Edible San Francisco

From Beak to Feet

By Wayne Garcia • Photos by Bart Nagel

To say I was disappointed would be putting it mildly. My heart sank. I was bummed.

My wife and I were enjoying a beautiful Saturday morning at the Ferry Plaza farmers market; our baskets were heavy with gorgeous summer produce, and we’d just purchased the season’s first figs. So what ruined this otherwise perfect day?

Chickens.

Or more specifically, the whole Marin Sun Farms chicken I was looking forward to roasting in our recently built woodfired oven.

For a country that prefers not to think that meat actually comes from once-living animals—smart, rooting porkers; gentle, sad-eyed cows; Mary’s little lamb—Marin Sun’s birds, with their large, yellowish feet sticking out of loosely packed bags, necks and heads curled sideways against the breast, and lifeless eyes, may represent too much evidence to the contrary.

I’ve roasted countless chickens in my day, and for many years Hoffman Game Birds was my source of choice. Raised in huge outdoor pens where they can roam and enjoy a diet of feed, insects, and grasses, their flavor is superior to that of so-called “free-range” grocery-store chickens fattened indoors in hangarsized open barns. When Ruth Hoffman decided to quit the Ferry Plaza market, I know I wasn’t alone in feeling a slight sense of panic. What would I do?

Dave Evans and his family stepped in with Marin Sun’s chickens. But with too few birds to meet demand—despite the $6 per pound price—one had to get to the market near dawn to secure one. Even then, the saffron-yolked eggs that come from the farm’s laying hens were often sold out.

Marin Sun did have chickens for sale that Saturday morning, but they looked different: vaguely pinkish-white, football-like shapes, snugly vacuum packed. It was little consolation to me that the heads and feet were in fact there, just stuffed into the cavity. I didn’t want to make stock—I wanted to cook my bird intact. (In my experience, roasting birds whole yields a distinctly more savory and succulent fowl.)

“What gives?” I asked Evans.

“Every time I turn around, it seems as if I’m fighting the system,” he replied. “We’re trying to do things the right way, but it’s hard when the rules are set up for huge agribusiness.” He explained that Marin Sun had built a costly open-air slaughtering station, modeled after the one employed by Joel Salatin on his Virginia farm (and described by Michael Pollan in The Omnivore’s Dilemma). “But the USDA inspectors didn’t like the open-air killing,” Evans said. “They didn’t like the loose bags and the exposed feet [for food safety reasons]. So I thought, screw this, I have enough battles to fight.” He phoned Alexis Koefoed at Soul Food Farm in Vacaville, CA, to find out where her chickens were processed.

Curious to discover exactly what obstacles small farmers like Evans and Koefoed face—and wondering if I’d ever get a whole bird again—I began a quest to learn more about the Bay Area’s pastured poultry operations.

 

A Marin Sun Farms chicken from the days when David Evans was still able to sell them whole.

Vacaville idyll

Arriving at Soul Food Farm, I slow the car to a crawl in order to avoid killing one of the 3,000 laying hens scooting about the property. As we stroll the epicenter of the 55- acre organically certified farm, with a vegetable garden that feeds the family and its workers, and where two pet pigs, Lily and Juniper, were cavorting, Koefoed explains that the farm had been deserted for 30 years before she and her husband, Eric, purchased it in the late ’90s.

“Back then, there was no house or garden,” she says. “We had three kids, were living in a makeshift home, and were trying to figure out what to do with all this land.”

The Koefoeds’ first planting was a small olive orchard, which was largely an effort to connect the children to the land: picking the olives for pressing has become a family tradition. The idea for raising chickens came to her later “as a way to make a living from the property.”

On a recent trip to France, Koefoed toured a variety of small poultry farms. One man she met oversees 100 farms each about the size of hers. Collectively they produce 2 million birds a year, or 20,000 for each farm, the same number Soul Food raises each April to November.

