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Pasturebird started as a 50-bird backyard operation and has grown into one of the world’s largest pasture-raised chicken farms. Paul Greive was first on the show years ago when Pasturebird was just beginning its growth. Now, he is back on the show to share what’s been going on at the farm.
Paul’s innovative mobile chicken coops ensure that the chickens are moved daily to fresh pasture, which makes for better chicken and better soil. He is very transparent about their processes and what it takes to raise their chickens. On the episode today, Paul talks with Diana about:
- The concept of the regenerative continuum
- What pasture-raised chicken actually means
- The nutritional difference in pasture-raised chicken
- Why Pasturebird partnered with Perdue
- What’s in the future for Pasturebird
Resources:
Sustainable Dish Episode 63: Paul Greive
Will Harris & White Oak Pastures
International Bison Conference
Connect with Paul:
Website: Pasturebird
Instagram: @pasturebird
Facebook: Pasturebird
Episode Credits:
Thank you to all who’ve made this show possible. Our hosts are Diana Rodgers and James Connelly. Our producer is Emily Soape. And, of course, we are grateful for our sponsors, Patreon supporters, and listeners.
If you’re ready to take your support for a nutritious, sustainable, and equitable food system to the next level, join my Global Food Justice Alliance community on Patreon. You will have access to ad-free podcasts, exclusive videos, a discussion community, and much more. Go to sustainabledish.com/join to support my work.
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Quotes:
“I’m really proud to be able to start making this better food more accessible, more affordable.” – Paul Greive
“I’m not saying don’t ever eat CAFO-grown chicken, just know what it is. And do your best to try to upgrade that when you can and when budget allows.” – Paul Greive
Transcript:
Diana Rodgers, RD
Welcome to the Sustainable Dish Podcast. I’m Diana Rodgers, a real food registered dietitian, author, and sustainability advocate. I co-host this podcast with James Connelly, who was a producer on my film Sacred Cow. I also founded the Global Food Justice Alliance, an initiative advocating for the inclusion of animal-source foods like meat, dairy, and eggs for a more nutritious, sustainable, and equitable worldwide food system. You can check it out and join me at global food justice.org. Thanks again for listening. And now, on to our show.
(Patreon Ad) Diana Rodgers, RD
Ready to take your support for a nutritious, sustainable, and equitable food system to the next level? Join my Global Food Justice Alliance community on Patreon and have access to ad-free podcasts, exclusive videos, and a discussion community, plus so much more. Go to sustainable dish.com/join to support my work, and thank you.
Diana Rodgers, RD
Welcome back to the podcast, everyone. Today I have with me Paul Greive of Pasture Bird. Paul, it’s been several years since I think I had you on way back when you were just kind of getting up and running with everything. And now you’re here, you’re this celebrity NEXTY winner from Expo East. So welcome back.
Paul Greive
All right, well, all that sounds good, except for the celebrity. And it was a great, I’m not gonna call it an argument, but the last time we talked, I felt like we had a really good debate around the importance of like, looking at the feed side of the equation on this regenerative monogastric conversation. I walked away with a slightly changed perspective. So I always liked that I’m very… I try to be open-minded to smart people, you know, so that was a fun conversation.
Diana Rodgers, RD
I actually don’t remember. What was the… I don’t remember.
Paul Greive
I think we were really wanting to be more regenerative than we were at the time. And I have this firm belief now that until you solve the grain side of, you know, chickens and pigs, you can’t really call it wholesale regenerative. Like, I think we were doing some regenerative things, some regenerative practices. But you really challenged me on, like, well, I don’t know, you know, let’s really dive into the grain side. What are you doing on that? And it was like, No, you’re right. We have some work still to do. And I think we’re doing that. But we’re still on… we’re still on that track. So I just think you brought some important points to mind on the monogastric side. And even really, even on the red meat side because a lot of their feed is you know, monocrop alfalfa, and it’s coming back. So I think that there’s kind of this deeper dive on off-farm inputs with regenerative that’s boring to a lot of people but really important if we want to move the needle, you know?
Diana Rodgers, RD
Yeah. Well, I’m glad you brought that up. Because before we started recording, I had mentioned and this is something that I posted on LinkedIn, and I won’t call out the company. It was a farmed seafood company that reached out to me and wanted… they were calling themselves ‘sustainable.’ On their website, they were saying they’re the first, like, regenerative seafood supply chain all the stuff. And when I pushed, I found out that they were just using conventional grain. And actually, interestingly, on LinkedIn, I said it’s not even organic grain. And then I got all these people pushing back. But organic doesn’t mean, you know, and I’m like, Oh, guys, that’s not… it was like all these people schooling me on the difference between organic and regenerative as if I didn’t know. So that was funny. But my point was it’s cool to make protein. And it’s really hard, especially when grain is the input. And we should talk about the difference between monogastric and ruminant because I actually think that many of my listeners probably don’t get like when they hear pastured chicken; they assume that the chickens are eating grass. And so we need to talk about, like, it’s not a supplement, like, they actually consume grain, in your case, probably lots of grain because of your scale, not because of like the way you raise them. Anyhow, the seafood company reached out to me, it was just typical grain. And I said, I don’t think you can call yourself regenerative if your inputs are typical grain, just conventional grain. Maybe if it was organically produced, then you could have like a better case for calling it regenerative. But they were like stunned and said, Well, you work with these other seafood companies. I said yes. But they don’t call themselves regenerative. So my concern is just truth and transparency like, I will promote or partner with beef from Australia. I think the goal is more grass-fed beef, right? So if it happens to come from Australia, that’s cool. I’m not telling anyone that it’s, like, more important to buy Australian beef and US produce beef. But we need transparency.
