SEJ conference

Chattanooga is taking food seriously. Our Sustainable Food tour at the Society of Environmental Journalists conference visited two enterprises: Sequatchie Cove Farm & Creamery is a private enterprise searching for ways to market its new products.  Crabtree Farms is a local nonprofit operating on city property to provide both produce and education to teach residents how to grow their own.

This lone Dominique hen wanders around Sequatchie Farms. Others remain in a pen, but not her.

Sequatchie owner Bill Keener is one of the new breed of farmer, someone who didn’t grow up on a farm but figured he could learn how to get food from dirt. Under Allan Savory’s principles of holistic management, the farm’s sheep and cattle graze together, moving frequently from pasture to pasture. The plants the cattle eat are different from the plants the sheep eat, so the two species balance each other. Moving them prevents them from denuding the pasture, allowing it to grow more food, enriched by the manure the livestock leave behind. It’s a system that was the focus of SEJ member Judith Schwartz’s book, Cows Save the Planet,who also attended the conference. Her book was reviewed in the conference issue of SEJournal.

Keener relies on the people involved in the farm and their talents. One wanted to be a cheesemaker, so he studied cheesemaking and is now garnering prizes for its Dancing Fern cheese. Products are available in local outlets.

The farm produces beef, pork and lamb, with the help of a local meat processing plant. Certified processing plants are a problem for small local producers. Large plants handle only huge herds of livestock, leaving farms such as Sequatchie unable to get their meat processed in certified plants that produce cuts of meat that can legally be sold to the public. Operations like Sequatchie Farms are part of the new local food production networks that are making local food, with its better flavor and nutrition and lower energy use, possible.

At Crabtree Farms, executive director Joel Houser has created a lush farm that provides Community Supported Agriculture shares. A CSA is a way for individuals to support the farm by paying in advance so the farm has some cash flow, in return for a box of vegetables every week. Those who don’t have the cash to pay can work for a share – and learn how to grow their own gardens at the same time. It’s a great way to spend five hours a week.

Program coordinator Andrea Jaeger dreams up other programs for the community, such as Dig In Kids and the Community Garden. Chattanooga’s history of industrial pollution requires some special handling – testing for lead in the soil and creating raised beds if it’s contaminated.

As a poultry person, I was excited to hear the honking of geese on the farm. Geese need plenty of room and fewer farmers are keeping heritage breeds. Geese have a long history and can be a productive addition to a farm. They are vegetarians with discriminating tastes in plants. They were traditionally used to ‘grass’ cotton and tobacco fields, because they eat the weeds but not the crop plants. Houser has plans for his eight China geese to do their part on the farm, but they are youngsters and he hasn’t quite gotten that in place yet.

The geese haven’t won him over yet, but Jaeger loves them and they are now permanent Crabtree Farms residents.

Bee Whisperer David Reed, owner of Erma’s Bees, retired from the military and a government job to pursue his real work: raising bees. They provide the volunteer pollination for Crabtree Farms’ crops. His hives haven’t been affected by Colony Collapse Disorder, and he’s breeding his bees into a vibrant local variety that will continue to contribute to their part in an integrated agricultural community.

Their publication, Tastebuds, is available free all around Chattanooga. It lists local food producers, what they sell and where, including Sequatchie Cove’s cheeses. One of Crabtree Farms’ chickens graces the cover. Chickens, the mascot of the local food movement, remain controversial in Chattanooga. They are not yet legal in residential backyards. It’s an idea whose time has come, though. It’s only a matter of time before Chattanoogans will be collecting fresh eggs from their backyard Wyandottes and Rhode Island Reds.

Rent-a-Chicken

The NYTimes explores the possibilities:

By CLAIRE MARTIN

Published: October 26, 2013

Chickens are soulful animals, Phil Tompkins says. “They walk up to you and talk to you,” he says. “They want to interact with you. They’re like a cat or dog, except they’re a chicken.”

Gary Howe for The New York Times

The local food movement has encouraged businesses like Ms. Suitor's.

Gary Howe for The New York Times

One of Rent-A-Chicken's mobile coops.

That vision of affability, along with the animal’s more obvious role in the food chain, are among the reasons that Mr. Tompkins and his wife, Jenn, who describe themselves as homesteaders living in western Pennsylvania, decided earlier this year to start a business called Rent the Chicken. For $350, the couple will deliver to customers a pair of egg-laying hens, a coop, a supply of food and a water dish for a rental period typically lasting from May through November.

Rent the Chicken is one of a handful of backyard-chicken rental businesses that have cropped up in states around the country, including Michigan, Massachusetts and Maryland. They join what is known as the sharing economy, a growing category now estimated at $3.5 billion that includes companies offering products or services without transferring ownership. 

