WELCOME TO
A FAMILY FARM IN SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
THE EASIEST WAY TO GET STARTED
A lot of people aren’t sure about making the commitment of purchasing a whole cow or pig so we’ve put together a nice sampler box to get you hooked on how good our farm fresh meat is.
The sampler box contains 5 lbs of a variety of pork and beef cuts. Each box is different, but you might get sirloin, pork chops, ground beef, sausages or just about anything else!
What is for sure is that you are going to want to purchase more after you taste how good these heritage breed meats taste.
FARM FRESH MEAT
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Chicken
$25.00The first-ever heritage Chicken Choosin’ contest was designed to highlight the culinary value of the chickens less processed in this country. The people’s choice was hands down the Americanized version of the English Dorking, a chicken that’s historically associated with some of the best eating there is in Britain.
Dorking is lovely to look at with sumptuous flavor in both the light and dark meat with some of best textured breast and thigh muscling.
It doesn’t get any better than organic poultry raised on pasture. Our birds are lean, firm, and flavorful due to the healthy environment, fresh air, water and pasture that is part of their daily routine.
Pasturing allows them to live like God intended. They scratch, eat clover and grass, chase grasshoppers, and receive a ration of our own feed mix. No commercial blends are used. Our poultry is free from antibiotics as well.
Since our birds spend a majority of their time grazing pastures, we only raise turkeys and chickens during the warmer months of the year. We try to keep a healthy supply of frozen birds on hand throughout the year. However, the possibility exists that we could run out by spring (especially the turkey). If we are sold out, your order will be added to our order list for the upcoming season.
Birds are $25 each and average 4-7 lbs
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Pork Share (bulk)
$150.00Meat prices are going up everywhere and pork is projected to rise 30%. First come, first serve. Please note: Pigs are a “seasonal” farm product at Flip Flop Ranch order yours today!!
Half Pork $5.50 per hanging lb (usually 50lbs) + butchering fee of $125
Whole Pork $5.00 per hanging lb (usually 100lbs) + butchering fee of $250
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Thanksgiving Turkey
$35.00We are offering Bourbon Red turkeys, fully processed and plucked. Bourbon reds are an amazing tasting turkey that has been endorsed by Martha Stewart. She said she won’t have anything else for Thanksgiving and that’s exactly what our customers say too.
If you have never eaten a Heritage Turkey, now is a good opportunity to try one. Don’t be confused with “feed mill’ turkeys sold as a heritage turkeys..
Properly raised Heritage Turkeys take 28 weeks to become a well proportioned and nutritious, table bird. Compared to an average of 16 weeks for the Broad Breasted Whites that dominate the stores, a properly balanced diet, is key to development. Our turkeys enjoy all the bugs and grasses they can find.
For most people a turkey is a turkey, and a Heritage turkey is not really a specific breed, but is a term used from years ago, before the Broad Breasted Whites were developed for massive meat production. The large whites and bronze of today are never raised to maturity; never have a chance to range. Hence the meat texture tends to be very soft or even mushy; breast meat is usually so dry that most processing plants add a brine solution to give it a little more taste. Heritage Turkeys have a finer and a more dense meat, dark meat is actually reddish to maroon in color. The skin is thicker with a good chew. They are not inserted with a “brine solution to give them flavor”.
HERITAGE LIVESTOCK
Traditionally, farmers throughout the world have raised thousands of different animal breeds and plant varieties. However, since today’s industrial farms rely upon only a few specialized types of livestock and crops, thousands of non-commercial animal breeds and crop varieties have disappeared, along with the valuable genetic diversity they possessed. Fortunately, a growing number of sustainable farmers, such as ourselves, are preserving agricultural variety and protecting biodiversity by raising “heritage” animal breeds and crops.
We raise heritage breeds such as Dorkings, Cotton Patch geese, Tennessee Fainting goats, American Guinea hogs, and Bourbon Red Turkeys. Heritage breeds are traditional livestock breeds that were raised by farmers in the past, before the drastic reduction of breed variety caused by the rise of industrial agriculture. Within the past 15 years, 190 breeds of farm animals have gone extinct worldwide, and there are currently 1,500 others at risk of becoming extinct. In the past five years alone, 60 breeds of cattle, goats, pigs, horses and poultry have become extinct.
