Going Organic is not only better for your body—it’s better for the planet. Organic production practices have a number of benefits for all of us who call Earth our home.

LESS WASTE WATER RUNOFF:

Agricultural runoff is a major problem for farming and rural communities across the globe.

When fields are tilled and fertilized with manure or synthetic fertilizers, the top layer of that soil (and the nutrients in the fertilizer) is too-easily washed away in the rain. Heavy rainfall creates a nutrient-rich runoff, that pours into nearby streams and lakes and feeds plant life at an amazing rate. In this process called eutrophication, the rapid growth of plant life cause the oxygen levels in the water to plummet—and the inhabitants are suffocated.

To combat this destructive cycle, Organic farmers have a low or no-till policy—a method that has proved to have many lasting benefits. Without heavy tilling, soil retains more moisture, cycles nutrients, cultivates land that is more drought-resistant, and limits the amount of erosion—which keeps nutrients in the soil where they belong.

MORE CARBON STORAGE IN THE SOIL:

A number of studies revealed that Organic soil carbon contents are considerably higher as compared to conventional farming.

This is a result of Organic agricultural practices which increase the return of carbon to the soil, raising productivity and favoring carbon storage:

• minimum tillage—returning crop residues to the soil
• the use of cover crops and crop rotations
• integration of organic materials such as composts or manure
• the greater integration of nitrogen-fixing legumes

Why is carbon storage important? Soil organic carbon, or “SOC”, is the basis of soil fertility. It releases nutrients for plant growth, promotes the biological and physical health of soil, and is a buffer against harmful substances.

INCREASES SOIL PRODUCTIVITY:

Rodale Institute is an organization that has been gathering research about soil health since 1947. Their studies have proved that in addition to large stores of carbon, healthy soil is teeming with a community of healthy bacteria, fungi, algae, protozoa, nematodes, and other tiny tiny creatures. The diversity of this below-ground eco-system works together as a natural defense against disease and pests—allowing plants to grow to their maximum productivity. This eco-immune system is far healthier and sustainable for the plants than off-farm supplements like fertilizers and pesticides.

Visit the Rodale Institute website for a closer look at how this system works!

LESS ENERGY NEEDED:

Growing crops takes energy, and there’s no way around that.

Farmers use fuel to power their agricultural equipment—tractors, sprayers, and combines just to name a few. Conventional growers also use large amounts of nitrogen-rich synthetic fertilizers, which take large amounts of energy to produce, and even more energy to spread it over the fields. And to top it off, more energy is needed to produce and spread the hundreds of gallons of pesticides and herbicides needed for conventional agriculture to be sustained.

Prof. David Pimentel of Cornell University published an in-depth study in 2006, which found Organic farms use up to 20% less energy than conventional farms. Organic agricultural methods use sustainable practices, like harnessing and relying on solar energy, and saving on costs for those expensive synthetic fertilizers and pesticides.

These savings are even greater depending on the crops being farmed. In a case for corn grown in Pennsylvania, Prof. Pimentel found that Organic farming used 31% less energy versus conventional (while also producing higher yields during drought years). Additionally, if just 10% of corn grown in the United States were grown Organically, it would generate a national savings of up to 4.6 million barrels of oil a year.

If you’re a pure numbers kind of person, you can see how those kinds of energy costs can affect a farmer’s overall income per crop yield. Heavy reliance on the availability of cheap energy is truly betting the farm.

FEWER AIR POLLUTANTS:

By now you’re familiar with the conventional practice of spraying herbicides and pesticides on fields, and we all know farms aren’t sealed in an air-tight facility. These chemicals can spread into nearby environments—a process commonly referred to as “spray-drift”. And it works just the way it sounds.

Spray-drift is a threat to an area’s biodiversity. Along with destroying unwanted varieties of bugs that munch on crops, pesticide spray-drift unintentionally reduces the population of other insects—dangerously pulling at the threads of the ecosystem.

In contrast, an environment free of pesticides and herbicides attracts pollinators… which attract other small animals… which bring larger predators to the area; creating a balanced, cohesive ecosystem.

According to Dr. Gerold Rahmann, of the Institute of Organic Farming under the German Ministry of Nutrition and Agriculture, the maintenance of natural areas within and around organic fields and the absence of chemical inputs create suitable habitats for wildlife.

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When it comes to the health of our planet, it’s worth considering what ways going Organic is worth the investment. Click the links in this post as a starting point for further reading, and search out more reasons why going Organic is better for planet Earth.

Of all the ways going Organic is better, this first one hits home.