Read the rest here.

Waterfowl photos

The 2013 International Waterfowl Breeders Association Newsletter is headlined "Pictures Speak a Thousand Words." What a great array of photos: Brown Chinese Geese, Black Muscovy ducks, Aylesbury ducks, bantam chicks, Rouen drake, Runner ducks, Blue Magpie, young African geese.Lots more great photos on their site.

 This painting is from the March 1930 National Geographic.

 Art Lindgren and his family in Maine offer their ducks water.

 They make good use of it.

 Sometimes you have to make an effort to reach it, but if you're a duck, it's worth it.

These lavender geese are Dave Holderread's in Oregon.

If you enjoy waterfowl, join IWBA and get the wonderful newsletter. Even if you aren't in a position to keep them now, IWBA will keep you informed. Geese may be in your future!

Biltmore Estate

During our recent visit to the Southeast, we visited the Biltmore Estate. It's often compared to the Hearst San Simeon Estate, so I've wanted to see it for a long time. One of my favorite Christmas carol videos is Judy Collins singing at the Biltmore.

 Antler Hill Village is the farm section, where the estate's provisions were raised and grown back in the 1890s. The farm now keeps about 400 chickens, all traditional breeds, and supplies eggs to the four restaurants on the estate. They told me they'd like to be able to provide for all the egg needs, but that would require 250 dozen a week, and they aren't quite up to that. What with molting at this time of year, they are getting about 50 dozen a week now. Allowing for breeding pens and the exigencies of hens who aren't laying, the farm manager figures she's need about 1,000 hens to reach that level of production.

They keep the birds all together, which has resulted in mixing breeds, hens with Light Brahma plumage but the muffs of Ameraucanas. 

 Kids get to come inside the barnyard with the chickens. They get a chance to be with farm animals and learn how to behave around them, no chasing. All the kids there when I visited were delighted but calm.

 This sweet Naked Neck hen had a mild disposition and was sociable with all the visitors.

They rotate the flocks around to other pastures. This attractive chicken tractor is a centerpiece of that part of the project. The donkey enjoys their company and also acts as a deterrent to predators, although they have has some losses.

 Several roosters preside over the flock in the pasture.

 This Barred Rock rooster didn't think he needed to stay inside the tractor enclosure. I hope his faith in his ability to outwit predators remains justified!

Chicken history research

Research into chicken/human relationship to start in UK

 

Findings will form basis of a nationwide information network on poultry domestication

This woodcut of a Persian chicken is from Aldrovandi's treatise on Chickens, written in 1600.

Release Date: Thursday, September 19, 2013

How the relationship between people and chickens has developed over the past 8,000 years is the focus of a new research project in the UK. 

Researchers from Bournemouth University, as well as from the universities of Durham, Nottingham, Leicester, Roehampton and York, will be examining when and how rapidly domesticated chickens spread across Europe and the history of their exploitation for meat and eggs. Research will include metrical and DNA analysis of modern and ancient bones to trace the development of different breeds. 

The principal investigator for the project, Bournemouth University's Dr. Mark Maltby, comments: "This is a fantastic opportunity to work with a team of high international esteem drawn from a wide range of disciplines that includes genetics, cultural anthropology, history and archaeological science. We are united by our mutual research interests in how chickens and people have interacted in the past and present."

Work is due to begin in January 2014 and the research will be completed in 2017. The results will form the basis of a series of exhibitions in museums and other venues throughout the UK, making up "The Chicken Trail" that will tell the story of the chicken's domestication in Europe. There are also plans to display some of the research findings in butchers' shops.

 I look forward to the results of this interesting project! Documenting chicken history will prove very enlightening. The relationship between people and chickens is complex.

Heritage breeds for everyone's table

Following on yesterday's story in the NY Times about high-end culinary chefs comes a more homespun story from the Kansas City Star. 

She's a local writer who speaks from her heart and her enjoyment of good food. Why should flavorful food be the province of the wealthy and elite? These are chickens and small flocks can provide this rich blessing of delicious life to all.

Here's Renee:

Imagine going to the butcher shop and ordering a Jersey Giant, Barred Rock or a New Hampshire — that is so much more exciting rather than just saying “chicken.”

Barred Rocks in a Kansas flock

We see chicken as the easiest, quickest and healthiest source for any meal. It appears to be widely available, but over three dozen breeds of chicken are on the brink of extinction, according to the Livestock Conservancy.

This is hard to believe, but it is true.

About 50 years ago chickens were seasonal as well as regional. They were vibrant birds which had longevity in most climates.

