How many chickens does it take to make a pack of livers?
No, this isn’t the beginning of a terrible joke.
A huge demand on offal here at Greenway Farm, coming mostly from a spike in diets advocating its nutritional value, means our little enterprise Farm2Fork is feeling the pressure to provide customers with vast quantities. It leads us to encourage you to ask the question – how many chickens does it take?
The answer to the non-joke is 20, by the way.
That’s right, it requires 20 chickens to produce just one pack of chicken livers.
We don’t need to keep on with the maths – although it’s worth noting that one cow from the Farm2Fork farm produces 14 rib-eye steaks (on average).
It’s easy to see that if everyone ordered packs of chicken livers, or steak, exclusively, then there just wouldn’t be enough.
Back to the offal: A supermarket has access to production lines where chickens suffer in conditions that make us shudder. These densely packed farms can make up packs of liver, heart, or any number of other organ meats, to supply the current high demand.
But as a small farm, with high ethical and environmental values, and following organic processes, we simply cannot always meet that demand.
Although we strive to meet our customers’ requirements, we have to remain both realistic and stay true to our values.
The way we manage high demand is two-fold. Firstly, we do have limitations on some of our stock – this is only to ensure that the products can be shared out as fairly as possible to our customers.
The second is to ask our discerning customers to consider enjoying more than just one part of an animal.
Yes, offal is nutritious and healthy, but so are other cuts. And with all our meat exclusively grass-fed (with a little added grain for the chickens and geese), we pride ourselves on the nutritional make-up of our products.
We ask you to be patient – to order different products over time, and to understand that when things are out of stock it is because we only have a limited number of animals being reared at any one time.
We can’t apologise for our way of farming – but we know that by doing it the way we do; we have attracted the right customers. You’re the ones that understand good food comes from careful and consciousness production. This produces healthy meat, and in our opinion far better meat.
We can also promise you that when the stock comes in and you can enjoy it, it will have been well worth the wait!