No synthetic pesticides in your food:

Does anyone remember the very tiny news cycle in 2018 about the test that confirmed the presence of glyphosate (Roundup) in several breakfast cereals….in higher quantities than deemed safe by the FDA? Even when food packaging claims “All-Natural,” it only means the finished product has no artificial ingredients added (and GMOs don’t count as artificial). Synthetic fertilizers and pesticides are still used in the production line, and traces end up in the finished product. The only way to know for sure these chemicals are nowhere near your mouth is to look for the Organic label. Under USDA Organic certification, these substances are prohibited in every stage of production. As a bonus, Organic automatically means non-GMO—it’s a win-win!

Reduces the risk of childhood diseases and disorders:

The Dutch birth cohort, KOALA, is a study of over 2500 children born between the years 2001 and 2003. Researchers have followed these children from pregnancy into adulthood, focused on measuring a broad spectrum of influences on their growth and development. In this group of mothers and children, exclusive consumption of organic dairy products during pregnancy and infancy was associated with a 36% reduction in the risk of eczema for the little ones.

From allergies to cognitive and behavioral development, numerous group studies like KOALA (based in several locations around the world) are drawing conclusions on the risks associated with exposure to various antibiotics and pesticides used in the production of non-organic foods.

Help reduce the risk of obesity:

While the jury is still out on the effects of Organic foods on big diseases (such as cardiovascular disease, diabetes, cancer, and neurodegenerative conditions), another positive association between Organic foods and children’s health is the decreased risk of obesity in adulthood. While there’s no single cause for obesity (which means going Organic isn’t the cure-all factor), several studies have found this positive association—which is worth taking a closer look at.

Even when it comes to nutritional values, significant differences between Organic and conventional crops have been recorded. Organic crops have found up to 69% higher levels of antioxidants—for the same kinds of foods! While conventional crops are four times more likely to contain pesticide residue and have higher levels of toxic metals, like cadmium.

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When it comes to our health and the health of our families, it’s worth considering what ways going Organic is worth the investment. Click the links in this post as a starting point for further reading, and see some of the reasons why going Organic is better for your health.

Do you ever wonder,
“what does the USDA Organic label ACTUALLY mean?”

“Healthier?”
“More expensive?”
“Safer?”

From your health, to the environment, to the animals, and even the folks working on the farms… we went on a fact-finding mission for the benefits of going Organic, and we’re back to share some gold nuggets with you.

For the next month, we’re going to shed some light on how going Organic can make a difference that might just be worth the extra pennies at the cash register.

To start, the organic label isn’t earned easily. In order to don the green, white, and brown, companies have to apply to the program and abide by rigorous standards set by the US Department of Agriculture. The certification is available to businesses who:

• demonstrate sufficient expertise in organic farming and handling
• comply with the appropriate guidelines and pass annual auditing and routine inspections

At the very least, all products with the USDA Organic logo displayed on their packaging or label are produced without synthetic chemicals, on land that has not been exposed to those chemicals for at least 3 years.

When it comes to broiler chickens (chickens raised for meat), the USDA Organic certification ensures they are raised without antibiotics, have clean, dry bedding in their houses, and are given outdoor access to encourage natural behaviors.

So what does the Organic logo ACTUALLY mean?

It means the folks growing and raising your food and products under this certification are dedicated to detail, and committed to high standards. It actually means a lot.

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To see a full list of guidelines for various industries, visit the USDA website.

It’s Grill Week! We aren’t just bringing you July 4th food ideas. We are bringing you our favorite recipes from the grill. Grab a kebab for the kids, make salads exciting, or capture a few tips on how to break down a whole chicken.
We know that everyone may have a different grill than those found in the recipes you are about to get your hands on, so here are some of our recommendations on grilling different Farmer Focus chicken products. If you feel you would get an A+ on a grilling test, we encourage you to grill your heart out while feeling inspired and trying something new from the flavors in these recipes.

It’s almost 2017, and most of us are gearing up toward new goals to accomplish during the new year. A common resolution centers around a cleaner diet and more exercise. But starting and sticking to a new habit can be difficult if you don’t make tangible rules and checkpoints for yourself. If your new year’s resolution is to live a healthier lifestyle, the first step is to adjust the food that even enters your home. Here are some tips to keep your grocery shopping trips on track.

1. 1. Stick to the outside perimeter of the store. That’s where all the fresh, whole foods are located. Makes trips to the center of the store infrequent. The inner aisles are where all the heavily processed foods hide in their colorful boxes and cans. Additionally, only shopping outside of the store keeps your grocery trips short and efficient.

1. 2. Plan a weekly menu and post it in the kitchen. This will help form your grocery lists and keep you on track throughout the week. Our favorite weekly meal plans come from foodiewithfamily.com.

1. 3. Don’t shop hungry. Eat a little snack before heading to the grocery store. It’s tempting to pick up items that can be immediately eaten while you’re hungry-shopping (this often means junk food). You are also more likely to stray from your weekly plan when all you can think about is devouring everything that meets your eye.