Through the years, it became “more desirable” for chickens to have a larger breast to thigh and leg ratio and thus the human selection began.

While we were focused on making our birds resemble Barbie, with smaller legs and larger breast meat, we have managed to create chickens that are housed and have become relatively an unhealthy breed.

If a bird doesn’t have the immune system to live through the winter, how to we think it will help us through those times?

The heritage breeds of chickens still allow us to nurture our bodies throughout the year. It is a culinary experience, as the heritage breeds are much more complex in flavor and texture, providing a deep rich mouth feel.

Once you try one you will realize chickens have never been a blank slate for flavor.

Not only are these birds a culinary delight, they are absolutely beautiful. Gorgeous enough I have photos of them in my home.

Their feathers range from jet black to peacock blue and rich copper. Healthy feathers and comb on the outside mean a healthy bird on the inside.

There are strict qualifications in order for a bird to be deemed heritage. It’s almost like they have to win a pageant before labeling. They work really hard at it.

Frank Reese is known for his heritage breed turkeys, too.

They have to be naturally mated, grown slowly to reach market weight at proper maturation, have a long productive outdoor lifespan and they must be from a parent or grandparent stock whose genetic line can be traced back by the American Poultry Association as heritage.

Here are five reasons to choose a heritage bird:

• They taste better.

• The chickens are the epitome of free range; they have to be outside in order to meet standards.

• By choosing the heritage breeds, you will be helping to re-introduce the birds into our food system and keep them from going extinct.

• They are local. Most of the birds are raised right here in the Midwest. They are actually seen as a hot commodity in New York restaurants.

• They make a rich stock, which will actually help you during a cold or flu, at least that’s what my mom says.

With anything extraordinary, it takes time to cultivate and nurture for a superior product. These birds are no different. They take longer to prepare and they cook very differently. Never fear! Look at it as revitalizing your grandmother’s recipe. It is nothing that hasn’t been done before; we’ve just forgotten how to do it.

Basic Heritage Roasted Chicken

Makes 4 servings

For the Brine:

1/2 cup salt

1 cup sugar

2 lemons cut in half

1 cup mixed fresh herbs torn (thyme, sage, parsley are great)

5 cloves garlic peeled and crushed

1/4 onion thinly sliced

1 gallon water

For cooking

1 heritage chicken

1 tablespoon olive oil

2 teaspoons salt

1 teaspoon pepper

1 lemon cut in half

1/2 cup fresh herbs torn

2 cloves garlic crushed

1/2 teaspoon salt

½ teaspoon pepper

Mix together all the brine ingredients and add the heritage chicken. Brine for 8 hours.

Heat the oven to 450 degrees. Remove the chicken from the brine. Sprinkle the inside of the bird with salt and pepper. Stuff the bird with the lemon, herbs and garlic. Tie the legs together.

Bring a large shallow pot of water to a boil. Place a strainer or sieve over the boiling pot of water. Place the bird breast side down in the strainer; making sure the boiling water is not touching the bird. It merely needs to steam. Cover with a lid or aluminum foil. Steam for 3 minutes, flip and steam the other side for 3 minutes.

Steaming seals the skin, which will lock in moisture.

Carefully remove the bird from the steam pot. Place on a baking pan with a rack breast side up. Place in oven for 10 minutes at 425 degrees. Flip over and bake for an additional 10 minutes. Cover the chicken with foil, turn the oven down to 325 degrees and bake for 60 minutes flipping back to breast side up after 30 minutes. Roast until internal temperature reaches 175 degrees at the hip joint.

To make crispy skin, uncover the chicken for the last 5 minutes of roasting.

Heritage birds can be purchased at Good Shepherd Poultry Ranch and Synergistic Acres.

Renee Kelly is the owner of Renee Kelly’s Harvest in Johnson County. Her passion lies in changing the food system, one plate at a time. Her inspiration is Mother Nature and the many growers in the Kansas City area.

Chickens are News

Lots of Chickens in the News! On one hand, the public is clamoring for more cheap chicken, which means more birds raised in crowded confinement. The following story is from The Economist:

ROASTED, fried or served with noodles, chicken is on its way to becoming the world’s favourite meat. Diners currently chomp through more pork—some 114m tonnes a year compared with 106m tonnes for poultry. But chicken consumption is growing faster—by 2.5% a year compared with 1.5% for pig meat—and is on track to overtake pork before 2020. And much more chicken is traded across borders: some 13.3m tonnes a year compared with 8.6m tonnes of beef and 7.2m tonnes of pork, according to the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation. Chicken is on a roll.
The growing taste for fowl is a result of increasing prosperity in emerging markets, meaning that people can afford to put more meat on the table. Chicken tops the pecking order as the most affordable. It takes far less feed to produce a kilo of chicken than the equivalent amount of pork or beef. And religious strictures that bar beef and pork from cooking pots around the world do not apply to poultry.

