Frequently asked questions

We process our birds in batches and freeze them at peak freshness, so your chicken is locked in the day it's packed — not sitting in a cooler for a week like store chicken. Frozen keeps it at its best until you're ready to cook. If you'd prefer it fresh and your pickup lines up with a processing day, just ask and we'll do our best.

Grocery chicken is cheap because it's raised by the tens of thousands in confinement barns, bred for speed, and processed on an industrial line. Ours is raised outdoors on pasture, moved to fresh grass every day, given no antibiotics, and processed by hand right on our farm. That takes more land, more time, and more work — and it shows up in a bird that actually tastes like chicken. You're paying for how it was raised, not just the meat.

On a lot of grocery labels, “pasture-raised” is loosely defined. For us it's literal: from about three weeks old, our birds live outside in open-bottom mobile pens, and every single morning we pull those pens to fresh grass. New forage, clean ground, room to scratch and peck. That daily move is the whole point — it's the difference you can taste and the thing you can verify by scanning your bird's trace code.

Real birds aren't a uniform factory weight — one whole chicken might be 4.6 lb and the next 5.4 lb. So instead of guessing an average, we weigh your actual packages at pickup and charge by the pound. You pay for exactly what you take home. The Shop and Preorder pages show a close estimate based on typical weights so you always know roughly what to expect.

Pickup is at our farm in Kosciusko County, Indiana — once your order is ready we'll message you to set a time. We also offer local delivery around the Chapman Lake area; tell us where you are and we'll work it out. Pickup and local delivery only — we don't ship.

We raise and process our own birds right here on the farm under Indiana's small-producer exemption, which lets a family farm process a limited number of its own birds each year and sell them directly to customers, following the state's sanitary and labeling rules. Because our chicken is sold farm-direct rather than through stores, it comes straight from our family to yours — and every package is labeled and traceable back to its batch.

Keep it frozen until you're ready to use it, then thaw in the refrigerator. Keep raw poultry cold and separate from other foods, wash your hands and surfaces after handling, and cook to an internal temperature of 165°F. Use or re-freeze thawed chicken within a couple of days.

That's your bird's trace code. Scan it with your phone's camera and you'll see the exact batch your chicken came from — when it hatched, its days on pasture, and the day it was packed. No mystery meat; just proof of everything we've told you.