Green Pastures Poultry brings to market chickens raised outdoors

Published: Wednesday, June 23, 2010, The Plain Dealer, Cleveland

It's a glittering, blue-sky day in Tuscarawas County. The grass is deep green, and the white-feathered chickens inside the mesh pen look pleasingly plump.

But Ariella Reback of Pepper Pike is not happy.

"They don't have any water," she says of the clucking birds moving slowly in her direction. She also thinks they look hungry.

Reback goes quiet, making a mental note to talk to the grower in charge. She understands that the Amish woman she pays to raise these birds is new at the job. Reback also knows that the woman has an ill husband who cannot work and that she needs to be away from the farm that afternoon, cooking a wedding dinner for her community. But Reback has a challenge of her own to meet: bringing the best chicken she can to market. That makes her an entrepreneur, educator, local-food advocate, saleswoman, truck driver and, right now, poultry police officer.

"Sorry," she says to a visitor as she heads off to inspect another farm. "But this is why we're out here."

Where does our food come from? How is it raised? Is it good for us? Good for the environment? Good for the economy? Good for the animals?

 

As more of us ask these questions, we are giving rise to farmers markets, farm subscription programs (Community Supported Agriculture, or CSAs) and home gardens.

Reback wants to answer each one of those questions as she builds her new home-based company, Green Pastures Poultry. She wants to sell a pasture-raised bird, one that has little in common with most supermarket chickens, even some organic chickens, which are grown indoors and fed mostly grain.

"Our birds live outdoors on lush farmland where they are nourished by fresh air, sunshine and the diverse forage of the pasture," she says.

"It's the way God intended them to eat."

But it's not the easiest to provide.

Reback's is not the only poultry company raising birds on grass and grain. Ohio law allows small-scale growers to process and sell up to 999 chickens a year on the farm without inspections. Birds sold at farmers markets must come from inspected facilities. Rare high-volume operations, such as Tea Hills Farms in Loudonville, are inspected by the Ohio Department of Agriculture. Tea Hills sells around 8,000 pasture-raised birds a year, mostly through farmers markets, caterers, stores and restaurants.

Reback sees potential for more sales.

"Did you know you cannot get pastured poultry at Trader Joe's or Whole Foods Market?" she says. "I'd like to see pastured poultry available everywhere. I'd like to see that every customer knows what they're eating." Jim Alexander, meat manager at Whole Foods Market in University Heights, said he'd be interested in learning more about Green Pastures.

Reback's tall order grew out of a simple exercise at Congregation Shaarey Tikvah in Beachwood, where she and her husband, Rabbi Edward Bernstein, found a collection of young couples like themselves who were interested in local food. They created a subscription program with a group of Amish farmers in Geauga County, contracting for vegetables throughout the harvest season. Everyone loved the freshness and wholesomeness of the products.

Several children were born to the group that year, including two sets of twins.

"We like to say it was the vegetables," Reback says, laughing.

Talk of purchasing local chicken soon followed.

That was heady for Reback, who remembers the deep flavor of her grandmother's chicken soup. She now understands the broth was made from "spent" hens, the name for older birds no longer producing eggs. While the meat was tougher, the age of the bird gave it flavor, she says, along with the outdoor diet of clover, young grasses and insects.

"You can't get a spent hen anywhere today," she says. She doesn't offer them right now, but thanks to her venture, more people in Northeast Ohio can get a pasture-raised bird. Hers live longer than factory birds, and, while chewier, also develop more flavor. Cleveland restaurants such as Fire Food & Drink in Shaker Square, Lolita in Tremont and Flying Fig in Ohio City feature them often.

Making time for her food passion

One year ago, Reback was a lawyer specializing in estate planning at Hahn Loeser & Parks. She left, giving her more time for her three children and for her passion for the food business.

While she keeps a few chickens as pets and for eggs, she had no interest in becoming a farmer. But she knew many Amish were looking for ways to live off the land again.

