Americans eat more than 160 million servings of chicken every day. A growing approach to poultry production — regenerative poultry farming — seeks to make it better for people and the planet.
This article was produced in partnership with Civil Eats.
When you approach the poultry paddocks at Salvatierra Farms you might not notice how many chickens are hiding among the tall grasses and young hazelnut trees at first. And that’s by design.
On a warm afternoon in June, 1,500 7-week-old hens had come out to mill around — lured by feed and water stations — but many were hard to find.
“There’s an eagle that comes around here,” says Reginaldo Haslett-Marroquin, the farmer and visionary behind the operation. “It has flown over a few times, and it just keeps going.”
Soon, he adds, the trees and other perennials will be tall enough to provide cover for the birds, but the grass will suffice in the meantime.
Salvatierra, which was a conventional corn and soy operation until Haslett-Marroquin bought it three years ago, is in the midst of a wholesale transformation. He has planted more than 8,000 hazelnut trees there, created a water catchment pond and begun managing the forest that frames it on two sides, and leveled the land where he plans to build a home for his family.
This summer, he also raised the first three flocks of chickens there.
As it comes into maturity, Salvatierra, which is in Northfield, Minnesota, stands to become a central hub around which a growing and much wider network of farmers, scientists, nonprofits and funders will rotate — all in the name of regenerative poultry farming.
Regenerative is a complex term with many interpretations.
But Haslett-Marroquin’s approach stands apart from many others as it combines what he learned growing up in Guatemala — where chickens thrive in multi-story jungles — with a deep understanding of the Midwest’s native ecosystems.
Unlike the pasture-based model of poultry production which typically uses mobile barns and is sometimes also referred to as “regenerative,” it involves raising the birds in one spot, alongside trees and other perennial crops as a way to build soil that is rich with organic matter and carbon, capture and store water and make the land on which it takes place more resilient in the face of the climate crisis.
At the core of the effort in Minnesota is Tree-Range Farms, the company Haslett-Marroquin co-founded, and a growing network that includes more than 40 farms in the region.
The Regenerative Agriculture Alliance (RAA), the nonprofit he founded and now sits on the board of, also plays a key, ongoing role in developing the infrastructure behind the network and has plans to scale it up to extend across the upper portion of the corn belt.
But the grand vision doesn’t end there. There are also farms using Haslett-Marroquin’s approach in Guatemala, Mexico, and in several Native American communities, including the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. And if its advocates have their way, the core practices and the philosophy behind it could be replicated in many parts of the world in the years to come.
And at a time when Americans eat more than 160 million servings of chicken every day and industrial poultry farming is known for polluting ground water, air and waterways, as well as causing health issues for people who live nearby, it could be a welcome change.
How the Regenerative Poultry Model Works
Like the chickens hiding in the grass, the sophistication of Haslett-Marroquin’s regenerative poultry system may be hard to spot for the untrained eye.
For years, he collaborated on research and development on his first farm, Finca Marisol, and on a nearby farm called Organic Compound in Faribault, Minnesota, to establish a production standard with very specific parameters.
Each poultry flock or “unit” includes 1,500 chickens, a barn and 1.5 acres of land divided into two fenced-in areas, or paddocks. The birds spend days outside in paddocks filled with rows of trees and perennial shrubs such as elderberry and comfrey.
“Everything that is part of the standard was tried and tested, from breeds to how long you feed them, to the right kind of welfare aspect to consider in the coop construction,” says Diane Christofore, the current executive director of the RAA, which brought in the funding for the research and development behind the standard. The organization recently launched an online course to train farmers, and it is also making a number of scholarships available.
In 8 to 12 weeks, farmers can take the birds to the small-scale processing plant that the RAA runs in Northern Iowa.
If they opt to sell them under the Tree-Range label, storage, distribution and marketing are all taken care of, as the birds make their way to consumers in the Minneapolis-St. Paul region. Soon, Tree-Range plans to expand its reach to add retailers in Madison, Milwaukee and Chicago.
The hope is to provide a relatively easy point of entry for beginning farmers and immigrant farmers looking for a way to start earning capital quickly.
With their short life cycle and relevance across many cultures, chickens allow farmers to get onboard and join the network — or the “ecosystem,” as RAA refers to it, while renting land and working other jobs. Once a barn has been built — or adapted from an existing structure— the required labor is concentrated in the mornings and evenings, making it a relatively easy lift for new farmers.
“We’re creating this for the people that don’t have access to the [resources to engage in large-scale agriculture], but you’re also working with people who are still engaged in conventional agriculture and asking, ‘How could I transition?’” says Christofore.
Many of the farms raising birds for Tree-Range are run by recent immigrants, such as Callejas Farm, where Jose and Erica Callejas, formerly from El Salvador, raise multiple flocks of chickens each year with their daughters. Or Carrillo Brother Farms, where Jesus and Aldo Carrillo — who migrated from Mexico — raise one flock a year alongside a wide array of fruit and vegetables.
Haslett-Marroquin says there are more interested farmers than the RAA has the bandwidth to support at this point, so he’s confident that the network will continue to grow.
For one, he says, the modular approach to adding flocks to farms makes it relatively simple to replicate.
After years of prototyping the system at Finca Marisol, he says everything fell into place very quickly at Salvatierra, where he is starting with three units and plans to add three more in the coming year.