Paul Greive
Well, it’s really hard, right? Because I’m convinced after 10 years of this, like regenerative is on a continuum from zero to 100 or from black all the way to white, and it’s probably not best serve as like a pass or fail. It’s like how regenerative are you? So I think when you see the greenwashing and we try to be so careful not to do that because I think we do some things in a really, really regenerative way, and we’re really innovating with like the mobile coops and the way we’re rotating chickens and cattle and grains altogether. I think that’s really cool. But then like the off-farm grain inputs, I think we have a ton of room for improvement still there, you know. So it’s like, are we regenerative? I don’t know. I would say we’re probably not regenerative yet. But it’s also like, we’re certainly on that path. And it is a continuum. So I think it’s important for people to understand, and it’s just not as easy to like, dilute it down to this seal that goes on your pack that says like, oh, yeah, cool. You’re regenerative. It’s like, Guys, can we like move past this whole stupid third-party certification thing? And like people are not that stupid, I think they can handle a little bit more nuanced, and complex story, I think, I would hope, you know,
Diana Rodgers, RD
I think the folks listening to my podcast can. I feel like even I’m getting to the point now where I feel safe to communicate the fact that even if an animal’s finished on a feedlot, there can still be regenerative grazing before that happens. And there are still better or worse feedlot conditions. And you know, I’ve recently learned that for every pound of plant-based protein, there are four pounds of waste from that. And so if cattle can upcycle that into protein, that’s awesome. Because the other alternative is this stuff just sitting in a pile and emitting greenhouse gases and not being turned into protein, right? So I think that feedlot-finished cattle do have a place in the system. It is affordable. And meat is a superior meat. And I mean, all animal flesh is a superior protein to the plant-based alternatives.
Paul Greive
I mean, I talked about that like continuum from zero to 100. And if you put the best kind of Will Harris, LCA-studied, grass-finished, kind of at that 100 mark, and you put like feedlot beef, probably at the 50 mark, and you put kind of like even the best pasture-raised chicken, maybe at that 50 mark somewhere to a lot of the feedlot chicken at the 30 mark, you know. Most plants are in like the below 10 mark. I mean, most of the plants are like so degenerative that it’s not even funny. So there’s such this like, false narrative that because it’s not meat, then somehow it’s better for the environment. And I just, I really have to challenge that. I know your listeners. That’s like preaching to the choir. But yeah, I mean, on the regenerative continuum, most of the plants consumed by humans or animals are so low, you know?
Diana Rodgers, RD
Yeah, I mean, nutritionally, yeah. And certainly environmentally. And I really get bummed out when I see this infighting happening in the pro… in the animal protein world, or like, we’re better than… grass-fed, or nothing, or even the bison, I spoke at the Bison… International Bison Conference, which many people are like that exists? And they kept comparing themselves to beef. And I’m like, don’t do that. Compare yourselves to plant-based protein because bison is like this cool alternative that’s like, kind of, let’s step outside my norm and try something cool and different. And that’s the same thinking that somebody would have when they try a plant-based protein.
Paul Greive
Oh, that’s interesting. Yeah. I mean, I was laughing – I saw something the other day it was they always like to talk about land use, you know, and I know you’ve written extensively about that. You understand that. I was just laughing. It’s like if you’re having a positive impact on land, sequestering carbon, increasing organic matter, retaining more water in the soil, increasing biodiversity through animal management, wouldn’t more land use be a better thing, not like a worst thing? You know?
Diana Rodgers, RD
Yeah. Jason Roundtree always says, would you rather have two and a half regenerative acres or one chemical extracted acre?
Paul Greive
Yeah, totally.
Diana Rodgers, RD
And it’s not like we necessarily need more calories. We need more proteins and nutrients.
Paul Greive
Nutrients. Yeah, yeah.
Diana Rodgers, RD
So let’s talk a little bit about the difference between a monogastric and a ruminant and how, you know, your inputs need to be grain.
