Robbie and I paid a visit to Regi Haslett-Marroquin’s Finca Mirasol farm north of Northfield last Saturday to buy some of their frozen free-range chickens. Or ‘solar chickens’ as Regi likes to say.
Want chickens? Contact Regi at the Rural Enterprise Center where he’s Executive Director. They have more in the freezer and want to expand their Northfield area customer base in 2009.
I asked Regi to email me a little background on the operation.
The Finca Mirasol farm is a member of the Northfield Area Latino Farmers group composed of 5 families who grew over 4,000 birds in 2008 and sold them through distributors and direct to over 125 families in Northfield.
A source of locally grown protein that does not have the large (up to 17 times more) use of fuel that it takes to transport food across states to your dinner table. Not only is the straight forward carbon footprint reduced (common in the food industry, which accounts for up to 80% of the price of food just for transporting it) but these birds were raised on grain, pasture and hay bales that they pick through and serves them as bedding to keep them healthy and build a tremendous amount of organic matter that is now composting in rows at Finca Mirasol Farm to be turned into rich organic fertilizer for the large family garden if spring ever arrives.
Finca Mirasol Farm was set up in 2008 as a small one acre model operation to introduce local Latino families to an intensive, sustainable and economically viable way of growing healthy local foods, improving a family’s diet at a low cost, while creating an income alternative through a high value product that obviously people are ready to buy and consume right here in Northfield.
For more background, see Regi’s blog posts on chickens (that link is a blog search result). And see the Pollo de Campo web site.
Full disclosure: the Rural Enterprise Center is a client.
I just cooked one on our mini rotisserie and boy is it good. Thanks Regi, and I love the fact that they were raised right here in Northfield.