“I’m convinced this can work in the States, too,” she tells me, comparing the network model to the Acme Bread Company—which, rather than build one huge bakery to serve the Bay Area, has built a quartet of small bakeries in order to achieve the same result, with less environmental impact.

Soul Food plans to grow its own grain, extend the complexity of the land’s use for crop rotation, and plant more olive orchards, which will also provide shade for the farm’s laying hens and Colored Range meat birds, a strain derived from a French breed that thrives outdoors.

When I mention Evans’s difficulties, Koefoed says that hers were always less challenging. “Once I found out what the regulations were for the wholesale market, I knew what I’d be up against if we wanted to slaughter on site.” To sell to restaurants like Chez Panisse, Koefoed’s first and best-known customer, each bird must undergo USDA inspection. “It would have cost us $40,000 to $50,000 before I sold a single chicken.”

When it comes to slaughter and processing, there aren’t many choices for small meat farmers of any kind. With chickens, Koefoed’s only real option is located 35 miles north, in Sacramento, where Harry and Amy Cheung have been running New American Poultry since 2001. Specializing in chicken, squab, and chukar (a small game bird in the pheasant family), New American kills and processes birds the old- fashioned way—by hand.

Laying hens have the run of the farm at Soul Food Farm; meat birds are contained in roomy outdoor pens.

 

Its methods are essentially the same as those followed by Salatin, Evans, and other Bay Area farmers—just indoors and overseen by USDA inspectors. Cheung says the birds are treated very gently, and killed as humanely as possible. A worker places the chicken head-down in large stainless-steel cone (chickens go limp and docile when turned upside down and constricted, as they do when held tightly), and slits an artery in the throat, rendering the bird unconscious while the still-beating heart pumps out the blood.

“The entire process takes about 30 seconds,” Cheung says. From there, the dead chicken goes into a 140-degree scalding tank, followed by a spin in a rotary defeathering gizmo with rubber “fingers” lining its barrel. The naked chicken is then eviscerated, checked both inside and out by a USDA inspector looking for bruises and disease, and finally placed in a 40-degree “chill can” before packaging. No chemicals such as chlorine baths are employed. Cheung explains that, legally, the birds must leave his facility in their entirety, heads and feet on.

That wholeness is also in line, he adds, with some Buddhist beliefs about animals and our relationships to them. This is especially important to New American, whose largest customers are Asian supermarkets and butchers in San Francisco’s Chinatown, where fresh whole chickens are prized. Soul Food and Marin Sun are Cheung’s smallest customers.

Point Reyes pastoral

Founded in the mid- 1800s, the Historic H Ranch sits near the northern tip of the Point Reyes peninsula, where a string of working alphabet-named dairies lead to the long-inactive Pierce Point Ranch. Here, the old barn, schoolhouse, and workers’ quarters evoke a very different time, while the Tomales Point Trail dips and climbs over a ridge where elk and wildlife roam, with spectacular views of the Pacific Ocean and Tomales Bay.

Dave Evans’s great-great-grandfather purchased the H Ranch in 1939 and raised dairy cattle on it for more than 30 years. In an effort to maintain the ranches against post-war real estate development, a 1962 congressional agreement designated the area a Pastoral Zone. Over the next decade the National Park Service acquired (at “fair market value”) all 17 of the remaining active ranches, including H. While initial use and occupancy leases were for 25 to 30 years, the Point Reyes National Seashore currently extends leases for five years only. Adding to this challenge, some in the PRNS believe that no agriculture—be it cattle, chickens, or even oyster farming— should exist at all on the peninsula, that it should revert to total wilderness.

In 1976 the Evanses switched from raising dairy cattle to beef. Today Dave and his family maintain a mix of pasture-raised cattle, sheep, goats, and chickens, and share a nascent pork program with a partner in Petaluma. Evans is proud of the holistic nature of his ranch. The goats provide meat while also serving as natural lawnmowers, keeping brush under control. The cows and chickens are rotated on the pastures, creating the kind of sustainable synergy impossible to find on a monocultured farm. The cows eat the grass, leaving behind larvae-rich pats, which, when the chickens are rotated in, become part of a complex diet that includes other bugs, young grassy shoots, and an organic corn and soy supplement. In turn, the guano the chickens drop leaves a nitrogen-rich fertilizer, which keeps the soil healthy for the grass.