1. 4. Pick up fresh items for quick breakfasts. Especially if you have kids, mornings can be hectic, and you might often find yourself leaving the house without something to eat. Skipping breakfast can lead to overeating the rest of the day. Or if you’re one to eat breakfast out, this generally high-fat morning meal can set the tone for your diet that day. Putting ingredients for a quick egg and veggie bake can last you through the week and can easily be frozen and reheated!

1. 5. Buy frozen veggies. If you find yourself tossing rotten, fresh veggies in the trash week after week, buy frozen. The nutritional content is comparable to buying fresh and won’t go bad as fast.

1. 6. Don’t be afraid to buy snacks. You WILL want to snack between meals. Denying yourself of this will make you unhappy and hungry and set you up for failure. Make sure to pick up quick and easy snacks to enjoy throughout the week. Keep it healthy with granola and yogurt, apple and peanut butter, or skim milk cheese sticks.

1. 7. Always have quick meals on hand. Everyone is familiar with those nights you come home from work feeling tired. Not to mention you still have Jake’s soccer practice, Melissa’s ballet lessons, and end the night helping with homework. You’ll want to keep some chicken (make it organic, SVO chicken for a healthy upgrade) on hand to toss in a stir-fry with the frozen veggies you purchased above. That way, you can get back to your busy night and hopefully have time to relax after the kids are put to bed.

Remember, every day is a new day. You can always start again if you had to eat out more than you had hoped this week or caved when the kiddos wanted to go out for ice cream. Reflect on how the week went and make efforts to try again next week!

We love visiting our farms.

We get to chat with the farmers—the folks that are the foundation of Farmer Focus chicken! The best time to arrive to the farms is early in the morning or late in the day—when the summer air cools and provides a nice comfortable setting for our feathered friends to stretch their wings and scratch in the grass for bugs.

These young chickens are only about four weeks old. Still discovering their outdoor area with plenty of curiosity—especially for our photographer’s camera.

We aren’t the only ones to visit SVO farms: third-party auditors from the USDA Organic Department, Certified Humane Board, and the folks from the Global Animal Partnership drop by often (sometimes unannounced). They take the time to ensure that meticulous certification standards are satisfied. So you can feel assured that these chickens always meet high standards regarding quality of treatment and quality feed.

Click any of the icons below to learn more about SVO’s third-party certifications:

Mother’s Day is around the corner, and you may be wondering what to get your rockstar mother-figure because she deserves the world and more! At Farmer Focus we are all about supporting small family-owned businesses and farms. So, we’ve put together a list of some of our favorite family farmed, family-owned, and family-inspired gifts that will make for the best Mother’s Day yet!

HARMONY HARVEST FARM

“Flowers for extraordinary people, from extraordinary farmers.” 

Harmony Harvest Farm is family-owned and operated by a mother-daughter trifecta, Chris, Jessica, and Stephanie in Weyers Cave, Virginia. Order your mom a unique handcrafted bouquet or arrangement full of 100% American-grown flowers from family farms. 

Follow along with Harmony Harvest Farm on their Instagram account, where they go behind the scenes of their farm and share their family story daily. 

SHOWALTER’S ORCHARD & GREENHOUSE

Taste the sweet and crisp apples grown in the Shenandoah Valley on Showalter’s Orchard in the hard cider from Old Hill Cider. Explore the different flavors and order them here. You can pair this cider with a booked getaway to one of the orchard’s Farm Stays, where mom can enjoy the views and relaxation at her own private oasis.

Joe Showalter started farming in 1965, setting up a fresh market for the community to purchase sweet, crisp apples, later adding a cider press, and creating their famous Showalter’s apple cider. As the family continues to carry on these established traditions, they have added a cidery (Old Hill Cider), farm stay, and event venue.

ROS O’BRIEN CERAMICS

“Make Life More Beautiful”

PREPOPSTEROUS

Don’t worry; we didn’t forget snacks. Tish is the CEO of PrePOPsterous and calls herself a “mom-prenuer”. She sources popcorn for her gourmet popcorn company from the Shenandoah Valley, and her family plays an active role in the business with her.

From traditional to customizable flavors and a gift box set ready to be shipped, PrePOPsterous has what you need to upgrade mom’s snacking experience and get her a not-so-ordinary yet extraordinary gift for Mother’s Day! Order yours here!

*”all popcorn is made in our own private, nut-free facility.”

Make Mother’s Day unique with these family-farmed, family-owned, family-inspired gifts that will last. Even if you have your Mother’s Day gifts ordered and ready, send this gift guide to someone else who made needs some direction. If you order any gifts supporting these family businesses, tag us and the farmers/families on social media to share the love!

Happy Mother’s Day from the Farmer Focus team!