Paul Greive
Yeah, well, to make it really like at the simplest level, chickens and pigs are monogastric. That’s a fancy way of saying that they are an omnivore like a human, where they can eat plants, meat and grains and be really healthy. Where beef cattle are ruminant. They have this ruminant stomach that’s really meant to like digest grass at the end of the day and know that you can put some grains through. I’m not even going to go down that road. But yeah, the ruminant stomach is meant to eat grass and grass alone, where chickens and pigs are – they’re scavengers, they’re hunters, they’re prey animals. They are going to be looking for downed game. They’re going to be looking for grains and seeds on top of grass, and they can eat a fair amount of bugs and worms and grasses and seeds and grains as well. Chickens have a special organ called a crop, and it’s gizzard that actually takes the grain in. It sprouts it. It stone grinds it, and it makes it like nutritionally available to their system. That’s an organ that I don’t have as a guy who like doesn’t tolerate grains very well myself. It’s something that, you know, cattle, horses, they don’t have that either. So, yeah, this idea of pasture-raised chicken is all about the environment that the birds are raised in. Not saying that that’s 100% of their diet is eating pasture or something like that. So when we’re talking about pasture-raised, it is misconstrued a lot. We try to be very forward that our birds do eat grains. All chickens eat grains, you may find a really rare Farmers Market producer that will say like grain-free chicken, but they’re feeding, you know, milo and wheat and stuff, that’s not quite a grain. So they’re all getting a supplemental feed if they’re doing any kind of growth. And if you go into, you know, wild chicken, and you go way back and kind of go to Hawaii, Thailand, where you see these like wild birds running around. I mean, try harvesting one of those, it’ll be a year and a half old, you won’t be able to eat it. It’s like tough as a boot, you know. So it’s really not like a commercially viable product at all the wild chicken thing. So it’s really important that they get kind of this rounded diet of grain inputs. For us, that means corn and soybeans and like, it’s one of those areas where I think a lot of people don’t understand that pasture-raised chickens are all eating corn, soybeans. It’s really hard to judge how much of it, you know, if you look at calories, it’s probably like 75-80% of their diet would come from the grains. If you look at nutrients or time, you know, when I just sit in, and I watch the birds, they’re grazing most of the time. And then they hit the feeder every once in a while. So it’s like, how do you judge that exactly? I don’t know. But we can talk about the nutrient density differences later, too.
Diana Rodgers, RD
Yeah. Well, I do think, I mean, it’s so cool what you’re doing because chicken is the most popular protein in America. And people are not going to give that up. I bet it’s even gone up over the last several years, just with the more and more people being concerned about their red meat consumption. Do you know much about the status?
Paul Greive
Yeah, I’m like the guy who wants beef to grow while I sell chicken, you know, so it’s like kind of sad that chickens raising to be honest, but even especially now with like economic headwinds, chicken consumption is gonna go up more, because it’s a really cheap protein, largely because of subsidized grains. I mean, that’s the real side of it, you know?
Diana Rodgers, RD
Right. And well, before I ask you more questions because I don’t want to get into your background, like at the way end, but you do have a kind of an interesting background. Can you just back up for folks that didn’t hear our first podcast and don’t know anything about how you got into all this and your military background? I mean, it’s actually really fascinating.
Paul Greive
Well, I was sort of like this city kid with no interest or experience in food or farming at all. I grew up in downtown Seattle, college athlete, played sports my whole life, and then went into the Marine Corps. And when I was in sniper school in Virginia, I got hit with Lyme disease. And it was the first time I’d ever really, like felt terrible in my life, you know, and really bad arthritis and brain fog, and just weird. I don’t know, it just felt bad. And this is like, 2007-2008 when you know, Robb Wolf and Loren Cordain and Mark Sisson, and all these guys were like really talking about Paleo and CrossFit. And that hit the military community in a big way. And so started eating different, feeling better. It was again, first time I’d ever even thought about what I put into my body and how that was going to make me feel. And when I came back from Iraq in 2010, my family was just bummed about, you know, we’re trying to buy organic produce and pasture-raised meat. And we could find organic produce, but we could not find pasture-raised chicken. And so in about 2012, we just ordered like 50 chickens for the backyard. We got really excited about the work Joel Salatin was doing out of Shenandoah Valley and Virginia on moving animals across the grassland. And basically just did it for our own family’s consumption, which led to you know, friends and family which led to kind of a local neighborhood which you know, eventually became like a real thing. So now, fast forward 10 more years we’re the largest pasture-raised chicken producer, maybe in the world. I don’t really know, like, definitely in the country for sure doing the mobile coops and daily move and all that.
Diana Rodgers, RD
Is there anyone else in the world that’s doing this?
Paul Greive
I’m not really aware of anybody internationally who’s doing a large-scale daily move program. There’s some really nice stationary programs out of France that… Label Rouge is it is a stationary barn, but they put it inside of orchards and in fields, and they have a good way to get more birds out. And probably what you’d see in the US it’s still very different than a mobile program, though. So yeah, as far as mobile goes, you know, you’ve been to Will’s. There’s probably 800 to 1000 mobile – what I would call true pasture-raised producers in the US and in the world. But it’s largely like a farmers market scale. There’s really nobody that’s said, Hey, we want to put this product into retail, make it accessible and affordable. And that’s, I think that that’s what we’re really trying to do.