The taste for chicken will boost production to 128m tonnes a year by 2020, according to Rabobank, a Dutch bank. The proportion hitting global markets will grow too, from around 14% to 17% of total output. The main impediments to faster cross-border growth are consumers’ preferences for fresh chicken and government policies to protect domestic agriculture, but rising food prices should stoke the appetite for cheaper, imported meat.
The business of raising chicken is generally concentrated in countries where grain is plentiful. Canny chicken farmers have also focused on places like Brazil where poor infrastructure makes it harder for grain producers to get their goods to market and to fetch global prices. That suppresses feed prices, which make up 50-70% of total costs. Production costs in America and Brazil, the world’s biggest producers, which between them provide two-thirds of chicken exports, are 30% below those in Europe and China, according to Nan-Dirk Mulder of Rabobank.
Trading chicken is far more complicated than merely plucking, freezing and dispatching the birds. Chickens don’t get sold whole; exporters have to optimise the “break-up value” of their fowl. The Western palate much prefers white breast meat. Asian consumers prize the more flavoursome brown meat from the thigh and leg. White meat may fetch four times more than brown in the West but costs much the same in China. Europe, a net exporter of chicken, sends legs and feet to Asia but imports white meat.
Wings, irritatingly limited by evolution to two per bird, are in short supply worldwide and prices are high. McDonald’s is rumoured to have been stockpiling them in preparation for the roll-out, which began this week, of its “Mighty Wings” range in America. But the dynamics of the global market is good news for rich-world consumers. The growth in Asian demand for chicken should mean a glut of white meat and lower prices in years to come.

But the NY Times is looking at a special program to raise heritage breed chickens on more interesting food for a longer time to produce better flavor for high-end chefs. Although the breeds involved are not mentioned, they must have some Buff Brahma influence. The article calls  them Green Circle and refers to "a heritage-breed chicken (in this case, one common to Gascony, the region of southwestern France" and "a heritage crossbreed." This could be the beginning of better understanding of the difference between heritage chickens raised on pasture and industrial chickens.

By JEFF GORDINIER

Published: September 16, 2013 151 Comments

EPHRATA, Pa. — They may be the most pampered chickens on the planet.

The chickens live on property owned by Leon Zimmerman, an Amish farmer and father of 12.

On certain days, a truck pulls up alongside their quiet, spacious coop on an Amish farm here and delivers a feast that seems tailored to a flock of two-legged aristocrats. Before long, the rust-colored birds are pecking away at vegetable peelings and day-old bread from some of Manhattan’s most elegant restaurants, like Per Se, Daniel, Gramercy Tavern, the Modern and David Burke Townhouse.

It is all part of an experiment that is bringing together elite chefs, preindustrial farming practices and a breed of French poultry that is rarely found in the United States. The goal: to see whether American restaurants can turn back the culinary clock and rediscover “what a chicken should taste like,” said Ariane Daguin, the pioneering businesswoman who is behind the idea.

Can scraps from acclaimed restaurants, where the best ingredients are used, create the table-to-farm-to-table chicken of the future — and the past?

New York diners will get to nibble on the results this week. After having been fattened up in Pennsylvania, about 220 of what the D’Artagnan company is calling Green Circle chickens will start showing up (usually roasted) on dinner plates at the same restaurants that helped feed them. For high-end chefs, who engage in a perpetual contest to track down the purest and most rarefied ingredients, it is a tantalizing prospect.

“When I tasted it, I was like, ‘Whoa,’ ” said Jean-Georges Vongerichten, who plans to start incorporating the chickens into his ever-evolving menus. Witnesses say that after his first bite, Mr. Vongerichten was on the verge of tears; Daniel Humm, the chef at Eleven Madison Park, consumed an entire chicken in one sitting.

Still, a few raised eyebrows are to be expected. The image of chickens gorging on four-star ingredients can seem a rather operatic manifestation of today’s obsessions over food.

“I do think in some ways it’s a wonderful reaction to corporate poultry and corporate farming in general,” said Matthew Mills, a creator of “Fodder,” a satirical online show from the Cooking Channel. “But at the same time, it swings so far to the other side that it’s almost an Onion headline.” He cited a well-known episode of “Portlandia,” in which two diners aggressively interrogate a waiter about the provenance of a chicken.