After hunting around, she discovered a new poultry processor in Baltic, in Tuscarawas County. It was a rare find. A 2009 study for the Ohio Department of Agriculture showed that since World War II, 40 percent of the country's small-scale processors have been put out of business by more cost-effective factory farms. Northeast Ohio has only a handful of small processors left that could do the work for Reback.

She started pulling threads together. The Amish would grow the birds under her supervision and get them to the processor by buggy or by paid drivers. She would drive the route herself in a little white pickup truck that her dad outfitted with a generator-powered cooler. She'd check up on the farmers, watch the processing, and pick up the vacuum-sealed results. Her customers would get their chicken fresh the same day or frozen later.

Last year, Reback sold more than 700 chickens, ducks and turkeys this way, and broke even. One chef asked for any chicken livers she could spare. Bags of chicken feet -- used to flavor soup -- disappeared in a flash.

This year, she is hoping to see a little profit, some stability and offer an additional line of birds slaughtered and processed under kosher dietary law. Those, too, fly out of her cooler.

Reback sees no irony in having the Amish, a separatist Christian sect, raise food that will be processed by Jewish law.

"I respect the Amish," she says, pulling into the driveway of Aaron Erb, another of her growers. "They worry about the same things as we do, including how to keep their children in the religion."

Erb shows her his duck pond and different varieties of chickens in different pens. He demonstrates how he moves pens twice a day, pulling slowly on a cord. Each move brings the birds to a fresh batch of grass and insects and leaves behind a fertilized square of pasture.

"Chickens are meant to be part of a farm's polyculture," Reback says. On a small- to medium-size farm, she adds, the problems of large-scale manure disposal are not issues.

Erb also opens the door to a small wooden building where chicks are being kept in 80-degree warmth before they're ready to go outdoors. He hands his 3-year-old son one of the downy, golden birds, which the child strokes gently with his small fingers.

Erb invites Reback up to the house where his wife, Nancy, is in the kitchen hulling strawberries with her two daughters, both sporting berry-stained lips. Talk turns to conventional chicken-farming methods. Erb says he knows how it works because his brother, Marvin, grows for a major manufacturer on his property across the street.

It makes for lively family discussions, he says.

Marvin's birds eat more and grow faster, said Erb, "but they still don't taste as good as ours."

"We call theirs 'blown-up' birds," adds his wife.

Erb invites Reback to stop in at his brother's chicken building and take a look.

She does.

She opens the door a crack and then hesitates. She opens it wider and peers into a dimly lit building the length of a football field. It is a blanket of white-feathered birds as far as the eye can see, with no noticeable access to the outdoors.

She closes the door, her jaw drops.

'I feel like I'm planting seeds'

Reback shows up too late at Pleasant Valley Poultry in Baltic to watch her birds being processed. They already have been dropped headfirst into an open metal cone, throats slit and blood drained. They have been put in a brief hot-water bath to soften their skin and into a rotating drum with rubber fingers to knock off the feathers. A line of Amish girls and women in rubber boots, gloves and waterproof aprons are now cutting and sorting parts under the supervision of inspectors from the Ohio Department of Agriculture. Finally, the birds are chilled to 40 degrees and packed.

Reback says she has come to terms with chicken slaughter.

Last year, in her first koshering ritual, she held birds as the rabbi slaughtered them.

"It's a very powerful experience to realize I've raised this food," she says. "I feel like I'm planting seeds, growing my own food and cooking it."

Within this spiritual experience, she wants to provide a respectable wage for everyone involved. She calls her relationship with the Amish a partnership.

Processor Aden Troyer said he feels similarly about the money, although it may take him some time to get there. He invested $70,000 to establish a processing facility next to his blacksmithing shop. Right now, nonfamily workers get minimum wage.

"I hope someday to offer competitive wages," he said.

On a cooler near the front of the processing room, Reback flips open her laptop to calculate the weight of each bird and write a check out to Marion Troyer. Marion is Aden's 18-year-old son who processes chickens and grows for Green Pastures.

"This is where old-style farming meets new technology," Reback said, typing away.

Now she must sell the results.

Related topics: chickens, Green Pastures Poultry, organic, pasture-raised