During the season, Marin Sun raises 150 to 250 meat birds a week, along with a few thousand laying hens. Both are cycled through the pastures: the laying hens in large hoop houses similar to those at Soul Food Farm, where they roam free in the daytime and are protected within at night; the meat birds in floorless portable shelters that hold roughly 75 chickens each. (Evans currently raises Cornish Crosses, but is considering switching to a heritage breed.)

As workers gathered birds to be transported to Sacramento for slaughter, Evans shows me his now-dormant slaughtering area. “You know, I’m no priest or rabbi, but I give my birds the best life I can, and I liked being able to end their lives in the same fashion,” he says with some sadness.

We discussed the USDA’s 20,000-bird-per-farm, per-year exemption that allows small poultry producers to process onsite, as Evans had been. But the rules stipulate that only family members are allowed to slaughter them. “Why they think my family would be more careful or sanitary than my workers is beyond me,” he said, half-jokingly.

Oh, and the precious heads and feet I sought that Saturday? It seems that, for now, anyway, they’re not to be. Although both Marin Sun and Soul Food receive whole birds from New American, the Ferry Building’s Prather Ranch store has been told it must sell Soul Food chickens with the extremities lopped off. Marin Sun also whacks the head and feet before vacuum-packing them in the cavity with the heart, neck, liver, and gizzard, extending shelf life from three days to five over the old loosebagged approach. When I ask Evans why whole birds couldn’t be vacuum packed, he replied, “The bag would have to be extremely large, it would be cumbersome and wasteful. I think it’s much better the way we do it now.”

(For a list of local retail locations where you can buy Soul Food Farm and Marin Sun Farms chickens, visit their websites: www.soulfoodfarm.com and www.marinsunfarms.com.)

The rolling abattoir

As the Livestock and Natural Resources Farm Advisor for U.C. Davis, Glenn Nader’s job includes helping small farmers develop niche markets for their products, with a focus on securing open spaces for grass-fed beef production. “These problems you’ve described are not unique to poultry,” he tells me. “The number of small processing facilities is decreasing, which makes it hard to build a business model when all the focus is on large production.”

As an alternative, he points to Washington State, which has successfully set up mobile slaughtering units for small farmers, and mentions that California is on the verge of at least two such rolling abattoirs. One for beef, lamb, and goat is located on the Central Coast, and another for poultry is in Grass Valley.

Roger Ingram, a livestock consultant working for the U.C. Cooperative Extension Service in Northern California, is part of the team involved in the poultry unit, which is slated to launch in early 2009 thanks to a combination of donations and grant money from Sierra College. “Picture a trailer 8 feet wide by 20 feet long,” Ingram says. “There will be eight killing cones on a rotating rack, and the trailer will be equipped with all the necessary equipment. The killing, scalding, and plucking room will be separated from the final processing section.”

In order to process under the 20,000-bird exemption, farmers will be required to pick up and return the trailer themselves (a manual will be provided); the birds must be sold whole; and, yes, by law, only family members can participate in the harvest. As Ingram points out, these mobile slaughtering facilities are not total answers, but they are a start.

Even for the most conscientious of cooks, it’s relatively easy here in the Bay Area to purchase our goods, return home, and turn them into delicious and healthy meals without giving much thought about what it takes to bring such beautiful food to our tables. Sure, we kvetch about $8 for a dozen eggs, $6-per-pound-chickens, and expensive grass-fed beef and lamb, but knowing what these farmers we buy from must deal with in a world built for mega-agribusinesses goes a long way to making such prices seem reasonable.

Follow Edible San Francisco on Twitter here. •