Clark Wolf, a prominent restaurant consultant, agreed. “On one side, it sounds kind of wonderful and magical, and on the other side it sounds like the biggest stunt I’ve ever heard,” he said. “I mean, you know — let them eat zucchini?”

Ms. Daguin, the French-born founder and chief executive of D’Artagnan, a company that has played a major role in bringing ingredients like foie gras, game birds and Berkshire pork into the broader American marketplace, said that it was not a stunt, but part of a continuing mission to change the world by changing its palates.

Ms. Daguin, 55, recalled moving to Greenwich, Conn., from France in 1977 to work as an au pair and getting her first bite of mass-produced American chicken. “It was a crime,” she said.

For Ms. Daguin (as for Gallic chefs like Mr. Vongerichten and Daniel Boulud), a distaste for chicken that was “mushy and full of water,” as she put it, was intensified by nostalgic memories of chickens back home that wandered around the yard nibbling on carrot tops, onion skins and old baguettes — and ended up tasting rich and meaty, with an almost chewy texture.

What would happen, she wondered, if you took a heritage-breed chicken (in this case, one common to Gascony, the region of southwestern France where she grew up) and fed it scraps from fine restaurants?

For chefs like Michael Anthony at Gramercy Tavern, there is a philosophical appeal in finding uses for those scraps — and in supporting a fresh but old-school alternative to factory farming. “We know the horror of the caged birds,” Mr. Anthony said.

Ultimately, it comes down to taste. In restaurant circles, a chicken that tastes like chicken is something of a holy grail. About half a dozen chefs have signed up so far, though the roster of restaurants is still in flux.

When Ms. Daguin approached Mr. Boulud with her proposal, he grasped it instantly, having grown up with similarly pastoral experiences. “For me it was not a foreign idea,” he said. (He contributed scraps from his restaurants as the food supply for a test run.)

Of course, these chickens are not dining on stale loaves from grandmother’s breadbox. On a recent afternoon at the farm, where a few hundred creatures inhabit a peaceful, 15,000-square-foot coop that would dwarf the size of most New York apartments, they clucked and ambled around pans of bread soaked in fresh milk, and white buckets full of leafy trimmings that would make a tremendous tossed salad.

“Some of this is nicer stuff than I have to eat when I get home,” said Mike Charles, a local poultry expert involved in the project.

The birds live on property owned by Leon Zimmerman, an Amish farmer and father of 12 who passed through New York City just once. “We’re not used to quite that much traffic,” he said. He has been raising chickens for decades, but never quite this way.

“We explained the concept,” Ms. Daguin said, “but for him it’s like: ‘What? You’re driving two and a half hours to give me vegetable scraps? I have them right here.’ ”

D’Artagnan poured more than $250,000 into research and start-up costs. Using the expensive hatchlings of a heritage crossbreed, and feeding them for longer than usual, has more than doubled the normal cost of raising chickens.

Mr. Anthony plans to serve a dish with breast and thigh meat from the chicken, as well as sausage fashioned from it, as a $22 lunch item at Gramercy Tavern. At some spots, the chicken will simply be incorporated into existing multicourse menus.

In spite of the expense, Ms. Daguin intends to take the experiment a step further, creating separate pens and roaming yards for the chickens that belong to each restaurant group. The Per Se chickens will eat only Per Se peelings and bread; the diet of the Gramercy Tavern chickens will come only from Gramercy Tavern.

The theory, anyway, is that each cluster of birds will have its own taste. (To get enough calories and protein, the chickens also feed on pellets made from corn and soybeans.)

“It’s kind of like a weird competition,” the chef David Burke said. “It’s like, ‘My chicken eats better than yours.’ At least that’s how I’m looking at it. I’m going to spoil my chicken like a pet.”

He spoke of trying to influence the flavor of the meat by throwing in mushrooms, celery root, pumpkin seeds, pretzel bread and maybe figs for sweetness. “Listen, if the chickens ate ginger and lemon, you would have a gingery, lemony chicken, I think,” Mr. Burke said. “You are what you eat.” (Alas, advance word has it that they avoid citrus.) Mr. Boulud wants to try garlic.

No matter what they eat, all these one-percenters of the poultry realm will meet the same fate. After 60 days, almost double the life span of a regular commercial bird, they’ll be trucked off to be slaughtered and air-chilled.

If the flavor of the birds and the spirit of the idea catch on with consumers, Ms. Daguin may add more Amish farms to the project. She sees it as a growth opportunity for her company, as well as an experiment in consciousness-raising that could influence cooks and diners around the country.

For chefs, the chicken is an experiment in creating an echo chamber of flavor. Or as Mr. Burke mused, “Maybe we’ll poach it in the same peelings that it ate.”