Oklahoma’s Poultry Problems
Can Pastured, Local Chicken Exist at Scale? Not Here, Not Yet.
Words by Chelsey Simpson / Photos by Hannah Hudson
I was excited — that’s what I remember most about buying chicken in the Bass Pro parking lot in 2010. I was among several dozen people waiting for a semi from DARP to arrive, and when it did, we were all smiles as the thighs, breasts, and whole birds were passed down from the back of the trailer. DARP was a new farm in northeast Oklahoma, and it was offering something impossibly rare: affordable, ethically raised, local chicken. What was rare in 2010 has become non-existent in 2025.
I’ve been engaged in food system reform in Oklahoma and elsewhere for 20 years now, including my current role as co-owner of Urban Agrarian, a locally sourced grocery store that has served Oklahoma City since 2008. For all of those 20 years, Oklahoma has had a poultry problem. To be honest, Oklahoma has many problems when it comes to fostering sustainable agriculture and small family farms. Our weather is inconsistent and harsh; our soil is less than loamy; our population centers are dispersed; and our political leaders tend to favor big-ag. Despite all of this, Oklahoma has been home to a host of wonderful programs and centers for progress over the years, like the Oklahoma Food Co-op, where I first engaged with these issues back in 2005. But where chickens are concerned, we seem stuck.
The average consumer is probably not aware of our poultry problems. Chicken is widely available. I would wager that in spite of our food desert issues, virtually every Oklahoma City citizen lives within walking distance of a chicken retailer of some kind, because even where grocery stores are scarce, there’s a Raising Cane’s or a McDonald’s or a corner store that is prepared to sell you a nugget or a strip. Chicken is ubiquitous, and chicken is cheap.
But if you want to buy locally raised chicken or pasture-raised chicken, things get a lot more complicated and more expensive. There are a lot of good reasons to seek out a locally raised, pastured chicken — there are human health concerns and animal welfare concerns, as well as environmental issues. Not to mention quality and flavor. But the bird I’m describing is hard to find in Oklahoma City right now. At Urban Agrarian, we source products from more than 60 different local farmers and food producers each year. Finding local food to sell is what we’ve specialized in for more than 16 years. Today, I could sell you local milk, artisan pasta, pork chops, peanut butter, ground beef, a rotating cornucopia of produce … the list goes on. But I could not, as of this writing, sell you a local chicken breast. And if I did source chicken breast, it would cost more than $25 per pound.
This hasn’t always been the case. For years, Urban Agrarian carried chicken from a company called Cooks Venture that was focused on pasture-based, regenerative farming techniques. Its processing facilities were in Jay, Oklahoma, and it worked with farmers in Oklahoma and Arkansas. Boneless, skinless chicken breast from Cooks Venture was $12.95 per pound at Urban Agrarian. Cheap is a relative term, but it was a price that many people found justifiable given the quality of the meat and the ethics behind the company. But in November 2023, Cooks Venture announced it was closing their doors, and after that, things got really ugly. Hundreds of workers were laid off shortly before Christmas. Farmers who had been raising birds for Cooks Venture suddenly had nowhere to send the animals for processing, and, worse still, no money to buy feed for the birds. I heard rumors that birds were being killed and discarded en masse, and reporting published later by Agriculture Dive confirmed that roughly 1 million birds were euthanized by the Arkansas Department of Agriculture using a suffocating foam.
Somewhere way down the line of suffering was my grocery store. Chicken was always one of our best-selling products, accounting for thousands of dollars of revenue. My business partner, Matt, and I spoke to everyone we could think of in search of chicken. The story was always the same: no one could sell us the amount of chicken we needed, and even if they could, the price would have been sky-high. Would consumers pay more than $25 per pound for chicken breast? We doubted it. We took a big financial hit; the lack of local chicken contributed to one of Urban Agrarian’s worst financial years in history.
The combination of volume, price, and ethics had made Cooks Venture a unicorn. Except, historically speaking, it wasn’t unique at all. It was actually the third chicken business to attempt a similar model. Remember the DARP chicken I was excited to buy in 2010? DARP was (as far as I know) the first version. It was a vertically integrated business with ethically raised chicken and a company-owned processing facility. DARP was followed by Crystal Lakes, which closed in 2018. And then came Cooks Venture, which launched in 2019, reportedly raised at least $120 million, and then closed in 2023.
It is obvious that these entities failed as businesses, which is very discouraging to anyone who would like to see ethically raised chicken succeed at scale. Calling what they did “ethical” is also up for debate, at best. I’ve already described the abandoned farmers and the foamed chickens that accompanied the closure of Cooks Venture. DARP, meanwhile, was accused of having cramped chicken houses, and in 2017 a story broke that involved worker abuses: “Chicken Workers Sue, Saying They Were Modern-Day Slaves” claimed an NPR headline.
