Poultry Your Way - Center for Integrated Agricultural Systems ...

Frank and Kay Jones, Earth Shine Farm.
FARM PROFILE • Pasture: Day-range
Frank and Kay Jones, Earth Shine Farm
Durand, Michigan
Pasturing Poultry Creates a
Different Kind of Product
Frank and Kay Jones work hard to produce the kind of poultry
products they do. And they expect to get paid for doing it. They charge
$2.90 a pound for dressed broilers they grow on their 10 acres near
Durand, Michigan, using labor-intensive methods, a topnotch, on-farm
processing facility they built, pasture, and organically grown grains they
grind themselves. They get $3 a dozen for eggs.
The enormous change that took place in the poultry industry starting
about 50 years ago was all about labor. Confining hundreds of
thousands of birds, broilers or layers, in buildings where they could
be managed en masse greatly reduced the labor associated with
raising poultry, and mechanized systems replaced manpower. It also
changed the nature of poultry products. On the plus side, products
were cheaper. Chicken wasn’t just for Sunday dinner anymore. But it
was different, too. Less exercised broilers mature at a younger age, the
meat is juicier and more tender, but some say blander tasting. Layers on
controlled diets produce eggs with yolks that are lighter in color and
milder in taste.
Is “modern” poultry better, worse, or just different? The Joneses believe there are health and social issues to
consider. Are confinement-reared broiler chickens exposed to too many antibiotics? Do they produce meat and
eggs with an unhealthy balance of fatty acids? Is denying chickens the right to scratch in a pasture both less
humane and bad for us as well? Some think so, including Frank and Kay.
To make poultry products their way requires, literally, that they get up with the chickens. They operate a day-range
system, in which chickens come into shelter at night and go outside by day to feed and forage, confined only by an
electrified net fence that keeps them within a hundred feet or so of their houses. Each morning at daybreak, Frank
or Kay opens the houses to let the birds out, and every evening, after birds come inside to roost, Frank closes the
doors behind the birds.
Housing
Why not just let the birds come and go as they please? The big concern is predators, Frank said, primarily foxes
and raccoons, but also owls that could come into the roost areas and wreak havoc on the defenseless birds. While
the electrified net fence offers fair protection by day, he doesn’t consider it adequate for the terrors of night. So
the birds are put into coops fortified with metal walls and chicken wire mesh.
Both the coops and the netting are portable, so when pasture gets eaten down or worn down to bare earth near
the houses, the houses can be moved. Lots of variations are possible, but the Joneses like to move the netting
three or four times to enclose fresh pasture before moving the houses. They have tried several other variations.
They used the moveable pen system developed by Joel Salatin, but abandoned that. “It was just too much labor to
move the pens to fresh pasture two and three times a day,” Kay said. “The pasture area inside the pen was just too
small and too many birds were injured while moving the pens.”
They tried using more permanently placed houses and fences. These provided greater protection from predators,
but sacrificed the advantages of pasture. The birds killed vegetation close to the building, and it was hard to
provide enough pasture without fencing large areas. Manure collected in the buildings, which needed to be
cleaned. Moveable houses just leave manure in place, to disintegrate naturally.
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MANAGEMENT
ALTERNATIVES