It's nice to hear about this.

Some years ago I participated in a EU-funded project aiming at creating 
educational material for "young" (read: new) organic farmers. The project 
was an epic disaster due to poor management but at least the texts we 
produced were OK: see the attached file for the texts about poultry. Note 
that this is for true organic farming according to the stringent EU 
regulations, but there may be a couple of interesting ideas there.

Organic livestock farming is indeed difficult. It's generally more work and 
the resulting product is more expensive due to longer production cycles. 
With true organic livestock, it is very hard to feed and treat animals and 
get as much milk/eggs/meat as in non-organic farming. In French 
supermarkets, prices for organic chicken are 2 to 3 times higher than for 
"standard" chicken ("Label" and certified chickens are expensive too, but 
less so). One solution is selling directly to customers: a colleague of mine 
just quit his job to become an organic sheep farmer (lamb meat). He 
advertises on local open markets and has a few dozens of customers in a 
30-km radius (IIRC) that he knows personally. Because there is no middlemen 
his prices are actually attractive compared to supermarkets. Of course this 
is for lamb and I don't know how it works in poultry (and I hope he's got 
his business model well figured out...).

G.


message de news: 4accab1f@news.povray.org...
> Since I started raising and selling chickens, I've become more and more
> aware of the so-called "industrial food system" in the U.S.  While I don't
> really want to use this forum as a place to opine on the nature (and
> horrors) of factory farms in the U.S., I do believe that there is a
> difference in the quality of the food produced.  Most of the people that 
> buy
> chickens from us (we raised 300 chickens this year), do it because they 
> also
> believe there is a difference.  Honestly, not too long ago, I was probably
> among those who thought "chicken is chicken and only hippies and
> tree-huggers believe in organics."  Ok, perhaps much of the organic food
> market is hippies and tree-huggers, but that doesn't necessarily mean they
> are wrong.
>

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Attachments:
Download 'poultry_uk.zip' (40 KB)