Raising pastured poultry is hard — rotating flocks to new pasture for foraging takes labor and space, and the animals are more vulnerable to predators. Readers of this magazine may remember the story I wrote in 2023 about Tiger Creek Farm’s pastured turkey operation, in which I described how its birds simply flew away one day. This year I can give you the sad update that bobcats apparently seized a larger than normal percentage of the 2024 turkey crop. Pastured poultry is hard. But the pasturing part isn’t why the farmers I know are having a hard time scaling up; Oklahoma’s poultry problems come down to processing.
For decades, independent chicken farmers in Oklahoma (anyone not in contract with an entity like Tyson) have had two limiting options when it is time to harvest their birds. Their first option is to process and package birds themselves, on their own farm, but the state of Oklahoma limits the number of birds that can be processed on-farm to 10,000 birds per year. If you think that 10,000 sounds like a lot, keep in mind that Tyson, the largest chicken producer in the United States, processes 42 million chickens per week, according to its own website. A worker in a large processing facility might work on as many as 14,000 birds in a single day. It is true, however, that processing 10,000 birds on a farm is no small task, and many farms don’t want to undertake it. It’s also not enough birds to make a living from, so no enterprising farmer would set their sights on just 10,000 birds. USDA rules allow farmers to process up to 20,000 birds on-farm, but Oklahoma is one of just 10 states that has not adopted that higher cap. Some people believe that local lawmakers stop short of increasing the limit in order to please companies like Tyson, which have a strong foothold in Oklahoma.
For all of these reasons, most farmers reach the conclusion that a commercial processor (option two) is the way to go, but processors are literally few and far between. Until recently (more on this later), there have been zero independent poultry processors in Oklahoma, so chicken farmers are forced to load up their live birds and haul them to a processor in another state. Hauling birds long distance is expensive, and hard on the animals and the people involved.
A farmer I know named David Bachman described to me why he decided to stop raising his own chickens: “We would have to leave at four in the morning with just 100 birds. We would drive for four hours, leave the birds, and then come back in two days to pick them up.”
Nate Beaulac, another farmer I know, owns and operates Prairie Creek Farms, one of the most ambitious pastured meat producers in Oklahoma. This year itraised 14,000 pastured meat chickens, and he took most of them to a processor in Dallas called Windy Meadows. He makes the eight-hour round trip twice, once with a trailer full of live birds and once with a vehicle to haul refrigerated birds. The processing alone can cost $6 to $8 per bird. Suddenly the $25 chicken breast starts to make sense.
Nate recently invested in Mayes County Processing — an existing meat processor in Pryor, Oklahoma — in order to help it add a chicken processing facility that will serve his farm and other local farms. He said small processors and small farms depend on one another, and it is hard to keep a processor in business. Oklahoma has been stuck in a cycle in which processors add chicken lines to their facilities only to find that the farms that requested processing have gone out of business while the facilities were being built. So then the processor shuts down. And so on.
Nate said that even if Oklahoma had more small processors, the price would still be high.
“A large processor will kill 40k birds per day, so they get a ton of efficiencies,” Nate explains. “My bill on 1,000 birds will be $5,500. A place like Tyson will pay $14 for 1,000 birds. That’s why you can get a $7 rotisserie chicken.”
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Have you ever held a chicken? They're surprisingly soft, but also delicate, like layers of chenille wrapped around a piece of china. They make soft little noises, too. When I was five, I had a pet chicken named Flower. She let me hold her, and sometimes she would jump up on the kitchen windowsill and eat whatever biscuit remnants my mother left sitting on top of our microwave. I think she was eventually eaten by a coyote, and I have never owned a chicken since.
Going back at least five generations, my mother and all of my grandmothers on my father’s side of the family were farmer’s wives (or, as I prefer to say, farmers, considering they were every bit as integral and involved in the farming operation as any man.) I've heard tales of both my grandmother and great-grandmother killing chickens for dinner — wringing their necks and plucking their feathers, and frying them up. Sometimes when I get lost in all the chicken math, I like to stop and remember that in my career, this is both what I'm moving away from and toward. And I recognize that I can't have it both ways.
The industrialization of agriculture is why I have never plucked a chicken; someone else has always done it for me. Often, even with a package of thawed, boneless, skinless chicken breasts in my refrigerator, I struggle to put dinner on the table by 7 p.m. There is no world in which I could write for a magazine, run a business, and also come home to wring the neck of a chicken and fry it up for dinner. I believe in a world in which agriculture is small, honest, and direct. But I benefit from a world in which it is not my own chicken's soft neck in my hands.
This is a story without an ending, because no one has solved the problem or even gotten very close. It would help if farmers could legally process more chickens on-farm. And it would help if someone (the government, the community, foundations?) subsidized small processors in order to make them financially sustainable. I will probably try selling chicken breast at $25 per pound so I can allow the market to decide what version of the food system it wants to support. All the while, I’m aware that the ability to buy chicken at any cost is not a privilege available to everyone. As consumers, we need to come to terms with the fact that there’s no such thing as cheap food — it’s just a matter of who pays the price.