Pasturebird

Tim Hammerich

News Reporter

California-based Pasturebird is the largest pasture-raised poultry company in the nation. But it started off from very humble beginnings, when military veteran Paul Greive decided to raise some for his family.

Greive… “When I came back from Iraq we were joking about just getting some chickens for the backyard. Because we were like, man, this free range stuff. It's not really what it's cracked up to be. Neither is organic. You know, they're all raised like in a big barn with varying degrees of, you know, you could call it outdoor access, but realistically like the birds really aren't going out that much. So we got excited about this idea of like pasture raised chicken and eggs.”

Greive said his idea was just to raise 50 birds for his family to eat. But he thought he might have some extra so he advertised on Facebook.

Greive… “To our surprise, like all 50 bird sold out before we even had harvested them. So my family was kind of upset that like I had presold all the chickens. And so the next month we had to do a hundred and then 200 and then 500 and then a thousand. And pretty soon we started thinking about ways that this could and should scale because when you see the impact of it and you see soil health getting built and really healthy, happy tasty animals kind of being raised. It feels like we're onto something here.”

Pasturebird now raises hundreds of thousands of chickens every year completely on pasture.