We are proud of the conditions that our livestock live in. We take great care to ensure that our animals’ lives are respected and cared for while on our farm. We source our day-old poultry from a hatchery in Pennsylvania and our feed comes from a small family run feed mill in northern Vermont. At the end of our chickens' lives, we process 100% of the poultry ourselves. It’s important for us to know where our birds are hatched, where their food is from and how they are processed. We think it’s important for our customers to know, too. We breed our own sheep and raise only our own lambs, which are raised entirely on our pasture and hay that we harvest ourselves or source from other local Organic farms. In 2022 we started harvesting our own 100% Grass Fed beef. In 2023 we added Pork production to our offerings as well. We produce premium quality, Certified Organic meat.
Broilers
Our broilers are available fresh every other week from July through September and are always available frozen starting in July. They are $7.50/lb and typically range from 4-6 lbs a bird. Chickens are processed on Mondays and should be cooked or frozen by the following Sunday night. We do have a CSA option available: CSA members will receive a fresh, whole chicken every 2 weeks from July through September, 7 times. Chicken CSA members end up paying about $7.00/lb for their chickens and can choose either Wednesdays from 3-6 or Saturdays from 11-6 for their pickup time. One of our whole chickens is enough to provide a ravenous family of 4 with 1 meal, or if there's plenty of veggies on your plate, we find you can get 8 servings of chicken from 1 whole bird. Don't forget to save your chicken carcass to make a gallon or two of nutrient-dense broth! We enjoy using the broth to make our rice with instead of water, but it's also good straight up, hot in a mug on a cold day. We appreciate our CSA customers, they help pay for our feed and chicks!
Smaller and Larger Chicken CSA's available:
You may choose between a "small" whole chicken every other week (averaging about 4.25lbs) or a "large" whole chicken (averaging about 5lbs) every other week. Small shares are $235 and Large shares are $275.
Bulk Chicken Orders
Do you have room in your freezer to stock up? Many customers prefer to pick up multiple fresh chickens at once. Some folks prefer to "break down" (cut into parts) multiple chickens and freeze packages of different parts (legs, wings, boneless breasts, etc) for future meal planning. If you are tight on freezer space, you can seriously decrease the amount of space needed to store your future chicken meals by breaking down the chickens first. Hats off to those customers who part up their chickens, make broth with the carcasses and necks immediately, then use a pressure canner so that they can store their broth unfrozen! Bulk chicken orders are reserved with a $15 per chicken deposit. 5 chickens is the minimum order and 20 is the maximum. For any one pickup, you must pick up your order during one of our regularly scheduled fresh-chicken CSA pickup days (Wednesdays 3-6 or Saturdays 11-6). Prices per pound for bulk orders is $7.00/lb. Space is extremely limited for our bulk chicken orders, only about 20 are available each harvest. If you are interested in some bulk chickens, you may contact "Chicken Jimi" at jimi@clydefarm.com
Available days for bulk chicken order pickups in 2024: 7/3, 7/6, 7/17, 7/20, 7/31, 8/3, 8/14, 8/17, 8/28, 8/31, 9/11, 9/14, 9/25 & 9/28
We raise our broilers in mobile “chicken tractors” that we move daily. We get them as day-old chicks, and after 2 weeks in a heated brooder, the chickens are big enough to go outside into the tractors. They're still very small at this age, but we only raise chickens for meat from May to September when the weather is warm enough to raise chickens on pasture. Chickens are fed only Certified Organic feed from Morrison’s in Vermont. Raising broilers on pasture has several benefits:
1. Chicken Health: Fresh air, sunshine and green grass alleviate many of the health problems that these fast growing chickens face when raised in confinement.
2. Soil Health: Whether it’s vegetables, fruit or livestock, if you’re an Organic farmer your focus is on the soil. The broiler chickens are the best natural fertilizers of the soil, period! Every year gardeners and farmers spend millions of dollars buying chicken fertilizer to amend soil. Our chickens apply enough manure each day to give our pastures a healthy amount of nutrients, for free, we don’t have to touch it once! Waste = Food.
3. Environmental Health: When manure accumulates irresponsibly, it starts to smell, rot and will eventually have runoff. Gross. With our daily moves, there’s never too much manure in any one place. We don’t have to smell it and we can feel good knowing that we’re not creating water pollution.
4. Low energy use: Chickens in confinement use A LOT of energy. Heating, ventilation, lighting, constructing huge barns, cleaning out the manure with tractors are all things we don’t have to do since we raise chickens seasonally on pasture.
5. Lower cost: When the grass is rich and bugs abound, the chickens can eat up to 25% less grain than they would in confinement. Our single biggest cost is Organic grain, so this is huge!
6. Nutrient Dense meat: "Tastes like chicken" really means "tastes like nothing" in our factory farmed chicken eating society. Our chicken TASTES like CHICKEN! Your taste buds and nose know it too! You are what you eat: so start eating protein from healthy, active chickens — it's full of vitamins and minerals!
Processing
We are also a Certified Organic poultry processor. The biggest reason that we process our birds ourselves is control. We know exactly what is going on with our chickens and our finished product. When you take one of our chickens home, it’s leaving the farm for the first time since it arrived on its 1st day of life. If knowing where your food comes from is important, then this is your chicken.
As of this time, we are only selling whole and half chickens. Our half chickens halve the neck and backbone removed. Cooking a whole/half chicken is simple whether it's grilled, smoked, simmered or roasted. Parting out a chicken into legs, wings and breasts — whether it's raw or cooked —takes only minutes once you've got the hang of it. With the remaining bones and neck, you’ve got all you need to make a delicious broth. If you’re new to cooking whole chickens you’re sure to be surprised by the amount of meat and broth one chicken will yield: whole chickens are an incredible value.
2024 Processing Schedule (all Tuesdays): 7/5, 7/19, 8/2, 8/16, 8/30, 9/13, 9/27
Turkeys
We raise a small number of Certified Organic Broad Breasted White Turkeys for Thanksgiving. We raise them in an almost identical fashion to our broiler chickens. The one significant difference is that after several weeks in the fully enclosed tractors they are then moved to open, mobile coops that are surrounded by electric fencing: truly free range while the electric fencing protects them from ground predators. Turkeys are $7.50/lb for whole birds and $8/lb for halves and are only available whole.
Our chicken, veggie of flower CSA members get first dibs on reserving a turkey!
Lamb
We process our 100% grass fed, certified organic lambs in late fall each year and they are available as USDA inspected, individual cuts/roast as well as by the half and whole!
Beef
Starting in 2024 our Beef is now Certified Organic!
We are extremely excited to announce that we are now producing 100% grass-fed and finished beef. We raise our beef animals with our sheep. We call our combination of a cattle herd and sheep flock our "Flerd". Sheep and Cattle are both ruminants which means that we can raise them without the use of any grain. We do not use any synthetic wormer nor do we use any antibiotics or added hormones.
Pork
We raise pork out in the fresh air and source certified organic grain for them. We have the butcher use certified organic spice blends for sausage and the bacon has no nitrates added and uses real maple syrup and real wood smoke! We are sold out of USDA inspected individually packaged pork, but we do have half/whole pigs all cut up and packaged in the freezer (including bacon!) right now.
If you have any questions regarding our animals or practices we use, please don't hesitate to contact us.
Thanks,
Jimi
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