“There was no guesswork,” he says. “This thing happened as if I had done it a million times. And we could take 1,000 acres, 10,000 acres or 1 million acres, and we’d know exactly what to do. That’s the difference between farm-level thinking and system-level thinking. And at the end, it’s that large scale that makes it truly regenerative, not the farm itself.”
Feed conversion ratio — or the relationship between the feed that goes into the animals and the final product — is a common metric for measuring financial success and environmental impact in meat production. Chickens in RAA’s system eat more grain because they move around much more. But the farms have an overall smaller footprint because the added manure replaces synthetic fertilizer. On 1.5 acres, mature hazelnut trees will produce around 800 to 1,200 pounds of nuts.
“Once you add up the output of meat, the output of hazelnuts, the large-scale sequestration of carbon,” Haslett-Marroquin says, “you can’t even compare it to a confinement model.”
At the core, his approach to food production is one that places productivity within a larger context of a balanced living system.
It’s about “stewarding the transformation of energy from non-edible forms to edible ones,” and it’s a process that isn’t new but, on the contrary, quite old.
“We are unleashing the original Indigenous intellect that makes us so powerful as human beings. It is the one thing that all capitalistic, extractive, destructive systems hate. That’s why they will go and massacre Indigenous communities at mass scale because they know that that intellect can overcome the extractive system. And it can, in the end, save the planet,” he adds.
The Science
Haslett-Marroquin is confident that the system he has developed works, but he knows that Western scientific research is key to scaling it up.
Dr. Beth Fisher, a soil scientist and assistant professor at Minnesota State University, Mankato, is part of a team of scientists in Minnesota that started measuring the health of the soil, the water and the emissions released from farms in 2021.
Fisher says she was approached by Haslett-Marroquin, who asked her to gather evidence to add validation to what he had long observed and understood intuitively about the way regenerative practices work on the ground. She was interested in the approach, but it was the visit to Finca Marisol, the first farm where birds and trees had been raised side by side for almost a dozen years, that sealed the deal.
“The soil structure is beautiful,” she says. “Water infiltrates beautifully. It has a wonderful collection of organic matter.”
Since then, she and the undergraduate students she works with have been gathering samples of soil on a handful of farms in the network, as well as conventional, corn and soy farms that neighbor them. The differences have been compelling, and Fisher hopes to begin publishing the findings in academic journals and in agriculture publications soon.
Carrie Jennings, the research and policy director at the nonprofit Freshwater and an adjunct professor and researcher at the University of Minnesota, initiated the research.
She points to the fact that the Cannon River, which runs through Minnesota and down to the Mississippi River, is one of the bodies of water in the nation that is most polluted by agricultural chemicals. And she has seen strong initial evidence that the regenerative poultry system is not adding to that pollution.
Jennings is closely tracking the funds Minnesota is directing toward regenerative practices, and she says, “We want to make sure they’re funding the right practices; we don’t want them throwing away tax money on things that aren’t going to improve water, soil and climate.”
Jennings also wants to provide hard evidence for farmers looking to change their practices.
“Farmers notice that their lives and waters are degrading over generations and even within a generation. They’re not exactly happy about it either. They know that they’re spending more than they should on chemicals. So, if someone like Reginaldo can show that this works then it’s more likely to be adopted.”
She also points to General Mills’ recent financial support as evidence of the potentially influential nature of Haslett-Marroquin’s approach. “They need to make sure [crops] can continue to be grown in this rapidly changing world. It’s important to the companies and the consumers of those products,” she adds.
In addition to research, General Mills is also funding the RAA’s farmer training and its demonstration farm. “We have been inspired by the RAA’s thought leadership and continue to learn from the deep and holistic way they approach regenerative agriculture,” said a company representative in a statement to Civil Eats.
RAA collaborated with Oatly, General Mills and a number of other nonprofit and research entities in the region, on a $5 million climate-smart commodities grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) aimed at “support[ing] poultry producers who follow diversified, regenerative, climate-smart grain production methods incorporating small grains such as oats, no-till and cover crops, integrated agroforestry practices.
“It’s an opportunity now to start to produce grains within [the regenerative] system, because 70 percent of the cost to farm business is feed,” said Christofore.
A Growing Network
In stepping down from leading the RAA, Hasslet-Morroquin hopes the network moves toward a collective model of leadership based on a Mayan diagram that looks more like a circle than a pyramid.
The idea is to create a strong system wherein everybody leads and follows at the same time, a reciprocal form of relationship-based accountability. “And if you do that, you unleash the energy of the people, and it is unbelievable. That’s why we call this an intellectual insurgency.”
Christofore echoes that idea. “We expect a certain level of participation from those who want to commit to the ecosystem. And that’s when you start to care about things, when you start to have ownership. It comes with a lot of responsibility and does require risk. But what comes with it is an opportunity to be a part of a culture and a community that’s growing.”
Hasslet-Morroquin has his sights set on reaching 250 farms on 50,000 acres in Minnesota, Iowa and Wisconsin.
From there, he can see the network expanding to five or six other regions around the U.S. until it reaches 500 million chickens. That type of growth sounds enormous, but it would still only be 5 percent of the total chickens raised in the U.S. And at that point, he says, a truly regenerative system would have some real leverage.
“At that point, we’ll look at the industry — the USDA, investors, markets, everybody, and say, ‘Okay, folks, why should we only do 5 percent of the total poultry system this way when we can do 100 percent?’” says the visionary farmer.
“I may not get there myself, but somebody else could get us there. It doesn’t matter how long it takes. We don’t plan for the next year to two; this is about the seven generations in front of us.”
