Our Organic Feed: The Full Breakdown

Mar 28, 2026

At Farm Daddeaw, we believe you deserve to know what goes into the food that feeds your food. So today, we’re answering one of the most common questions we receive: what do we feed our chickens and pigs?

Every Ingredient Is Certified Organic

Every single ingredient in our chicken and pig feed is certified organic. Our feed is based on four core ingredients: corn, rice, beans, and fish meal. Each one is individually certified organic by a recognized certifying body.

We don’t compromise on inputs. We never have. The quality of what our livestock eat directly determines the quality of what ends up on your plate, and we take that responsibility seriously.

The Difference Between Each Ingredients and Finished Feed

Here’s where it gets nuanced with the paperwork.

In the organic certification world, there’s an important distinction between certified organic ingredients and a certified organic finished product. Even if every single ingredient is organic, the processing facility that grinds, mixes, and pelletizes those ingredients also needs its own organic certification for the final product to carry an organic label.

Our feed mill — the facility that takes our certified organic corn, rice, beans, and fish meal and turns them into a finished pellet — is currently pending its organic certification.

That means: certified ingredients going in, but no certified organic label on the bag coming out.

We work closely with our supplier on this issue. The quality of the feed is there. It’s just the paperwork that is pending.

“Why Don’t You Just Make Your Own Feed?”

It’s a fair question, and one we’ve thought about deeply.

Producing our own feed would give us full control over the entire chain — from raw ingredient to finished pellet — and would allow us to pursue certified organic status for the complete product. In theory, it sounds like the obvious solution.

In practice, it’s essentially starting a second business.

To produce feed in-house, we would need to:

    • Store large quantities of raw ingredients — and manage freshness, rotation, and humidity carefully so nothing goes stale or moldy
    • Invest in milling and pelleting equipment — machinery that is substantial in cost and requires technical expertise to operate
    • Dedicate significant physical space to storage and production
    • Hire additional labor to run the feed operation

This isn’t a small project. It’s a full operation that would divide our attention, our capital, and our energy — away from the thing we do best, which is raising the healthiest, most nutrient-dense chickens and pigs we can.

Where We Choose to Focus

Right now, our energy goes into one simple thing: producing the best quality meat possible.

That means daily pasture rotation so our chickens always have fresh grass underfoot and weekly forest rotations for our pigs. It means zero antibiotics, zero vaccines, zero growth hormones. It means on-site processing so the birds never experience the stress of transport. It means choosing certified organic ingredients.

We’re a small farm with a simple mission. We’d rather do one thing extraordinarily well than spread ourselves thin trying to do everything at once.

Could that change in the future? Possibly. If we grow to a scale where full in-house feed production makes sense — where the investment is justified and the logistics are manageable — we’ll revisit it. And when we do, we’ll tell you exactly how and why.

But for now, we’d rather be honest about where we are, than pretend to be something we’re not.

What This Means for You

If you’re buying Farm Daddeaw chicken and pork, here’s what you can be certain of:

  • Every ingredient in our feed is individually certified organic
  • Our chickens and pigs eat a healthy, balanced diet of corn, rice, beans, and fish meal — for a nutrient-dense profile
  • We are actively working toward full organic certification at every level of our supply chain
  • We will always tell you the truth about where we stand, even when the truth is inconvenient

The organic label is important. But it’s a proxy for something more fundamental: trust. And we’d rather earn your trust with transparency than hide behind a pending paperwork process.

The Bottom Line

Perfect certification on paper means nothing without integrity in practice.

We’re choosing a different path: certified organic inputs, honest communication, and a relentless focus on the actual health and welfare of our animals.

Because at the end of the day, what’s in the feed matters. What’s on the label comes second.

If you have questions about our feed, our farming practices, or anything else — we welcome them. Transparency isn’t a policy for us. It’s a value.

Buy pasture-raised chickens and forest-raised pork via Line: @farmdaddeaw

Want to learn more about how we raise our chickens and pigs? Explore our How We Farm page to see our full approach — from pasture rotation to on-site processing.