Diana Rodgers, RD
Yeah, you guys are crushing it with the packaging. Can you talk a little bit about… I love it so much. It’s like friendly and happy and so different really sticks out. How did you get to that part?
Paul Greive
I hate that that’s what it takes to sell me. Like, I rejected that thesis for 10 years. We would put stuff in clear bags, and put a nasty little like white sticker on it. And we’d be like, we don’t want to like invest in packaging, we’re all about product product product. Like, we just want to improve the way these chickens are living. And like if people don’t get it, then screw them, you know, it was through some pretty good guidance that was like, Look, if you want to play in the retail world, not everybody is gonna go on your farm tour and go like, you know, you need to like appeal to the masses. And we worked with Pearlfisher out in New York. It is this amazing graphic design agency. They’ve done some really high profile projects, and they sort of drew up this like… really, I would say it’s consumer-friendly, but it doesn’t give you like the attributes that you think they are. Nowhere on our packaging, does it say, you know, free range or cage-free. You’re not gonna see Certified Humane or GAAP. It’s not… it doesn’t say a lot of the stuff that you would think. So it says Pasturebird, rotated daily, mobile coops. And I feel like everybody looks at that and like, what the heck does that mean? Like, those aren’t terms that we’re used to seeing. And then it has this flip sleeve. And we show real photos from the real farm, like, not marketing shots. You know, like actual photos from the birds inside of our mobile coops. And then on the back, it has a QR code that will take you to either a live stream from the farm, or to like a pre-recorded virtual farm tour. And it tries to drive you to come out and see the farm for yourself and that whole deal. So I feel like it’s really innovative. It is cute, it’s more approachable. It’s doing really well in retail so far. But it was like it was… I don’t know. It was a sacrifice for me to go, how are we really going to spend money on packaging? But you have to, to play in retail, like packaging, sadly, is 50% of the equation, you know?
Diana Rodgers, RD
Well, as someone who loves like really good graphic design. And, you know, I used to work for Whole Foods. So I have an eye for packaging. And I just think it’s fantastic. And like who sees green on chicken too, like, the green label, that’s so awesome.
Paul Greive
Well, what you see is a lot of bright green. So I said whatever we do, we’re not doing like the neon fake-looking green, like if we’re gonna do green, we’re doing olive green. We’re gonna do like natural color of what really grass actually looks like. And that was a lot of fun. Pearlfisher like, enjoyed playing with the natural tones. And we did this chicken logo that’s essentially like made up of all the different things our birds eat. So there’s corn and soybean, but there’s also like the grasses, the bugs, the weeds, the flowers, like all this stuff that a pasture-raised chicken is foraging on. And so it’s that whole idea that like you are what you eat, but you also are what you eat, eats. And even if people don’t really get that it’s a bit subliminal. But that’s what we’re going for, you know.
Diana Rodgers, RD
And there’s a bigger difference nutritionally when it comes to what a monogastric eats, and how that translates into its meat and fat than what a ruminant eats because when a cow was eating their rumen is, I like to say it’s sort of like translating that food into basically fatty acids and feeding the cow the fatty acids, right. So if a cow ingest something, it’s not like it really kind of gets into its portal vein, like us and circulates around in the blood. That’s not the case with chickens. So will you talk a little bit about the difference between I’m sure you have some research on the difference between typical chicken and then the chicken that you raise.
Paul Greive
Yeah, it’s been really cool to go into the labs, it’s really hard to make those claims on pack. I’m sure you’re familiar with that world, but we’re working on it. So to look at omega three, just, you know, six to three ratio, normal conventional chicken is something like 24 to 1. On six to three ratio on pasture, because they’re exercising a lot more on eating a much more varied diet, it’s about three times better. So we say something like seven or eight to one. If you look at really good grass-fed beef, though, I mean, what is that three-to-one? And then you go to like really good wild salmon and it might be one-to-one, right? So it’s definitely on a scale where we’re way better than conventional. But I would still say like grass-fed beef and wild fish are the superfoods in the meat aisle.
Diana Rodgers, RD
But chicken is, just like I said, it’s so popular. It’s so accessible. People know what to do with it. They don’t have to look up like some weird cut to figure out how to cook it. Although I did… I remember when we sold whole birds at our farm store, a lot of people were like a whole bird…. I know, because we, at the time refused to cut it up. We were like you were, like buying in a plastic bag. And you just cook the whole thing because we’re not going to like dumb it down for you. And there were a lot of young moms that were like, what?
