(orchestral music) - The particular chicken we're looking at today, they're called our heirloom chickens, and it's a cross between our white chicken and our brown chicken.

So the breasts were little larger.

And that's because our pasture raised will go out of the building.

- [Margaret] Rocky Oaks was started as an idea of mine.

I was raised on a dairy down in Riverside, California, cow dairy, and had been a nurse for almost 40 years and wanted to do something different.

(orchestral music) (goat bleating) - [Mary] These dry rice hulls (chicks cheeping) are very important, this is what keeps everything dry for the chickens to walk on.

- We actually got our first goat not far from here, actually on the corner over here, and his name was Billy, and that's where we learned how much fun goats can be, and then we've had goats in our lives since then.

(orchestral music) - And what's real exciting is when we travel and I go in a restaurant and I see my name on a menu, the chefs love it.

- Our ladies will go through this within a couple of hours.

I've always been an animal lover.

Dogs were probably our first love.

- Another thing that makes our chickens very unique and different is we feed all of our chicken non-GMO feed that we make at our own feed meal.

And it's a combination of corn, soybean meal, a vitamin pack, and a mineral pack.

(donkey snorting) (orchestral music) - We have one who likes to open the locks.

That's Tricia.

(door squeaking) - Now we're very high on animal welfare.

It's a very big thing to us.

I'm sorry.

Don't be scared.

It's okay.

You're gonna be a movie star.

- I had two goats and then I had five, then we had seven, which I would had milk, and then we had like a little teeny micro creamery.

I started making cheese, practicing different recipes, different things to find out what would be a good product to sell.

And they're just kind of like a bigger dog in that they have their own personalities.

And they're very devoted to you.

- When I go shopping in Whole Foods in Fresno, sometimes I go in and pick up a couple of my rotisserie chickens, and they're like, "Mary, why are you doing that?"

And I go, "Well, cause I'm so busy talking about chickens, I don't have time to cook them, so."

(Mary laughing) - My vision for it is to have 30 milking does be milking year round.

We cover the local farmer's markets and maybe have some sort of outlet of cheese here on site.

- We've been able to keep ourself and other chicken farmers here in the San Joaquin Valley in business.

And we're very grateful that we're still able to do that.

- Our goal in supplying our chickens and our feed and our American product, so we're proud of it.

- Yes, we are.

(orchestral music) - [Narrator] Production funding for American Grown: My Job Depends on Ag provided by James G. Parker Insurance Associates, insuring and protecting agribusiness for over 40 years.

By Gar Bennett, the growing experts in water, irrigation, nutrition, and crop care advice and products.

We help growers feed the world.

By Golden State Farm Credit.

Building relationships with rural America by providing Ag financial services.

By Brandt Professional Agriculture.

proudly supporting the heroes that work hard to feed a hungry world every day.

By Unwired Broadband, today's internet for rural Central California, keeping Valley agriculture connected since 2003.

By Hodges Electric, proudly serving the Central Valley since 1979.

And by Valley Air Conditioning and Repair.

Family owned for over 50 years, proudly featuring Coleman products.

Dedicated to supporting agriculture and the families that grow our nation's food.

(orchestral music) (cow mooing) (birds cheeping) - I grew up on a dairy down in Riverside, California.

It was a cow dairy, and we never were involved in the milking but we did a lot of the feeding.

We drove trucks out and helped with feeding, things like that.

And then we always would go visit my grandma out in the barn on Saturday mornings.

She would then fix us breakfast and we would watch TV, which we thought was a great time, but I would still remember her pulling that big old holes washing things down, so they came for a big work ethic.

Dad was family had been in dairy business since he was a small child, and he and his brothers actually ran most of it.

I chose goats over cows (animals chattering) in that they're smaller and they're able to be, they're easier to handle for women.

Goats are sometimes known as the cattle of women because of the size of the being, and women being able to handle them more than cows.

(goat bleating) The whole milking cheese making process is each year the goats are bred, we milk 'em until they're about two and a half months pregnant, and then they dry out.

So pregnancy's tough on a goat because of the weight of the goat and the kids' product.

We make cheese, two weeks after they've kidded, we give the babies milk and a formula, and we start using the milk to make cheese at that time.

So we'll start typically making cheese in February and go until November.

So this is Tricia.

She broke her leg when she was a little gal, so she's extra spoiled, but she's healed up just fine.

Typically, she is pregnant, will be kidding in February, she's pregnant with probably two, three kids.

Kids usually weigh six to seven pounds each, where the goat itself will probably weigh like 150.

So that's why you want to dry the goats out out so that they can focus on the healthy kids and not milk production during dry season.

Rocky Oaks has Nubian goats.

We've chose Nubians because of the high butterfat that they have, which is excellent for cheese making.