LIVESTOCK FOR SALE
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American Guinea Hog Piglets
$300.00The American Guinea Hog is a landrace breed unique to the United States; it is the once-popular homestead hog or yard pig. As the habit of keeping homestead hogs disappeared, Guinea Hogs became increasingly uncommon. The breed has been saved from extinction through the efforts of a handful of farmers, but is still extremely rare. The American Livestock Breeds Conservancy conservation status of the American Guinea Hog is currently listed as “critical.”
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Bourbon Red Turkey Poults for 2020
Sold out for 2019
I can’t even begin to express how much I love our Bourbon Red Turkeys. They are vicious little things when they’re babies (if you don’t believe me, watch one baby turkey drag another baby around by it’s little toothpick leg) and then they turn into funny, proud, beautiful birds as adults. It’s hard for me to say what my favorite animal is on the ranch, but our Bourbon Red Turkeys are really up there.
Bourbon red turkeys are what finally took us from city people to country people. We had raised a few birds and butchering them was hard. That is until we tasted how good the bourbon red was. After that thanksgiving, we never bought turkey (or any meat) from a store again and we were on board with truly farming. You absolutely can’t compare store bought from farm fresh and grass fed.
These birds proportionally have much smaller breasts, darker leg meat and are generally gamier in flavor than broad-breasted whites raised on large, modern poultry farms. Heritage birds are also typically older than faster-growing, broad-breasted birds at the age of processing — 26 to 28 weeks compared to 14 to 18 weeks — which can result in a more textured or flavorful meat.
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Cotton Patch Geese Goslings for 2021
$75.00Cotton Patch geese are extremely rare and hard to find. Our geese are wonderful! I love these guys. They follow you around everywhere, they climb into your lap to take a nap and best of all they AREN’T AGGRESSIVE!! Our geese don’t bite and rarely hiss. Geese that show ANY aggression are culled from the flock. We breed our geese for friendliness, meat production and weeding abilities (they were originally used to weed the cotton fields of the south until chemicals were brought in and made them “useless”). No more locking your geese up and never interacting with them. No more running from a flock of honking terrorists. No more bruises or broken skin. Help preserve this endangered goose and enjoy doing it!!
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Dorking Chicken Chicks for 2020
$7.00Sold out for 2019
The dorking is both large bodied and fine boned. Because of this, it has a better meat to offal ratio.
The history of chickens revolve around the Dorking. The Dorking chicken is one of the oldest breeds dating back to ancient rome. When America was being colonized, the Dorking was hugely popular as a meat bird until the development of the Plymouth Rock, which…was bred from a cross of Dorking and Black Cochin hens (J. Robinson, 1921). The Plymouth Rock was shown in the Dorking class for many years. It is the cross of the Plymouth Rock and Cornish chicken, what is called the Cornish Cross chicken, that is today’s modern meat chicken. Point being that if you are looking for a heritage meat breed, you couldn’t choose better than the Dorking.
“It is also common cited as a point in favor of the Dorking that it has an extraordinary proportion of its meat on the breast and body, which furnish the “white meat,” and correspondingly less on the legs, the meat of which is dark in color. This point is of more importance in fowls sold to market…as between any two poultry carcasses that are fairly well heated that which has the better developed breast will be the most attractive.”
“Unless it is the Dorking….there is no breed of which it can be said that it is generally of superior table quality.”
“The English Dorkings at its best is perfection in meat type–considering quantity, distribution and quality of flesh. It has, with the maximum of flesh, the minimum of bones and offal.”
At the end of the day, chickens are bred for the table. All poultry, even most exhibition breeds in our opinion, should be bred with the ideal of whether it will make a good meal. Obviously this doesn’t mean that we should ignore breed standard, looks, feather quality and egg production. These are all very important too and good looks usually implies a healthy, quality table bird. It is simply that most breeders focus on these qualities rather than what we believe is the primary importance: does it make a good dinner. A beautiful bird can be an inferior meat bird.
Form is the first consideration in selecting dorking for table poultry as the form determines the amount and distribution of meat.
We are breeding for a bird that develops a bit faster (our goal is butcher ready by 4 months) with a bigger breast.
Minimum order of 5. Must add shipping.
OUR BLOG
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