KANSAS CITY, Mo. – Last week, we introduced you to Matt Wadiak, co-founder of the meal kit company, Blue Apron, and founder of Cooks Venture, a poultry company. Cooks Venture sells a proprietary breed of chickens directly to consumers online, through retail outlets and to foodservice operators at prices comparable to competing mid- to high-attribute birds currently on the market.
But Wadiak will tell you that the story behind Cooks Venture chicken is the real selling point. He became a poultry breeder because he believes that turning the tables on climate change relies, in part, on solving what he calls the poultry problem.
Wadiak says that topsoil is this country’s greatest resource and mixing it with synthetic inputs is only sustainable for so long. For Cooks Venture, meat production that manages crops and empowers producers to support a whole food system instead of just one point in the food system.
“Our goal is to partner with our feed growers to create more systems of small grains and alternative crop rotations,” he explains. “And because our bird has a more robust and developed digestive tract, our bird can eat low-density seeds and process them into muscle, bone and organ tissue more effectively than a conventional bird could. So, having a healthy bird is really essential to having healthy soil.”
In this episode of the podcast, Wadiak explains how adopting regenerative chicken production and farming practices not only can fix the food system but make an impact on climate change in the process.
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