They don't make as much milk, and they're not as great as moms as some other breeds of goat, but their milk is really wonderful.

(goat bleating) So here at Rocky Oaks, we have livestock guardians.

There's are coyotes that do come around, the thing you worry about with your goats as you want to keep 'em safe.

In a area like ours there can be other dogs that come onto the place or coyotes.

So our livestock guardians guard, stay with the goats.

These are very, it's very interesting doing kidding season.

Every time a goat kids, they're excited about the new babies coming part of it.

They know who's in the herd and will protect it.

Blake and Barbara are our two guardians.

Blake takes care of the outside.

Barb's inside with the goats.

(dog growling) Our pets for livestock for guardians are our donkeys, who are Ozzy and Harry, and we also have Orlando, who's our pet steer.

He's bottle fed, so he's very tame.

We used to be able to carry him.

We became Rocky Oaks Goat Creamery because of our house, actually, there's lots of rocks.

And then we had a lot of oak trees where our house is, and then we had the goats.

We're a creamery because we make a dairy product rather than a farm, since we really don't grow anything.

So we became Rocky Oaks Goat Creamery.

(slow orchestral music) - Hi, I'm Mary, and I'm here to talk about our chickens, and why all the products are named after me.

(gentle orchestral music) I met my husband, Rick Pitman, at Cal Poly back in 1973, and he graduated, and then I graduated in '73.

We both went to Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, and he was raising turkeys (turkeys gobbling) with his father at that time.

So in the nineties he realized, "Wow, we've got to do something to stay in the turkey business."

Because one by one, the processors were leaving California.

In 1998, he raised 5,000 turkeys, and he went back and did it the way his father did.

He took the antibiotics out, and he made them free range going in and out of the buildings, and he didn't know what to name them.

And then one night he had a dream and he realized he had to name them after me, Mary, because this is what I was looking for.

I was always looking for something that was pure.

No antibiotics, our turkeys are just turkeys, our chickens are just chickens, and our ducks are just ducks.

I was very sick for 30 years.

I didn't know, all I knew was that every time I ate something, I got worse.

So it took me 30 years to figure out what was causing that.

So I was reading labels during this whole time and I still do, always looking for a pure product.

And this was way before there was Whole Foods, Sprouts, a lot of health food stores, natural groceries, this was just a long time ago.

I finally found out that I had eight silver fillings that were loaded with mercury.

So basically I was mercury poisoned for 30 years.

It's the most highly toxic metal that exists.

So if I had anything toxic, like white flour, sugar, or anything, I was really, really sick.

So I'm kind of a magnet for bad foods.

I know exactly, you know, what's good and what isn't.

So anyway, during this time, my husband kept going down to Los Angeles, looking at all these health food stores.

And he said I would love them.

And someday he would have his turkeys and chickens there.

So that's how we came about with the products being named after me.

- [Interviewer] So you were being forced out of business because all of the processors were leaving California?

- Yes, they were all leaving California, and it was down to just one, and we never knew what we were gonna be paid for the turkeys, and we just knew that, they were gradually adding on their own farms, and so we knew that we were being pushed out.

So we knew we had to get a, my husband decided, you know, I'm just gonna risk everything and get a processing plant.

I'm either gonna go out with a boom or I'm gonna make it.

And so we were about three months away from closing our doors when Whole Foods found us.

Went over to Cal Poly, asked a professor that my son David had just had and my husband had 20 years before, "Do you know anybody that does turkeys and chickens?"

And he said, "Yeah, you gotta talk to the Pitman family.

The dad does the turkeys and the son does the chickens."

And so that's what we did.

We started gradually putting our chickens in Whole Foods in Los Angeles, which is our testing grounds for United States, and we've been with them the last 20 years.

(chicks cheeping) - So my parents married whenever they were in their early twenties.

Dad was a Dutchman that raised on a dairy that was brought over to my mom's house by actually her nephew who was about her same age.

They met and they got along, married, had four children.

So dad was the quiet Dutchman, which is why I make a Gouda, because it's a Dutch style cheese, and we coat it in red wax, which is traditionally for the Dutch cheese.

Mom being Spanish, manchego is a Spanish style of cheese, which mom, was all Spanish, actually, she started school speaking Spanish, and she loved red wine.

So that's why we soak it in, our manchego is soaked in a red wine, it's to honor my heritage with my parents.

(orchestral music) Here at Rocky Oaks, I've been lucky enough to add hens to our group of producing ladies.

So we have 170 hens now.

We plan, only a hundred are laying, but come spring all them will be laying, and we'll have a lot of eggs that we'll sell at the farmer's markets, or probably here on site.

Nice Brown eggs.

We have chickens that lay three colored eggs.

(chickens chattering) Brown, white, and then the Araucana do a variety of colors.

We realized that taking care of your animals is a priority to us because you do get great products from them.

