, we process 10-20. On the days we process, we handle around 3,000 birds total.
Here's a look at what chicken farmers know (and why it matters to you)
The math is sobering: 97% of all chicken comes from industrial speedways racing through hundreds of thousands of birds before anyone stops to sanitize.
But here's what keeps me going: Every week, customers write, shocked that chicken actually has flavor. That their family isn't playing bacterial roulette at dinner. That food can be produced by people who still have time to blink.
You're not just buying meat when you support farms like ours. You're voting against a system so broken it can't tell the difference between food and widgets on an assembly line.
Your farmer (proudly operating in first gear),
Cody