Going green has gone to the birds, to the chickens and to the turkeys.

Cord Jenkins, an agricultural teacher at Rolla Technical Institute and who is the FFA advisor at Rolla High School, is gaining markets with his free-range poultry, specifically finding his niche at a St. Louis farmers’ market. He and his wife grow free-range chicken and turkey on a small farm northeast of Rolla. They start raising the birds in early spring and don’t quit until early fall.

Jenkins and his family sell pastured poultry in the Rolla area with sales driven in large measure by word of mouth, he said in a phone interview this past week.

Jenkins came across a Web site of Sappington’s Farmers Market a Web site of Sappington’s Farmers Market, a large St. Louis grocery store that provides local homegrown produce and other food products. It is also Missouri’s only farmer-owned supermarket, according to its web site.

“I mainly market my poultry to an audience that is more concerned with where their food is coming from and how it is grown,” Jenkins said.

Jenkins made arrangements with the store to market his first bunch of chickens, around 30-to-50 birds this month. He said he is staggering the deliveries out at four-week intervals, and also has set turkeys out to pasture. The turkeys take a bit longer than the chickens to grow, approximately 22-to-24 weeks, but they will be ready to go the first or second week of November, he said.

His chickens, called color-range broilers, are bred to do well on pasture. These chickens are designed to grow slower and more uniformly, which means less health problems than commercial chickens. He said the free-range chickens also have a richer flavor because of their natural diet of grass.

Jenkins orders his chickens in bunches of 50-to-75. The chickens are hatched in commercial incubators, then picked up by order and shipped through priority mail. Right before they hatch, the chicks draw the yolk sac into their bodies. By doing this they give their body energy to survive without food or water for about 70-to-80 hours. Jenkins receives the chicks when they are approximately a day old. After nine weeks, they are sent to Loose Creek, Mo., and processed.

Jenkins already has begun to raise bourbon-red turkeys which will be ready to market shortly before Thanksgiving, he said.