So our goats are very spoiled.

They're named after princesses and country Western singers and treated accordingly.

The hens are fed twice a day.

They have inside houses to go in at night to keep 'em safe.

Then we collect their eggs twice a day.

The eggs are kept at below 65 during the week, and then we wash them prior to going to farmer's market.

Once they're washed, then they go into refrigeration and kept under refrigeration until they're sold.

As we expand our herd, what we've done is, we are considered what's called a closed herd, because we keep just goats from our place.

We, you know, from our does, and we have our own bucks that we use.

We have done some artificial insemination this year to the second group.

And I plan to keep a buck from one of our does which we can use for breeding stock too.

So to expand what we do is we just keep a few of our girls from usually the good producers, or sometimes they're just too cute, so we keep 'em on that cause, and then we sell the rest of them.

Typically in this rural area, that does are sold for milk production, the bucks make excellent pets for a lot of people, or they go into grazing.

(orchestral music) - Actually, we were looking for a processing plant here locally.

(orchestral music) And we just missed buying one in Madera, where my husband grew up, and then we kept missing them, and he did come close to buying one in Los Angeles, but it's just too far away.

It's just really better to be here locally, where all the farms are.

And so we were very fortunate to find an old food processing plant in Sanger and we converted it to poultry.

But what really makes our products unique and different is particularly our chickens, is that we process them using the air chilled method.

My oldest son, David kept going to Europe and all the chickens in Europe are air chilled.

And he never liked the way the chickens in the United States were put in water.

So the water chilled chickens add seven to 20% water, that has 20 times more chlorine than what's in your swimming pool.

Whereas we do this air chilled method where we hang the chickens individually, we blast 'em with cold air, and that retains the real chicken flavor.

That's what's one of the things that's made us very successful.

And we also process our chickens very humanely.

In Europe, they also use what's called the CAS system.

They gently put the chickens to sleep, and that's what we have done also with our chickens.

- Right here, we got our half barrels, the half barrels are kind of little protection from the birds to run inside and out.

It gives them kind of a shelter.

It also, it's an improvement to their animal welfare health for them, is something that we strive in our company is to have the best animal welfare that we can have for the birds, because that's what it's all about, is caring for the birds and raising the bird right, and when you do that, the bird is less stressful, which will make it more tender, and the meat more tender, and the chicken will taste better.

(orchestral music) - They're in here for 25 to 28 days, and the heaters are automatic.

They come on and keep them at a certain temperature.

And then after that, as you can see, these different openings all along the building here, they will go in and out free range as much as they want all day long.

And then in the summer we have the cool cells where they come in and we keep it cool in here for them.

So there'll be go out in the early morning when it's real hot and then they'll come back in.

So this is just for the inside.

We have lots of room for our chickens to roam, but it's real important to have these enrichments and perches and have as natural environment as we can.

Another thing that makes our chickens very unique and different is we feed all of our chicken non-GMO feed that we make at our own feed meal.

And it's a combination of corn, soybean meal, a vitamin pack, and a mineral pack.

And my son Ben, he came out with the first non-GMO verified logo in the United States for nonorganic chicken and also for organic chicken.

He worked for a year with the USDA to develop this.

And what he wrote is now the standard for the United States.

- [Interviewer] That's awesome.

- That's right.

That's my boy.

(all laughing) These dry rice hulls are very important.

This is what keeps everything dry for the chickens to walk on.

It costs us a lot of extra money to do this, but this is part of what we do to make it humane for the chickens, keep the beds dry has been suggested, and it's just really important for the health of the chicken.

That's why it doesn't smell in our barn.

(orchestral music) - Goat cycle is that they come into heat every 21 days, and that's usually about, during the fall, they don't, they're very traditional in what they are.

They're very seasonal.

So they start coming into heat in the fall.

We try and breed as early as you can so that you can have the production, and then they are pregnant for five months.

So they'll kid in January.

(gentle orchestral music) In prior years, we were able to have a few events here out at the creamery and invite the public to come out and visit and enjoy our settings.

We have kids' day, which we're hoping to have this year.

Even if with COVID, we're gonna try and figure out something that's socially distancing correct that we can have people out to see.

And so that we'll have two separate kid days, since we have two separate kiddings.

So there should be one in March and then another one in May.

We've been lucky that COVID hasn't impacted our business to the extent that it's impacted several small businesses, and that the goats always need to be milked, so all of our staff has kept their jobs.

We're still making cheese, and we're doing it with safety guidelines in place.

And the farmer's market business, since it's essential, has been good for our markets.

So our goats are milked twice a day.

We usually milk at 6:30 in the morning and about 5:00 in the afternoon.

Our barn is a hundred feet away, so that they each walk up the walk and they all have their own order on what they go up into the stand.

