Similar to dry aging for beef, air chilling chicken creates a superior product, full of flavor and tenderness. We air chill our chicken for 48 hours before freezing, which costs time and money, but it’s how you get the best quality chicken on the market. In large, commercial slaughterhouses, chickens are chilled in water, which is much faster (After all, they are trying to process hundreds of thousands of chickens in a day). They even utilize the water to add weight to the meat, which means you pay more…not our style.
- Our cattle are primarily angus genetics, but we also have charolais and red angus.
- Our sheep are katahdin / dorper cross, which are referred to as “hair” sheep. In other words, they do not grow wool. They are considered great meat breeds.
- Our laying hens are golden comets. They are a great breed, lay lots of large eggs and have really good dispositions. Matter of fact, they’ll walk right up to us and want to be loved on.
- We use two different breeds for meat chickens; Freedom Rangers and Cornish Cross. The freedom ranger is more of a heritage breed red broiler, slower growing and yields less pounds of meat than the traditional cornish cross. They also have more really tasty yellow fat than traditional broilers and are very active, prolific grazers making them perfect for a pastured poultry operation. We highly recommend trying our freedom ranger chicken! We also raise Cornish Cross, the more common white broiler. They are fast growing and have a lot of tender meat, great for feeding families. All of our broilers are raised on grass.
We vaccinate our cattle and sheep on an annual basis, however we do not use mRNA vaccines.
We are better than all of those! Our laying hens live their entire life on pasture, eating bugs, foraging and scratching – in other words acting like real chickens. We feed non-gmo grain as a supplement to our chickens, creating rich, flavorful, nutritious eggs. Don;t be fooled, even though grocery stores and mega chicken operations label themselves as organic, these are massive farms with hundreds of thousands of birds that require a hazmat suit to enter, literally. We don’t have hazmat suits and will never need them, because we raise healthy animals on a small scale.
Yes! Our chickens are raised in mobile chicken coops on grass at all times. Research has shown pastured chicken is higher in omega 3 fatty acid and vitamins D3 and E compared to commercially raised broilers in confinement. Not only that, but the chickens are much happier running around in the grass!
Absolutely not! We get asked this question all the time by folks that have never tried lamb or maybe bought it at a restaurant and experience a strong or gamey flavor. Here’s the deal, a sheep that is over a year old is considered mutton, and that can have a strong or gamey flavor. However, lamb that is less than a year old, referred to as lamb, is absolutely the most delicious meat ever. Its tender, well marbled and flavorful red meat. If you haven’t ever tried lamb, or you want to give it a try, we highly recommend Dry Branch lamb. PS, the best way to cook chops is on a flat grill or cast iron pan in butter in our opinion!
We like to figure 25 pounds of cut and wrapped meat per square foot of freezer space. For freezer beef and lamb, please feel free to call or email, we’ll be happy to walk you through all the details.
Don’t stress over this, we have a recommended cut sheet that we will discuss once your deposit has been received. We can make adjustments depending on your family’s needs.
As a general rule, you’ll get approximately 40% of the live animal weight back as freezer meat. Live animal weights will vary, but We typically butcher our beef weighing around 1200 pounds and our lamb at 100 pounds. For freezer beef and lamb, please feel free to call or email, we’ll be happy to walk you through all the details.
Yes we are. That being said, regenerative, in our opinion, is one of those terms that is so overused and indefinable that it really lacks impact or meaning. Soil health and improvement is our primary goal as farmers, and We employ what are considered to be regenerative practices, such as rotational and intensive grazing, reapplying manure to pastures and creating compost. Since we do not till, there is no need for things such as cover crops. In fact, our farms have really healthy sod, which is much better than cover crops.
The animals we have selected to go into our meat program are fed a non-gmo grain ration in addition to being on pasture. This is the best way to get an animal to truly finish and create the rich flavor, texture and tenderness we all want in our meat.
Contrary to popular belief, ground beef is not created equal. Here’s some inside baseball. Giant packers, slaughterhouses and meat companies primarily use old cows (typically 7-10 years old) for ground beef as they are the cheapest animals to buy on the open market. Then they take excess fat from the younger, more expensive animals and mix it together with the old cow meat. The result: when you cook the ground beef, the fat burns off quickly and there’s nothing left in the burger except the old cow meat, so it doesn’t have the great flavor, texture and juiciness of high quality ground beef. On our farm, we don’t play those games. We hand select only the best animals for our meat program, then we butcher them one at a time, the old fashioned way. The meat from our cattle is already highly marbled and full of flavor, the fat is in the meat, so it doesn’t just burn off when you cook it. For the best burgers you’ve ever had, give us a try!
Yes! Our beef is hung in a temperature controlled environment, or dry aged, for 21 days. This creates a rich beefy flavor and unmatched tenderness. The king of meat is beef, so let’s pay it the respect it deserves. During this hanging period, enzymatic processes naturally occur in the meat. These enzymes break down proteins and connective tissues, enhancing the flavor and tenderness of the beef. This results in a richer and more complex taste. Hanging beef for 21 days before cutting it up is a well-established practice that enhances the flavor, tenderness, and overall quality of the meat. It allows for the development of complex flavors, the tenderization of the meat, and the improvement of texture, making it a preferred method for many meat enthusiasts and connoisseurs. Dry aging is costly and time-consuming, something that huge packers and grocery stores would never do, but it’s the best way to experience local farming and craft butchery.
That’s correct, we went to the time and expense to build a first-class poultry processing facility on our farm, which is licensed by the Kentucky Food Safety Branch. We did this for several reasons. Unlike cattle, sheep and pigs, there are very few local options for poultry processing. We wanted to provide a really high quality product to our customers, and this was the only real way to achieve that. Having our own facility allows us to harvest the chickens and turkeys when they are at their optimum age and weight, gives us the ability to provide high-quality air chilled product that sets Dry Branch chicken apart from the competition. Lastly, we just plain don’t like the idea of massive poultry slaughterhouses that slaughter thousands of birds every hour. We take great pride in treating every animal with respect and dignity all the way through the process of raising and harvesting, which cannot be done by commercial chicken farms.
Yes, our animals graze the rolling hills of Kentucky the majority of their lives. Along the way, we supplement them with non-gmo grain for maximum marbling and flavor. We work with a local nutritionist to create the best rations possible specific to the animal’s needs.
Organic chicken in the store isn’t as good as most people think. The “organic” label refers only to the feed the chicken eats in its life and not the environment it lives in daily. We go beyond feed to make the whole process better than the organic standard. It’s the perfect recipe for the best chicken in America: pasture-raised on organic feed with no antibiotics or added hormones. That’s why our chicken will blow you away.
Our chickens are raised on pasture, where they eat grass, bugs and act like chickens! We also feed non-gmo grain as a supplement to create maximum flavor and texture.