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app.com recently posted an article highlighting Griggstown Quail Farm on purchasing locally for Thanksgiving.

Matthew Sytsema, a chef who runs the retail, wholesale and online operations at Griggstown, said the meat on the heritage birds is darker and has a richer flavor, but it’s not gamey.

“It’s just as moist as the other turkeys,” he said.

Like most free-range birds, these turkeys don’t have to cook as long as conventionally raised livestock because they are all muscle.

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myCentralJersey.com has featured Griggstown Quail Farm in a recent article for Thanksgiving.

When it comes to serving families and friends for Thanksgiving and at gatherings throughout the holiday season, everyone wants the best. For shoppers who are increasingly turning to organic, locally raised meats and produce, “the best” may mean natural, free-range turkey.But finding one is not as easy as buying fruits and vegetables at area farmers’ markets.

Central Jersey residents, however, are lucky to have two local sources of natural, organic, free-range turkeys this year. The Griggstown Quail Farm is offering two types of turkey, the traditional broad-breasted white and the heirloom Red Bourbon. Simply Grazin’ Farm, which specializes in organic beef, pork and chicken, also is offering the broad-breasted white for the first time. Both farms are in southern Somerset County.

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Think Locally

Small farms operate on the same economic logic as any other businesses: Adverse conditions force a choice between innovation and failure. Lucky for local gourmands, unanticipated challenges have pushed Griggstown Quail Farm, located on 70 acres outside of Princeton, N.J., to diversify their product mix and expand availability.

The farm and associated market, which sells items such as quail eggs, chicken sausages and turkey potpies, started out with just 12 quail on two acres of land in 1973. George Rude, the farm’s current owner, was acquainted with gastronomic icon James Beard, who complained that it was impossible to find fresh game in New York City. In response, Rude, who grew up near Princeton, began raising quail to sell to New York restaurants.

As the farm expanded, Rude added free-range chickens, ducks, pheasants and turkeys to the mix, and continued reserving the bulk of sales for restaurants and wholesalers. After Sept. 11, though, as New York struggled with the psychological and economic aftereffects of the attacks, demand for Griggstown’s products sank.

So the farm opened a market on the grounds and began retailing to the general public to thrive. To draw consumers to the bucolic but slightly inconvenient site roughly halfway between Philadelphia and New York, it wasn’t enough just to sell game birds, turkey and chicken. Rude hired a chef to turn the farm’s products into prepared goods that home cooks can easily turn into a meal.

Matthew Sytsema, chef at the farm store for the last five years, says the gig is “a chef’s dream.” Sytsema grew up on a nearby dairy farm before heading to the Culinary Institute of America to train. After a few restaurant stints, Sytsema found his way back to the farm.

“It’s pretty unique as a chef to ask the farm to produce whatever I want,” he says.

Certainly, chefs in top restaurant kitchens have access to higher-quality ingredients than the general public, but few of them have Sytsema’s proximity to fresh ingredients. A short walk from the kitchen leads to the incubator, in which 800 to 1,000 quail eggs hatch a week. Farther down the road, free-range pheasants strut beneath a canopy of lambs’ quarters–roughly 2- to 3-foot-high plants that keep the birds out of the sun.

A trip across the grounds will likely result in an encounter with George Rude and his brother Peter, who work the farm seven days a week–year-’round. Raising free-range birds without antibiotics and hormones in the feed produces better-tasting birds, but adds challenges for the farmer. Standing just a few feet away from me outside an outdoor pen home of white turkeys, George Rude points out, “These birds exercise … other birds don’t walk from me to you.”

The ability to wander outside the enclosed shed makes the birds susceptible to local predators.

“The ‘coons got 25 bourbons two weeks ago,” Rude says. This was a substantial hit to the farm’s pricey red heritage turkeys–the turkey equivalent of an heirloom tomato. Red-tail hawks and owls are also consistent threats.

Challenges to the farm’s bottom line come from other unexpected areas. Rising food prices have carried over to the price of grain, and the downturn in the housing market has led to an increase in the cost of the wood shavings that line the floor of the chicken shed.

To deal with spiraling costs, the farm has become more reliant on farmers market sales to provide consistent cash flow through the summer. Griggstown Farm offerings are found at 10 farmers’ markets in New Jersey and Pennsylvania, including Headhouse Square on Saturdays.

Summers yield grill-friendly items like chicken sausage with white wine, lemon, parsley and garlic, made with the farm’s chicken by nearby Martin’s Specialty Sausages, and butterflied pousson (a young chicken) with soy-ginger marinade. Both the sausages and the bird are substantially moister than factory farm chicken and mass-produced sausages. The juicy pousson even forgave the char that accompanied a slight overcooking.

For novelty’s sake, who can resist a package of fresh quail eggs, diminutive ovals that are ideal poached and served on brioche with a little truffle butter? The minds behind Griggstown Farm may not have planned it this way, but such delicacies aren’t just for New York restaurant patrons anymore.