Paul Greive
Isn’t that crazy? So I’ll tell you a crazy… you’ll appreciate the story. We almost didn’t even do a whole bird for our retail launch because it was just like, it’s a dying breed as much as I want to do it. I don’t think anybody’s buying that anymore. But then COVID happened. And for what it’s worth, people started cooking at home again. And so all of our retailers are shocked. Like our a whole bird, actual to forecast has been like 70 to 100% over forecast. I think it’s partly because people learn how to cook again. And it’s by far the best value, right, you get like, minimum three meals out of one whole bird. Because you’re gonna have your primary, you’re gonna have leftovers, then you’re gonna make your bone broth, you know. So at worst, it’s gonna be three meals. So it’s like the best value. But I think people just figured out how to make that product at home. It’s such a good value, like we’re doing a deal with Sprouts right now. And previously, I mean, we had to be $25, $30, $35 per chicken, just to try to kind of break even, you know, and make a little bit of money. I mean, in Sprouts, you can go find our whole birds for like 12 to 15 bucks right now. And I think, for a family of 4, 5, 6, like $15 for a whole bird, and everybody can eat that, like, I don’t know. I’m really proud to be able to start making this, you know, better food more accessible, more affordable. And it’s like, I think that’s how we’re going to move the needle a bit. You know,
Diana Rodgers, RD
I am so impressed. I was going to ask you about the price because I know how much you know the costs are, and with grass-fed beef, it’s a little more expensive. Pastured poultry, compared to typical, it’s insane. Yeah, that your input costs are so much higher. But the quality of life, I’d say is even more dramatically different for your chickens versus a typical chicken. So…
Paul Greive
I’d agree with you on that. Yeah.
Diana Rodgers, RD
Does it tend to be like twice as much as a typical chicken like, or let’s compare to like the organic, you know, Bell and Evans or like a nicer brand of chicken?
Paul Greive
So you have like three levels. Traditionally, in the chicken aisle, you have like three levels, really, at the end of the day. They’ll all make all these bells and whistles, but really, there’s like the low end, or ABF, or NAE is what it’s typically called: antibiotic-free, or no antibiotics ever. Then you have free range in the middle, which really just means those same exact birds, but they had, you know, pop-door access to the outdoors. Better than nothing, you know, whatever. But it’s not what a lot of people think it is. Then you have organic, which would be this kind of real nebulous access to the outdoors with certified organic grain. Big problem with that certified organic grain is most companies are importing a lot of that it’s very much like rampant with fraud. And, you know, true domestic organic grain is like a really cool thing. But it doesn’t mean what a lot of people think. So we are really targeting coming in between the free range and the organic. So we’re cheaper than organic, we’re more than free range. And the only reason why that’s possible for us is because we did this partnership with Perdue, who is, you know, Big Ag through and through. They’re number four chicken producer in the US. They’re the number one organic producer in the US. And it was like a real thing for us to decide if this is a good decision for us or not. And it was a really hard decision for me and my family. But ultimately, we wanted to leverage somebody with this vertical integration where we could have consistent good prices and good access to chicks, to feed into harvesting. Harvesting probably being the main one because we were as an independent poultry company, you are always one phone call away from being out of business, you know, and the pricing that you get from these guys is just brutal. So by partnering with them leveraging a lot of their infrastructure, but still using our process of the mobile coops and putting the birds on pasture, we’re able to drop the price. And also, I think bring something that most people wouldn’t have access to these $30 to $35 Farmers Market birds. That being said, it doesn’t diminish the importance for small-scale, you know, backyard Farmers Market production. Like I still think that’s just as important as what we’re doing in every way shape and form. Like, I hate when people think that me doing this means that I think that that doesn’t have a place because I absolutely think it does. It’s just we have to meet people where they’re at.
Diana Rodgers, RD
I love it. It’s not either or it’s yes and.
Paul Greive
Exactly, totally. And we need I mean if Big Ag genuinely wants to like move the needle and start doing things differently. Because I always tell people, Perdue could have very easily just taken their free range program, slap pasture-raised on the label, slap regenerative on the label, and nobody would have stopped them. Right? They could have done that. But instead they said, No, we want to partner with a company who’s actually doing something authentic and legit and different. And it’s going to be a slower ramp for them because of that, like every single house that we have to put up into pasture like we have to build it from scratch. This infrastructure doesn’t exist for these big mobile coops. But I really respect the fact that they’re like trying to do it authentically.
Diana Rodgers, RD
Where are your chickens produced? You told me… I was just on in White Oak Pastures. You told me that I drove by… what? Is it your research?
Paul Greive
Yeah, yeah. So we are in Georgia now. Historically, we’ve always been in San Diego County. It’s been very good to us. I love farming in California. I live in Southern California. It’s been great. Land here is about $25,000 an acre. It’s about $2500 in Georgia. I pay six figures to irrigate my farm here. It rains all the time in Georgia. For many, many reasons, if we want to make pasture-raised kind of this mission, affordable, accessible, pasture-raised, nutrient-dense chicken makes a lot of sense in Georgia. So we are focusing a lot of growth in that market. And that kind of south of Atlanta, about an hour and a half, two hours, it feels really, really good to scale like a pastured poultry business, whereas San Diego, I love it, we’re close to our customer base. We do a lot of farm tours and stuff. But you know, ultimately, those costs get passed on to the customer. And that’s a lot.
