Pasture-Raised Chicken
The best chicken you can buy
As part of the Mulligan Farms philosophy, we exclusively raise happy animals. We ensure their happiness by creating for them an environment in which they can just be themselves, getting as much exercise as they like, while eating tasty, healthy food.
Mulligan Farms chickens eat high-quality food. They get exercise and sunlight. They are given space to be happy chickens. They are never given antibiotics or hormones. They are slaughtered humanely. How animals are raised and fed have a gigantic impact on how they taste, which is why our chickens are the best tasting chickens you can buy.
Chickens on pasture
A happy chicken is a chicken that's free to run around outside while breathing fresh air, scratching in the dirt, and catching bugs. That's why we raise our chickens on our beautiful pastures.
Our chickens live on pastures for the majority of their lives, spending their time in our moveable coops. The coops give the chicken access to sunlight and shade, the cooling Montana breeze, and enough room to move around and scratch the earth.
Every day, we move our portable chicken coops. When the chickens get older, we move them twice per day. Every morning, they get a new, fresh slice of grass to scratch around on, new patches of weeds and grass to chew up, new ants and grasshoppers and spiders to eat.
Chicken health
Their daily fresh slice of grass keeps our birds healthy, as well. They're never forced to muck about in a filthy environment, a huge difference from corporate chicken farms. This means we don't have to worry about our chickens getting sick from being constantly surrounded by their own waste. We don't ever need to give them hormones or anitbiotics. Nature keeps them healthy all on its own.
Soil health
In addition to the benefits to the birds themselves, raising chickens the way we do is a huge benefit for our pastures. Scratching, they aerate our soil and stimulate micronutrient cycling, continually improving the soil conditions and allowing all the bugs, worms, microbes, and fungi to thrive. Plus, the chicken waste, spread evenly through our pastures, is a potent natural fertilizer, so we don't ever need to use artificial checmical fertilizers.
Exciting activities
Chickens are social beings. They have a social order (the phrase "pecking order" comes from the social hierarchy that chickens establish among themselves). They spend a lot of time hanging out with each other, clucking at each other. We're not sure what they're saying, but they sure do say a lot.
Since our chickens are not confined to tiny cages, they get to behave like chickens. They run around and hunt grasshoppers and other bugs. In addition to their high-quality feed rations and insects, they sometimes eat weeds and other plants in the pasture.
High-quality food
You are what you eat, the saying goes. By extension, you are what you eat eats. Part of ethically raising animals is feeding them good food that is sourced from quality producers. This ensures our animals are healthy and happy, and as well ensures that the food they provide for us contributes positively to our customers' health and wellbeing.
Our chickens are always fed food with no soy, no corn, and no GMO ingredients. We currently feed our chickens all organically-grown rations, however we have used conventionally-grown rations for earlier batches, though we no longer do.