Sustainable Regenerative Agriculture

At Pasturebird, our mission is simple: we’re aiming to change the world, one pasture raised chicken at a time. 

Our sustainable regenerative agriculture methods are better for the land, the chickens, and our customers.

Regenerative agriculture has four basic principles:

1. Promoting soil biodiversity: Soil biodiversity, as the name implies, is the variety of living organisms that exist within soil. It includes microorganisms such as bacteria and fungi, and insects such as earthworms and termites. These organisms contribute to carbon and nitrogen cycles and are crucial to growing healthy crops for human or livestock consumption. As explained in the article linked above, from the government of New South Wales, soil biodiversity enhances sustainability by improving:

• Soil structure
• Soil water movement
• Nutrient availability
• Suppression of pests and diseases

2. Decrease/eliminate tillage: By reducing disturbances in the soil, which wreak havoc on the complex ecosystem living within, soil biodiversity is protected and erosion is reduced, allowing it to retain carbon more efficiently rather than releasing it into the atmosphere and reducing global warming and climate change. 

3. Reduce use of synthetic fertilizers: The advent of artificial fertilizers was a gamechanger for conventional agriculture. No longer did crop growing have to rely solely on mother nature to flourish. Crops could grow faster, and profits could be maximized. That may sound like a good thing, but the use of synthetic fertilizers disturbs the microbiome of the soil and interferes with the soil’s ability to absorb nutrients. The soil becomes dependent on the fertilizer and the symbiotic relationship with the surrounding ecosystem is fractured. To make matters worse, synthetic fertilizers accumulate in the soil and water runoff affecting not only the microbiome but the water supply as well. 

4. Allow livestock to graze using regenerative practices: Using conventional farming methods, livestock grazing areas are allowed to be continuously grazed, until they become barren and eroded. This erosion contributes to water pollution, greenhouse gas emissions, and low nutrients in new forage. When regenerative agriculture practices are used, the land is allowed to regenerate between grazings, and the animals are moved to new pasture land more frequently. The pastureland is healthier, there is less soil erosion and water runoff, and plant and insect biodiversity is maintained.

Pasturebird’s Mission

Our aim is to educate about sustainable regenerative agriculture so that more consumers (and farmers!) realize what a boon it is to our current environmental and agricultural crisis. Far from being a trendy practice, regenerative agriculture has been around for centuries, since indigenous peoples farmed this land in tandem with mother nature. Regenerative agriculture, at one point, was just known as “farming” and it wasn’t until the advent of industrial agriculture that these practices began to change. 

Thankfully, there are many farmers nowadays that are making regenerative agriculture a focus of their farming, helping to lower the negative impact of industrial agriculture and return to the practice of farming in harmony with nature, rather than focusing solely on crop yield and profit margin. At Pasturebird, we aim to give back to the land as much as we take from it. Our mission is to leave agriculture better than we found it, and we do this by making sustainable regenerative agriculture the driving force behind Pasturebird.

Bringing Small Scale Farming Philosophy to Large Scale Operations

What began as a better way to feed our own families has turned into a better way to feed everyone - focusing on sustainable regenerative agriculture so that our farm doesn’t just take from the land, but actually gives back to it. We’re able to make this a reality on a larger scale by making our pasture raised chicken available and accessible to all. By shipping our products nationwide, we’re able to provide responsibly produced pasture raised chicken to consumers all over the country, bringing both our products and our mission to a wider audience who may not have local options for ethically farmed, pasture raised chicken.

We’re big believers in the philosophy that you get out of something what you put into it, and we like to think that our sustainable regenerative agriculture practices pay back in a big way. Not only is our land flourishing (check out the pictures on our website of our pastureland 5 years ago compared to today!) but our pasture raised chicken is far more nutrient dense and tasty than its conventionally raised counterparts. For example, pasture raised chicken has been shown to have 50% more vitamins A and E, 21% less saturated fat, and 3x the omega 3s of conventional chicken. This is due to the wholesome diet our chickens obtain on pasture, by foraging for insects, bugs, worms, plants, and small animals. Because our chickens have such a healthy diet and are exposed to fresh air, sunlight, and movement daily, they thrive during their lifetime and their meat is healthier for our consumers. 

Before the advent of industrial agriculture, farming was done on a much smaller scale, and it was imperative that farmers nurtured and nourished the land - it just wasn’t feasible for unhealthy land to support a working farm. As recently as the 1930s, we saw the detrimental effects of failing to work in tandem with nature, when the Dust Bowl obliterated livestock and crop farming across the Great Plains of the U.S. and Canada.  

Unfortunately, it took a long time for us to learn from that mistake, but luckily, many farmers are now realizing that industrial farming methods are not beneficial in the long term, and the tides are beginning to turn back to more sustainable farming practices. Since so much land was negatively affected by industrial agriculture, it’s not enough for farmers to farm sustainably - the must farm regeneratively, to actually regenerate the land that has been neglected in favor of large scale monoculture and quick profits. This process isn’t always easy, and it takes time, but if enough ethical consumers support farmers that focus on sustainable regenerative agriculture, these farming methods can hopefully become the norm once again.