Diana Rodgers, RD
I really do think the southeast is going to be where all of the California agriculture is gonna move to.
Paul Greive
That’s interesting. I don’t disagree with you at all, based on my own experience, at least. And it might be a good thing. I mean, it really is. For chicken, we need to be within about two hours of the processing plant. So with beef cattle, you can drive them a lot farther. Chicken, you don’t want to be driving that far. And then it comes back to like 52 weeks of production. So lots of pastured poultry producers in Pennsylvania, in New York, and in Michigan, but it’s all seasonal. If it’s authentic, right, it’s gonna be seasonal. Otherwise, if it’s not seasonal, you kind of go well; how are you raising birds on pasture? You know, in upstate, when it’s minus 10? You know, people don’t ask those questions. But like, I’m always like, Come on, dude. The authentic ones are seasonal. For us, it’s really important to be year-round because we’re selling to restaurants and grocery stores. And it’s like, they want fresh chicken 52 weeks. So Georgia, Florida, Arkansas, Texas, you know, California, those are climates where you can do that.
Diana Rodgers, RD
So what’s your focus these days? Is it just scaling your business? Are you thinking about like value-added products like pastured chicken chili or chicken sausages or anything like that?
Paul Greive
So we always say like, let’s hit the fastball and a fastball right now it feels like the fresh case. So you go into Sprouts, you have your, you know, ABF chicken and you have your organic chicken, it feels like a very tired area of the grocery store, not a lot of innovation. So before we go and focus on a bunch of value, add stuff, like we really want to innovate in the fresh meat case and bring something new and different, like the packaging tells a good story. So we’re going to try to do really well there crawl, walk, then run. And someday I’d love to do the value add thing, but it does feel like a distraction like a shiny object a bit right now, where I mean, there’s 9 billion chickens harvested in the US. And there’s so much opportunity with that. The other big area of innovation for us is like this plant/animal integration. So now that we’re hitting scale in Georgia on our research farm, that’s a cotton and corn rotation. So we’re in fertilizing this cotton and corn rotation, and then we’ll eventually move over to another plot of land and they’ll plant cotton and corn behind us. So that to me, feels really exciting. So it’s really this like cattle, chicken, and crop rotation as opposed to just, you know, permanent chicken field or something like that. Because what we bring in is a lot of nutrients. That’s one thing about the monogastric we’re bringing feed in from off the farm. So we can put down a lot of nutrition over the two to three-year period, use that time to transition to certified organic, and then they can come in and put a crop in behind us, which feels like a really cool model to me. You know, we’re talking about 10s of 1000s of acres down the road. So could be a pretty interesting thing for the southeast for sure.
Diana Rodgers, RD
Yeah, it’s amazing. I saw so much cotton production in Georgia, and you… kind of someone from the northeast, you forget that like cotton grows and feels.
Paul Greive
I know, I know. It blows my mind still when I drive through. It’s like, Oh, you think of that as like an 1800s crop, but no, there’s a lot of cotton grown in Georgia. And it’s very degenerative as it stands right now there are companies trying to push the bar trying to put in cover crops. I think that makes a ton of sense, but animal integration on a nonedible crop like cotton is kind of tricky. So to put it into poultry into like a, you know, permanent pasture no-till for two to three years, and then come in behind that and do a cotton crop feels like a pretty cool assault.
Diana Rodgers, RD
Yeah. Any other things going on with the waste from, you know, the chicken feathers or anything like that? What’s whole animal use looking like in the chicken market?
Paul Greive
There’s so much room for innovation. Still, I would say we’re trying to stay for us, like, we’re trying to stay really focused. I think the innovation on the grain production side is huge. The plant side is still untapped. You know, there’s so much room for cool innovation on the plant side. I know Will’s doing some amazing stuff. I feel like he’s an early pioneer, with the black soldier fly larva, which has just had such a hard time reaching like commercial value. I know he’s doing a pretty good job with it. But it’s a tough piece. But all that slaughter waste is such a great stream to produce this black soldier fly larva that can get fed back to chickens. So I really hope that that continues to catch on but really like my focus with Pasturebird is, you know, putting more birds on pasture, these mobile coops, which you’ve worked really hard on. So it’s a solar-powered, fully autonomous mobile coop that holds 6000 birds and drives itself to fresh grass every single day. Yeah, that’s where most of our focus has been. And I think it’s the right place for us to be focused right now. You know?
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Diana Rodgers, RD
Let’s talk a little bit about these mobile coops. So they drive themselves, and how does the water work? Or is there a piping? Or does somebody have to physically go in and add the water?
