How to raise organic poultry

The Cornucopia Institute’s motto is “Promoting economic justice for family scale farming”. In many cases family scale farming involves organic foods. The co-director and spokesperson Mark Kastel offers a pretty stringent set of guidelines on how organic poultry should be raised. “The real gold standard for poultry production either oilers or laying hens is pasture poultry. The best examples of those producers have them housing their chickens in mobile coops and rotating those coupes out in a pasture sometimes following a species such as a herd of dairy cattle. Many of them have scaled up so they have thousands of birds. They are producing superior food in terms of taste and nutritional value and the informed consumer is glad to pay a premium for that product.”

 

The Cornucopia Institute harshly criticized the USDA for its recent failure to conduct an investigation of 14 legal complaints filed by the Wisconsin-based organic industry watchdog group last December. The complaints allege a systemic pattern of livestock management violations occurring on some of the nation's biggest certified organic “factory farm” poultry and dairy operations.