The Good Farm

by Nicole Zappone @TheChronicleCT

The bird is certainly the word at The  Good Farm in Columbia. Owned and operated by Jefferson Munroe, the farm is also home to the Twin Beaks Fried Chicken trailer that can be seen at various community events. As a farmer since 2010, Munroe runs the farm from his palate, focusing on finding biomimicry systems. The farming adventure for the Columbia resident began at a farm-to-market shop called the Larder and a fried chicken trailer on Martha’s Vineyard.

Jefferson Munroe, owner and operator of The Good Farm in Columbia, holds up one of his broiler chickens on the farm.

When Munroe decided it was time to invest in his own farm, he called Columbia home, where he would plant his roots with his wife, Erin. On the farm, dogs protect the land, so the birds can roam free during the day and at night. Those dogs are named Aspen, Angel, and Ace.

On the farm, broiler chickens are raised and will be sent to the slaughterhouse in the next week. The chickens are raised in a bottomless structure and moved every day. “We move them every day, and we do that in part because it helps spread their poop around in terms of fertilizing,” Munroe said. “More importantly, it means they are not sitting in their own poop all the time, and they have access to bugs and grass.” Munroe said this process is very labor-intensive, but it’s worth it. “It’s kind of modeled on production style by this guy Joel Salatin, who is in Virginia,” Munroe said. “We don’t do everything the same, but he kind of originated the idea.”

The farm will raise about 3,500 chickens, and most of them will go through the food trailer, Twin Beaks Fried Chicken. “I’m trying to get out there and give people good food,” Munroe said. “When I started raising chickens, we were doing it this way, but on a much smaller scale.” Munroe was mostly wholesaling them to restaurants as whole chickens. Over time, they would cut them up and season them. “We finally started cooking them for people mostly as fried chicken, and that seemed the model that made the most sense,” Munroe said. “I like it because the margins are higher, which is nicer than regular farming, but it also means that we can serve people local food.”

What got Munroe into farming was his first encounter with permaculture in his 20s. Permaculture is the approach to land management and settlement design that draws on the principles of flourishing natural ecosystems. Those principles refer to fields such as regenerative agriculture, town planning, rewilding and community resilience. “I got into that, and it’s about design and how you can produce food without destroying the environment essentially,” Munroe said. “From there, I sort of started looking at food systems and where meat comes from. There wasn’t a lot of options at that time.”

Munroe was living in Boulder with his partner at the time and ended up working for a season on a vegetable farm. “I wanted to give it a try and see what it was like,” Munroe said. “I really enjoy it, but I wasn’t that interested in vegetable farming.”

When Munroe found out about the style of raising chickens he practices today, he was living on Martha’s Vineyard, where a nonprofit had built a mobile slaughterhouse. “I was able to use that slaughter facility to slaughter the chickens I raised and sold to people,” Munroe said. “It was built while I was there, and there wasn’t anyone really using it. I was able to lease some land and start raising some chickens.”

Munroe said he had never worked on a farm before, and recommends that anyone interested in working in the field work at another farm before going out on their own.

“One of the cool things this year is that we’re increasing our production pretty significantly, and that will allow us to cut up chickens and sell them raw, which isn’t something we have really done before,” Munroe said.

Earlier this year, the farm got a farm transition grant to build its own slaughter facility. “It’s kind of a full circle thing,” Munroe said. “I started actually slaughtering other people’s chickens before I started raising my own.” To have the chickens slaughtered, Munroe would have to travel about an hour to a facility and wait in line. To save time and be more sustainable, he decided to build his own facility.

“We do turkeys for Thanksgiving, and we will be able to do more of those,” Munroe said. “It will be cheaper to do it ourselves (slaughtering).”

The farm has a variety of animals, including chickens, hogs, turkeys and sheep.

The Good Farm is located at 544 Rt 87 in Columbia.

For more information, visit thegood.farm or email thegoodfarmmv@gmail.com.