Paul Greive
Yeah, so if I mean for years, right, like the Joel Salatin model, you come out with your five-gallon bucket, you dump the water in. And that’s cool when you have your intern laborer, and you have a small number of birds. But when you start talking about 15, 20, 100,000 birds a week that you want to harvest, like that ain’t gonna work. So the water is piped in. I don’t know you’re at Will’s and I know he’s running the mobile range coop now. We’re essentially a 10x, the size version of that same thing, and it’s fully automated. So where he’s going in and dumping buckets of feed in, we have to, you know, 5000 pounds silos that use that solar power with battery, and they auger the feed in automatically so you’re only feeding the coop about three times during the bird’s life. And that just, you know, it’s not always say like, the birds don’t care if they’re fed by hand or they’re fed by an auger. So like trying to focus our labor on areas that actually add value versus stuff that can be done autonomously, robotically feels like a good way to kind of make things more affordable.
Diana Rodgers, RD
I mean, one of the great things about chicken, you know, in the land, we talked about land use a little bit maybe before we didn’t talk about that while we were recording, right? No, I don’t think so. So, a common plant-based argument… I just got in an argument with somebody who is a big rewilding guy. And he’s like, Oh, but livestock are so inefficient, and I’m like, two and a half pounds of corn or soy to one pound of flesh. That’s pretty efficient. And it’s the nutrition upcycle for our food system. And so if you know, with those kinds of inputs for chicken, it’s a net win. Can you talk a little bit more about land use and that kind of stuff.
Paul Greive
I mean, chicken like was widely heralded as the most efficient on land use. The funny thing that every misses is for every, you know, chicken barn, which is like 99.999% of poultry productions. It’s a 600 foot house, 40 foot wide, 24,000 birds they live in there, you know, it sounds gross, but they live eat, sleep, poop, all in the same place. It’s essentially like a feedlot for chickens, you know, it doesn’t move. It just stays in one place all the time. They clean out the barns once every, once or twice a year. So the chickens are really kind of living on their own manure more or less. What people miss is, you know, to say that that’s the footprint of chicken is really misleading because you have the feed that needs to be produced off farm, and then you need to move that manure somewhere too. And to do that responsibly, you’re not taking like 80,000 pounds of manure and putting it onto one little field. Like, it should be spread out over a big area. So we calculate that every chicken barn really needs about 82 acres of land to responsibly apply that manure in a way that’s actually regenerative. That’s not the way it’s being done. That’s why you hear about a lot of, you know, the lagoons spills, the kind of leaching runoff, algae bloom all that it’s because we’re putting too much manure on too small of an area. We’re not spreading it the way it probably should be. It’s also like when a lot of that manure is antibiotic infested, and full of a bunch of weird synthetics. That’s not really something you want to put on your crops either. But yeah, I think that there’s a regenerative impact that you can have when you move chickens across it – grass land, an impact that’s actually really positive. So our entire stocking density, which is how many birds we have on how many square feet, that’s all calculated. So it’s 6000 Birds on 7500 Square Feet moved every 24 hours to a new spot rested for 90 days in between flocks or in between grazings. So all that’s calculated for optimizing for the land value, we feel like that amount of manure is the exact right amount to go down onto each spot. The cool thing is we can control it. So like in a stationary house, obviously, most of your manure is going to be in the house, you’re going to get a little bit more like right outside of the house, you’re gonna get very little as you get like 100 feet away from the house. This is a way that we can like control where we’re impacting the ground. And that’s really important for crop growers.
Diana Rodgers, RD
I’m glad you gave a little bit of a visual. I think people they might have driven around and seen feedlots. You know, there’s some places in the country where you can definitely drive for very long periods of time and see feedlots. And I think that’s their image for why they don’t want to eat beef. But I always tell folks, if your choice in the grocery store is just typical chicken, typical pork, or typical beef. The most ethical one is the beef. Because even compared to feedlots, chicken and pork industrially produced is way worse as far as animal welfare goes.
Paul Greive
Yeah, so the same thing about dairy. You know, it’s just like…
Diana Rodgers, RD
Dairy can be really hard for me to defend. It’s, yeah…
Paul Greive
And there’s so many shades of gray, I just want people to understand what they’re getting. That’s my whole thing. Like, I’m not telling you that you have to only eat pasture-raised from the farmers market. If your budget… you’re trying to – there’s so many people out there just trying to feed their family as good as they can. I’m like Bravo. Do your thing. I’m not saying don’t ever eat CAFO-grown chicken, just know what it is. And like, do your best to try to upgrade that when you can. And when budget allows. I think there’s such a misconception about what it actually looks like on the inside. I’m really encouraging more companies to show photos from the inside of their barns, and to be honest about it. And it’s like, when you put things in the light, you know, it just uh, I just think it’s better for everybody, if the industry became a bit more transparent, you know. And even our stuff. So I would say, we make a huge effort to do no marketing gimmick photos and videos. We used to do that. We’d have the marketing companies come out. They would take a bird from inside of our coop, they put it out in a big open field. They’d like lay down and take a picture of it with my son holding it. And it’s like, I don’t know. I just always felt *beep* about doing that. I don’t like that approach. To now where we’re like, I literally bought an iPhone with a data plan. We put it inside of our mobile coop, and we just run like 24-hour live streams of it a lot of times, and a lot of people hear all about Pasturebird. They’re influencers are talking about it. And I think that they log on and they see this video of like 6000 birds inside of this like shade structure. They’re like, Oh, that’s not what I thought pasture-raised was and they see them eating feed. You know, they see like, I don’t know, I think it just breaks some of the preconceived notions in a way that’s more negative than they probably would have thought. But I’m just like, I don’t really care. I just want you to know what you’re getting. At the end of the day, we have people that are like, Oh, I don’t want to buy that. That doesn’t look like it’s, you know, free range. And I’m like, good. I mean, if that’s what we accomplished by showing you what we’re really doing, and you decide it’s not for you, by all means, like go buy beef. There’s lots of other options out there, you know. I would just rather have people know what they’re getting than not.
