Monday, May 11, 2009

Heritage Breeds label


Frank Reese, http://www.reeseturkeys.com/, has been a leader in breeding and raising standard poultry and creating a market for it. This year he plans to breed 15,000 standard turkeys, 40,000 standard bred chickens, 500 ducks and 200 geese. He sells them through a local market, online through Heritage Foods USA, http://www.heritagefoodsusa.com/index.html, and through his site.
This new label has been approved by the USDA, a complicated process. It includes those descriptive words, Heritage and Standard Bred, and specifies that the chickens are not younger than 16 weeks old. Typical industrial chickens are slaughtered before they are seven weeks old.

He breeds Standard Bronze, Bourbon Red, Narragansett, Black and White Holland turkeys. His standard-breed chickens include Cornish and Barred Plymouth Rocks. The ducks are Rouen and Aylesbury and the geese are Dewlap Toulouse and Embdens.

Frank has also championed the cause of Standard-Bred Poultry, creating the Standard Breed Poultry Institute and writing a definition of Heritage Chickens, see the blog post of February 20, 2008. His work has attracted substantial media interest. Thanks for your work, Frank, and for keeping me posted!

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