153: Pasture-Raised Chicken Is Mostly Nonsense | With Chester Bidmead

When you pay a premium for pasture raised chicken or pasture raised pork at the store, you're probably not getting what you think you're getting. Chickens and pigs are monogastric animals — they have one stomach and no rumen, which means they can't ferment grass the way a cow can. Chickens descend from jungle fowl and pigs are woodland animals, so the image of birds on open green pasture has more to do with marketing than with biology. Whatever you feed a monogastric goes straight into its meat. There's no filter.

My guest this week is Chester Bidmead, founder of Ancestral Food, who moved from the UK to Texas and built a vertically integrated farm after his son's health forced him to question the eggs and chicken his family was buying. We get into why breed selection matters more than any label — American Bresse chicken versus Cornish Cross chicken, and why heritage breed chickens behave like an entirely different animal — plus fermented chicken feed, rationing, woodland raised pork, and running a corn and soy free chicken operation at commercial scale. Chester also shares what his lab tests actually showed when he compared his birds against store-bought, including one result that surprised him and one that didn't improve at all. If you eat pork or poultry, this episode changes how you shop for it.

About Chester Bidmead:

Chester Bidmead is the founder of Ancestral Food and a former entrepreneur who grew and sold two businesses before turning to farming, with a family history of fishing in coastal England dating back to 500AD, a 2016 move to San Antonio, Texas, and a vertically integrated monogastric operation he built from scratch in 2025 that controls everything from birth to packet — his own farrowing and hatchery, woodland raising, and a USDA-inspected processing facility. His approach argues that pasture-raising chickens and pigs is largely theater, because neither animal can ferment grass — and that what a monogastric eats is exactly what ends up on your plate.

Ancestral Food — https://ancestralfood.com/

In this episode:

00:00 Intro

03:52 Why ancestral foods

06:12 Son's health wakeup

09:23 Breeds over labels

11:01 Woodland trials win

12:29 Rationing and fermented feed