Greg Gunthorp raises turkeys on pigs on pasture at Gunthorp Farms in LaGrange, Indiana. He used to raise “a lot” of pastured chickens. Then Covid hit and business changed. The only poultry production to survive 2020 is pastured turkeys.

Greg has been a part of the pastured poultry game from the beginning, and he is a go to resource for those who need help with inspected processing setup and regulations. You might also see him arguing for the benefit of rural America and independent farms. He’s an outspoken critic of consolidation and concentration in our food supply.

In our podcast chat, Greg unpacks exactly what Covid did to his pasture poultry business, which was almost exclusively wholesale to restaurants. You may be surprised, like I was, that the second quarter of the summer of Covid saw Gunthorp Farms sell out of inventory. Thing were looking very good. They pivoted and responded to the immediate crisis. That’s a testament to the agility of a local, independent food supply. Then things tightened up over the following months as some of the traditional meat supply rebounded and other news took over the front page.

The weight of the problem resettled. How do you take 120,000 meat birds direct to consumer when they all went to a restaurant market that was itself on life support? Combine the shift in markets with the reality that processing chickens through an inspected facility cost twice as much as the pigs on a per pound basis. The competition in the pasture raised chicken market has been heating up since 2015 and Perdue is just the latest player to put pressure on the wholesale market. That pressure on the wholesale market ultimately means the plant needs to run more chickens to get to a competitive price. Running more chickens was not in the roadmap for Greg and family. They had previously decided they grew as big as they wanted to.

Greg’s gracious enough to step us through the problem, and we talk about the effects of consolidation. We even have a chance to talk about Bill Gate’s pursuit to replace real food that anyone can produce at any scale with highly industrialized, processed food that only a few people can produce.

Not all poultry is lost at Gunthorp’s. He’s still raising turkeys, and I’d wager that he’s raising more turkeys than most people raise chickens. Ducks are likely to come back to the farm. The outlook for chickens isn’t so rosy, according to Greg. I personally will not be surprised if in a few years, we see chickens at a more modest scale flow from Gunthorp Farms. My crystal ball is broken, so I’ll just wait and see.

Entangled into all this discussion was the navigation of no man’s land, which is a book title, but also a very bleak place where you’re either too small or too big. Greg believed he took his pastured chicken business to no man’s land. The surprising part may be exactly where he thinks the border crossing into no man’s land is.

If local food and pastured poultry is your jam, then this is a must listen episode.

Resources

• Politics from the Pasture Facebook Group – Greg and Kara Gunthorp’s group to discussion local food issue.
• No Man’s Land by Doug Tatum