Griggstown Quail Farm Highlighted for their Poultry

JOE MCLAUGHLIN / MyCentralJersey

FRANKLIN — For a local market, the answer to the age-old question, “Which came first …?” the answer is, “It all depends.” The Griggstown Quail Farm & Market sells fowl and eggs to stores, restaurants and individual customers. For its supply of chickens, the business acquires live chicks and raises them to maturity, but for its pheasants and quail the market incubates eggs. Griggstown’s chef, Matthew Sytsema, said it’s more cost effective to raise pheasants and quail from eggs nurtured on the premises and to have the chicks shipped in once a week. The baby chickens would need a separate incubation system that would cost at least $30,000, and more labor would be involved to take care of them. Sytsema turns the fowl and eggs produced by the farm into prepared food that is sold in a number of places, including an on-site store, green markets, other retail outlets, and online. The operation, located in the Griggstown section of Franklin, includes an incubation room for pheasant eggs. That room can accommodate 20,000 eggs at a time. An alarm is connected to farm owner George Rude’s cell phone to alert him in case the machine overheats. “Pheasant and quail eggs are really expensive. That’s why we do those on-site,” said Sytsema. Breeder flocks of those more exotic fowl — male birds and hens that can lay eggs — are kept at the facility. Pheasants stay in closed-in areas for about two months before spending time in the fields for an additional 10 weeks or so. Sytsema said 25,000 to 30,000 pheasants are raised on the farm each year for their meat, not for hunting purposes.

JOE MCLAUGHLIN / MyCentralJersey

The birds have a fan in Corey Heyer, head chef at The Bernards Inn in Bernardsville. Quail and poussin from the farm turn up as specials in the restaurant every other month. And Griggstown’s chickens are a dining staple at the elegant eatery. “The meat is plump. It is very juicy. It has a wonderful, rich flavor,” said Heyer, who gets about 30 chickens a week from Griggstown. “People love our chicken,” said Heyer, who notes that the complete menu for the restaurant in Bernardsville changes four times a year with the seasons, but that the Griggstown chicken always has a permanent spot on it. “We have people that come here and say that this is the only chicken that they’ll eat.” “We’re not organic and don’t claim to be,” said Sytsema. But the poultry is natural, free range and raised without hormones and antibiotics. For instance, the animal feed for the poultry they raise is a corn-and-soybean mix with vitamin supplements and minerals. A Pennsylvania-based company analyzes the feed and determines the best mix for each of the types of fowl they have on the farm. The retail store has been in operation for five years, but the farm dates back to 1973, when Rude started off with raising 12 quail on just two acres of land. Now, the business has expanded to 70 acres and raises thousands of chickens, quail and pheasants take up residence each year. The entire operation brings in about a million dollars annually, Sytsema said. An aerial photo of the entire operation hangs in the shop. “We’re not known for our produce,” said Sytsema, but they do grow a number of vegetables on the premises including peppers, eggplant and butternut squash — foods that are often used in the prepared items they sell. Customer Colin Bitter from West Windsor found out about the business at the West Windsor Farmers Market. He said the turkey burgers are a favorite food from the shop and popular barbecue fare for family and friends. “The turkey burgers are really tasty. I like them. It’s not supermarket hamburger,” said Bitter, 21, a music major who is home for the summer from the University of North Texas. The market carries an assortment of items like soups and some gourmet products like raspberry wasabi dipping mustard. It also makes and sells 500 to 600 chicken pot pies a week.

JOE MCLAUGHLIN / MyCentralJersey

Griggstown products can be found in 23 retail outlets from New York to Philadelphia. The business also participates in nearly a dozen farmers markets. Local sellers of Griggstown’s products include Pennington Quality Market in Pennington and Maple Tree Produce in North Brunswick. Even though Griggstown has a USDA-approved processing plant on the premises, Sytsema is careful with the language when speaking to customers. “Mrs. Jones doesn’t want to take the leap from cute chick to poussin on the grill,” he said. Inspectors come in twice a week to inspect the fowl that will go out to customers. Sometimes the inspectors do double duty and change clothes to inspect the kitchen the same day. Sytsema, 26, grew up on a farm in Sussex surrounded by 200 cows. He wasn’t sad when his family sold the business when he was 13. “I hated milking cows,” he recalled. His father used to give farm tours. “The parents didn’t know where milk came from. They thought it magically appeared on the (grocery store) shelf,” he said. Sytsema, now a Manville resident, was trained at the Culinary Institute of America and interned at a French restaurant in Manhattan. Sytsema later got a job at The Ryland Inn in the Whitehouse section of Readington Township. Recently, he had a job offer at a similar retail outlet, minus the farm. Even though he wasn’t too fond of milking cows as a younger person, the pastoral atmosphere at Griggstown still has a hold on him, and he declined the move. “I couldn’t sleep at night thinking I wouldn’t be on the farm.” Article by Christine Sparta