And you don't mess around with their order, - [Interviewer 2] Because they know it.

- [Margaret] They know it.

- [Interviewer 2] Exactly.

- Goats love routine.

Rocky Oaks Goat Creamery is unique in that we want to stay small.

We like to have the personal involvement with our animals and our production and the ownership of the place, and some of that can get lost in too big of a size.

So we want to keep as small as we can.

We were in a couple of restaurants before, you know, before COVID, and we were in Erna's Elderberry House, which used all of the different cheeses.

And then we were in Trelio in Clovis.

My vision for the future of Rocky Oaks Goat Creamery is to have 30 milkers.

We cover the local farmer's markets and maybe have some sort of outlet of cheese here onsite and with our eggs for people to come out and purchase onsite.

Shipping goat cheese gets real complicated, in that, especially with the fresh cheeses, in that it's, in our valley whenever it gets nice and hot in the summer is that they can perish very quickly.

It's expensive to ship because you ship with ice, which ups your costs, and then you want to do it over the shortest period of time you can, like preferably overnight.

so that you get the nice, fresh product.

(Owl hooting) - Yeah, these heirloom chickens, they are becoming more and more popular because they are a slower growing bird.

- Not only they're just slower growing, but they, if you were to compare them side-by-side, there is more flavor in these slower growing breeds than there are in the standard white chicken.

- Yes.

It's a real favorite with the chefs.

(orchestral music) (turkeys gobbling) You know, basically my husband's father started turkeys in 1954, and then he continued on with it.

And then when he got out of college, he decided, as he did in 1998, he came out with Mary's Free Range Turkey.

It was our 25th wedding anniversary.

So he loved, he put my name and phone number on the back on the turkey hotline.

He loves to answer and say, "Oh, you know, some girls get diamonds.

My wife gets turkeys named after her."

So he's always kind of fun on the hotline when he says that.

And then five years later, we came out with Mary's Free Range Organic Turkey and Mary's Free Range Heritage Turkey.

And that was our 30th wedding anniversary.

I said, "Honey, you gotta do better than this, okay?"

(Mary laughing) Well then he did, he started naming geese after me and ducks and all kinds of different things, but it's been so exciting for us, as Americans, we've always, you know, we've always heard that if you work really hard you can have your own business in America.

But we are very humble and grateful that we have been able to stay in business, because all of the other companies are so much larger than us and have a lot of benefits that we don't have.

But the consumer goes on the internet.

They know we're honest.

They know that what we do is what we say we do.

I know buyers have come out here and they've seen this particular farm right here and they go, "Wow, this is just like you have it on your videos."

And I go, "Well, sure, isn't everyone like that?"

And they go, "No, Mary."

- You would think this barn would stink like you wouldn't believe.

And you can hear stories where people can smell farms.

- From two miles away.

- Exactly.

Especially poultry.

They're even known for that.

But if you come to one of our farms, you can't even tell it smells like a chicken farm at all.

- And we're basically a collection of a lot of small farms.

We've been able to keep ourself and another chicken farmers here in the San Joaquin Valley in business, by we've got our own processing plant, we make all of our non-GMO feed at our own feed mill in Hanford.

We also have our own breeder farms and our hatcheries.

So we've been able to keep ourselves going and other farmers as well.

We're very grateful that we're still able to do that.

And what's real exciting is when we travel and I go in a restaurant, I see my name on the menu.

And I'll have my chickens, and that's always real exciting to me, 'cause I'm not sure where all they go, the distributors don't let me now.

So our chickens have been very popular on menus on the West coast for some time now.

And so that's always exciting to meet the chefs, and they're always excited to meet us.

And we're just grateful, like I said, to still be in business and to be able to supply such a healthy chicken.

That's what's real exciting to me.

It's been very exciting for me to provide a product that I would eat because I'm very careful what I eat, and I'm just very thrilled too, that my sons have come in the business and have provided this wonderful product for all of us to enjoy.

(upbeat music) (upbeat music) - [Narrator] Production funding for American Grown: My Job Depends on Ag provided by James G. Parker Insurance Associates.

Insuring and protecting agribusiness for over 40 years.

By Gar Bennett, the growing experts in water, irrigation, nutrition, and crop care advice and products.

We help growers feed the world.

By Golden State Farm Credit.

Building relationships with rural America by providing Ag financial services.

By Brandt Professional Agriculture.

Proudly supporting the heroes that work hard to feed a hungry world every day.

By Unwired Broadband, today's internet for rural central California.

Keeping Valley agriculture connected since 2003.

By Hodges Electric, proudly serving the Central Valley since 1979.

And by Valley Air Conditioning and Repair.

Family owned for over 50 years, proudly featuring Coleman products.

Dedicated to supporting agriculture and the families that grow our nation's food.

(firework booming)