Growing in Tandem:
Diamond G Poultry
Ben (left) and Jacob (right) at Gray Acres Farm.
Jacob Gray and Ben Gillespie are not only business partners, they’re friends who share the same values for healthy food systems.
Ben and Jacob met six years ago when Jacob was in an internship program with Ben’s family farm, The Living Farm in Delta County. After the internship ended, Jacob stayed in the area and continued to farm.
“Jacob worked as an intern for a couple of years before buying the intern house from my family and deciding to stay here long term...I can’t get rid of him,” Ben joked.
Jacob started his own farm, Gray Acres, in 2014. On two and a half acres, Jacob produces milk, cheese, fruit, jam, and pastured poultry. He also leases other acreage to raise his highland cattle for beef and hides.
Both Jacob and Ben were producing poultry respectively at their own farms until 2018.
Chicken producers (especially the way Ben and Jacob grow them) are not common in Colorado. There are egg producers but not many poultry producers. Prior to 2016, there was not a lot of legislation around rules and standards for poultry producers. That and the lack of infrastructure for producers made it difficult to sell poultry. Currently, there are no custom poultry processors on the Western Slope and fewer than ten in the entire state. In 2016, House Bill 58, one of the first laws to set standards for chicken producing and processing, passed, changing things for Coloradans.
“In 2016, a law was passed that said if you raise 1 to 1000 chickens, you could sell your product on-farm or directly to customers with no middleman,” Jacob explained.
The caveat was that record-keeping rules came into play and producers had to keep the name, day, address, and the number of birds sold to each individual customer. Additionally, products had to have a certain label with safe handling instructions.
At the end of that law-making process, there was a requirement that the state had to develop a stakeholder group to see if they wanted to further regulate chicken up to 20,000 birds. That’s where Jacob decided to get involved.
“I entered the stakeholder group with a bunch of restaurant owners, retailers such as Natural Grocers, and a couple of other chicken producers...even though there's not many of us in the state,” Jacob said.
The stakeholders' group decided they wanted new rules that allowed the sale of poultry on a wholesale level more defined for poultry producers.
“After a lot of back and forth and a lot of trips to Denver, we decided we were going to go through the Colorado Department of Agriculture's Sunset Review to get another law passed,” Jacob said.
In 2017, Jacob and the other stakeholders began writing some of the rules that appeared on that bill. With that came regulation for state-licensed facilities for poultry that were different from red meat.
“We fought for some of the things that we thought didn't really pertain to such small scale processing as it did with larger facilities that handled red meat, like the three walls on the kill area and more comprehensible rules. Simultaneously an empowering and frustrating experience,” Jacob said.
Finally, in early 2018, Jacob and the stakeholders' work was passed into law with broad support.
Through this process, Ben and Jacob realized they weren’t seeing enough return with their separate operations.
“I needed to get a little bit bigger to make the margins work. When you enter into the wholesale market, production naturally has to increase to make up for the price difference,” Jacob said.
Together, they started Diamond G Poultry. In their first year, they decided to construct a processing facility under the same operation. Diamond G processing facility is set to open in early 2020.
“We decided to stop competing and combine our knowledge, customer bases, and our resources, and that's where Diamond G was born,” Ben said.
“Diamond G is fully wholesale, so what we do is we sell to our individual farms to sell retail as well as other restaurants and retailers,” Jacob said.
“Diamond G utilizes The Living Farm and Gray Acres, materials, feed, and some of the land. When we sell to our respective farms, we then get to sell directly to consumers at a retail price, which helps keep the operation going,” Ben said.
Diamond G combines the best of what Ben and Jacob’s separate operations have to offer to legally supply chickens wholesale and retail to people across Delta County and the state. The key to Diamond G is the licensed processing facility -- A rarity in the state. By Colorado law, only Ben and Jacob (the owners of Diamond G and the processing facility) are able to process their own chickens in their facility. Ben and Jacob have had a lot of interest in their processing facility, even though it is still under construction.
“A lot of people want to raise meat, not a lot of people want to process meat,” Jacob and Ben said in unison.
That has put them in a unique spot. Had it not been for Jacob’s involvement in the legislative process, the niche market demand, or Ben and Jacob’s ability to do the construction themselves, the Diamond G processing facility would not exist. Jacob said being included in the legislation that outlined a proper processing facility has been really helpful in determining what is okay for his facility. The area of demand for fresh, pasture-raised chicken in the surrounding counties was there to support the time-intensive construction of the processing facility, and the fact that Jacob and Ben could do all of the construction themselves sealed the deal. Had they not been able to complete the construction themselves, the project would have cost upwards of $75,000.
The methodologies and values of Diamond G’s pastured poultry, echo Joel Salatin.
“Jake actually read the Pasture, Poultry, Profits book by Joel Salatin, and my mother had read it, but I had never read it, but she told me about the principles of sustainability and I was sold,” Ben said.
Ben started pasture raising poultry four years ago, but he had been against barn-raising chickens for a long time.
“I've been barn-raising chickens ever since I was ten, or 12,” Ben said, “In a barn, chickens stumble between their feed and their water and there’s always a thick layer of poop between the food and the water...and they just go back and forth all day.”
Ben said the barn chickens were able to go outside, but he estimated about 40 percent of them never did. Ben tried to keep up on the cleaning required for the number of birds he was raising, but ammonia is able to build in that situation quickly. One of the major selling points of pasture-raised birds for Ben was the cleanliness aspect.
“It all kind of clicked from there,” Ben said. “By moving the chickens outside, the manure goes straight in the ground, their safety barn is moved once a day to spread their manure properly. Yes, it is more labor to move their pens once a day, but I am promoting soil health, I'm also promoting poultry health, and you know, I’m promoting my own health. Being inside those barns full of ammonia is not healthy for me either.”
Ben noted how in larger chicken facilities, farmers must wear masks in the barn to avoid getting sick from the ammonia.
“I've visited some of those bigger chicken operations. And you would die if you didn’t have your mask on and did chores all day in there...imagine how the chickens feel having to live in there?”
For Jacob, sustainability played a big part in the decision to raise pastured poultry, ecologically and economically.
“It’s about the whole system working together...the soil, the animal, the land, and the farmer,” Jacob said. “In order for me to raise healthy poultry at this scale, I have to charge enough to keep going, and you just can’t charge that much for an average bird, so we have to raise a superb product.”
Their customers’ reaction to their chicken has also been a motivating factor in their operation.
“As far as taste, I mean, because our birds are a little bit older, they have good healthy fat on them, from chlorophyll filled plants and bugs, and good local hearty grains, they just have a different taste,” Jacob said. “We have friends that we make dinner for and they’ll say our chicken is the best thing they’ve had in weeks.”
Ben and Jacob are hopeful by sharing their story, they can encourage people to become more involved in the food system and take more accountability for their food when possible.
“I hope stories like this will help shift farmers’ mindset on getting involved and paying closer attention to the quality of food we produce. And for consumers, shift their mindset to care about where their food comes from, why it costs what it does, and what it does for the health of all of us,” Jacob said.