We are bringing you a game-day menu that your guests will devour! We’ve got you covered with fan-favorite flavors like honey mustard, sweet and spicy, and buffalo. We even threw in a chicken drumstick recipe for our friends who like to have a wing in one hand and a drumstick in the other as they watch the big game.

HONEY JALAPEÑO PARTY WINGS

Need to save some time while keeping amazing flavors? Try our new pre-seasoned Honey Jalapeño Party Wings! We’ve done the seasoning for you; now, all you need to do is cook them how you please. Available at Fresh Direct.

Find your Farmer Focus chicken party wings and chicken drumsticks at a store near you using our store locator!

It’s not every day that you get a call from the White House to speak on a panel about protecting generational family farmers. For Farmer Focus founding farmer and Chairman, Corwin Heatwole, January 3rd was that day. He joined a White House round table to discuss the Farmer Focus business model and how it can scale to continue promoting and protecting generational farmers while offering transparency and better quality chicken to customers.

For more information from the White House on the event see their press release.

To hear more from Corwin’s White House speech visit this link or read the transcripts below.

“As a 6th generational farmer, I greatly value the farming lifestyle. But, I was grieving when I saw dozens of farms closing down around me and I realized that my farm was not viable for the next generation. We knew that something had to be done, but there was no option for us to get our animals processed locally.

Everyone kept telling us, “farmers don’t start chicken companies”. So, with no other options we started a company with a mission to promote and protect generational family farms. We are now partnered with 73 independent family farmers and on track to exceed 100 this year while providing poultry products for around 1 million consumers.

 

Our unique and scalable model of partnering with farmers focuses on the financial viability and sustainability of farms while bringing solutions to the three pain points that exist with conglomerates:

 

1)    The lack of ownership of animals and inventory on the farm.

2)    The lack of operational control that belongs in the hands of farmers.

3)    The tournament pay system that plays farmers against each other.

 

We’ve found that when you empower farmers with ownership and control, enabling farms to be viable and sustainable for the next generation, incredible success stories emerge. Stories of farms returning to success from the brink of bankruptcy. You even see the next generation returning to the farm. We’ve seen the average age of our farmers trend around 10 years below the national average.

 

This model has enabled a resilient community of thriving farmers while bringing consumers the transparent and traceable products they are looking for. We are excited that this administration is focused on increasing the capabilities that create more options for generational family farmers. We ourselves look forward to partnering on these new programs to expand and touch more farmers and communities. We believe that together, we can continue to level the playing field for farmers and ranchers while establishing a more resilient supply network.

 

We thank you for your diligence in helping preserve the legacy of the American farmer.”

 

Learn more about Farmer Focus’ unique model here and learn about the difference that model can make here.

We are thrilled to share with you a new chicken feather in our cap!

For years, Farmer Focus has been working to reduce pollution produced by our farming and production practices. We learn more and more each day how connected living beings are to the land, and how important it is to protect the land from harmful contaminants. We’ve asked farmers and environmental experts to show us where we can do better, and we’re taking actions to operate in cleaner and less wasteful ways. It’s a work in progress, and we have a ways to go yet, but what we’ve done so far has been recognized by the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ), and we are committed to these efforts for the long haul. 

The DEQ recently published twenty-two case studies in successful pollution prevention. The case study about Farmer Focus, which you can read here, outlines all we’re doing to prevent pollution at farms, at the processing facility, and at our offices. We try to focus on the 3 R’s: Reduce, Reuse, and Recycle. By reducing waste and conserving resources wherever we can, we also reduce the amount of materials we need to reuse and recycle. So that’s the first step. We “reduce” by installing motion sensor LED lighting at the plant, developing on-site wastewater treatment, and replacing polystyrene foam with something reusable. These are cutting edge ways to use less electricity and water and reduce trash. We’re also looking at ways of using biochar in chicken bedding, which will reduce bacteria in chicken houses. Common sense approaches also help reduce waste, like letting natural light illuminate the chicken houses during the day. We’ve all been taught to turn off the light when we leave the room, right?

As for “reuse,” we allow farmers to reuse their existing houses and other structures. Kind of like “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” we believe “if it’s still usable, don’t replace it!” We’re researching how farmers might be able to kill pathogens in used bedding with heat so they can reuse the bedding for the next flock. And water reclaim stations at the processing facility let us reuse some water, alleviating the burden on the city’s supply. 

We have ramped up our recycling efforts to handle whatever food waste, cardboard, and plastic we create. If we want the land to be healthy, we can’t keep handing our trash off to someone else. We have to handle it ourselves. So we’re installing a cardboard compactor and composting food waste and biosolids. This achievement has lit a fire under us to find even more ways to reduce our environmental footprint and be good stewards of the land we all rely on. We’re excited for this journey and so grateful y’all are on it with us.