Diana Rodgers, RD
Yeah, I don’t think people understand how vulnerable broilers are to predators and why you have to keep them like that. And they can’t be just living under a tree or in a wide open space.
Paul Greive
We posted a video. So, we leave the doors wide open often, you know. We posted a video the other day, it was Georgia, it was a nice day, it was probably 88 degrees, you know, not a crazy humidity day, maybe 50 60% humidity, a pleasant relatively pleasant summer day in Georgia. The doors were wide open and there was in the sun was coming in part of the coop and the birds were literally lined up in an angle around where the sun was hitting, so they wouldn’t go into the sun. And what you got to remember is like, chickens are prey animals, right? They’re not beef cattle that are just gonna go prance in an open field without really natural predators. In the wild, they’re hiding under bushes, they’re hiding under trees. They want to be close to their food, water and shade. So it’s like this idea of access to you know, 108 square feet of pasture like, that sounds really nice to the average consumer. If the birds aren’t using it, then who cares if they have access to 1000 square feet like the point is, where are they actually spending their life? And so our whole thing with pasture-raised is you have to move the house because that’s more or less where they’re going to stay. You can do an outdoor exterior access. That’s fine. The birds aren’t really using it. It’s really important to move the house so the birds are actually living on pasture all the time.
Diana Rodgers, RD
Yeah, anything else you want to say about Pasturebird? About your future plans or anything else?
Paul Greive
No, I just… I feel like it’s optimistic. We’re one of many that are trying to do something really different. I feel like we’re in the golden age of regenerative meat production right now. What will kill the movement is if we pretend like we’re farther along than we really are. So like, I really encourage people to get into this space. I always say plant-based is clearly waving its white flag right now. So I’m hoping that a lot of smart and well-intentioned people there will come over to the meat side and try to do some really good stuff like you’re not our enemy. You’re our friend, even the consumers of a lot of the plant-base, I think that they’re just well-intentioned people that are trying to feed their family good and take care of the environment. So we welcome all those folks with open arms. But I do think it’s like, we’re coming into the Golden Age like now that plant-based is obviously not a solution for the climate. How do we take, you know, whatever it is 300 trillion pounds of animal manure and convert that into an asset? And it’s like such a big opportunity. We need not just Pasturebird solution, like we need everybody thinking about this and trying to do better. So yeah, jump in. I think… I know we’re going into a tricky economic time right now. But I think that there’s going to be an enormous amount of investor dollars that want to go, to help kind of push the new wave of animal stewardship and land stewardship using animals. So I just think it’s a really optimistic, hopeful, like situation out there right now.
Diana Rodgers, RD
Actually, before you go, you and I are on the same page about this. But you know, about these larger corporations that are trying to get into, you know, that might be accused of having financial motivations getting into regenerative. You want to just articulate what we were kind of talking about a little bit before I hit record.
Paul Greive
Yeah. So really quick. I mean, it’s big companies respond to consumer demand for 50 years, people ask for cheap chicken like I’m talking about Perdue. They did a really good job producing, guess what – cheap chicken because that’s what people are asking for. Now, they legitimately see people asking for something different, something that’s good for their bodies and good for the planet. And so they want to respond. I think, like, I think that they would want to sell a product that people are asking for. And what I always say is, let’s be cautiously optimistic when we see these things and absolutely hold their feet to the fire when they start doing the greenwashing deal. So the fact that you may, you know, other folks are sometimes inside the belly of the beast, per se, is a good thing. Not a bad thing. And I think if we can move them by five degrees towards something that’s more regenerative, that’s a huge win. And again, equally as important to the ultra high-end backyard producer selling at the farmers market, like we absolutely need both sides of the equation to leave it better for our kids, you know,
Diana Rodgers, RD
Totally, couldn’t agree more. Thank you so much for your time and for everything you’re doing. And I want people to check you out. So it’s pasturebird.com.
Paul Greive
Yep, pasturebird.com. We’ve got nationwide home delivery, but we’re also quickly adding to like the list of retailers nationwide too. So definitely jump on pasturebird.com and check it out.
Diana Rodgers, RD
All right. Thanks so much.
Paul Greive
Thanks, Diana.
Diana Rodgers, RD
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