“Everybody is distrustful of what they’re currently buying, and want something better,” Ben Riley says, looking over his family’s pasture.

The sun is still slinking up through the stringy clouds beyond the treeline. There’s a crisp cleanliness about the air here—remarkably fresh in a way you wouldn’t expect of a commodity farm—certainly not a chicken farm. 

Ben is one of 12 children. He, along with his father, Les Riley, and his brother-in-law, Caleb Frederick, are the minds, bodies, and souls behind Riley Family Farms. 

The farm traces its roots back through nearly two centuries of farming in Mississippi.

Les Riley, a lifelong farmer, has a glimmer of pride in his voice when he tells me about this land that’s been in his family since the 1800s.

“My granddad and dad farmed this land, growing crops and selling vegetables out on the square,” he says. “I like to think we’re carrying on that tradition, but with a new focus.”

For most of its history, Riley Family Farms was just another row-crop farm in North Mississippi: soybeans, corn, pesticides, artificial chemical fertilizer. This monoculture farming stripped the land of its vitality, leaving compacted, bone-dry soil, devoid of all life. At some point, Les felt something calling him to carve a different path. 

In the early ’90s, he came across some articles on organic and sustainable farming that changed his vision of his life’s work.

“Cheap food has a high cost,” he says. “People don’t see it at the checkout, but it shows up in the environment, in health problems—somewhere down the line, someone’s paying for it.”

By 2021, the Rileys had fully shifted their focus to regenerative, pasture-raised chickens, a product Les felt could make a real impact.

“Chicken is such a staple, but it’s usually raised in conditions that aren’t good for anyone—not the animal, not the farmer, and certainly not the consumer. We wanted to change that,” he says.

Ben walks me through the brooders, where the farm’s chicks grow up. Every spring, just as the North Mississippi mornings start to warm, the Rileys begin their careful process of raising a new batch of chickens. Day-old chicks, barely bigger than a ping-pong ball, arrive with Ben from Metzer Farms, still fragile and peeping with life. They’re brought to the farm’s custom-built brooders, warm structures lined with fresh pine shavings. 

“Those first three weeks, they’re at their most vulnerable,” Les Riley explains. “We give them the best start we can—fresh bedding, non-GMO feed, and a few natural supplements to boost their immune systems.”

Instead of antibiotics—like you’d see being pumped into baby birds at a big-time meat operation—the chicks drink water spiked with apple cider vinegar and colloidal silver, which naturally kill bacteria.

When the chicks are about three weeks old, they’re ready for pasture. Carefully loaded into crates, they’re transported to Les’s father’s fields, a piece of land that’s seen a lot of change in the last few years.

Walking through the Riley pastures feels like walking through a meadow in the wild. It’s hard to believe it was all dead not too long ago.

“Basically, we just quit terrorizing the land,” Ben says. “We let the grass grow and started moving chickens across the fields.”

The chickens are placed in open-bottomed, mobile shelters where they can scratch at the earth, hunt for bugs, and nibble on fresh shoots. Their foraged diet means they need only a fraction of the commercial feed that’s typical in large-scale operations. Every day, sometimes twice a day, these shelters are moved to give the chickens fresh ground.

“It’s a win-win—for the chickens and for the soil,” Ben says.

“We’ve seen plant species come back that hadn’t been around in years. It’s like the land is remembering what it used to be.”

Walking the fields, the difference is palpable. One section, untouched by chickens, remains sparse and dominated by a single type of grass. Just across the path, a pasture where chickens have grazed unfurls with verdant green wild flora. All that chicken behavior aerates the soil and incorporates organic matter, including their nutrient-rich manure, back into the earth. It activates dormant seeds in the soil’s seed bank, allowing native grasses and clovers to reemerge. 

“This was row crops just 15 months ago,” Ben says. “Now, it’s teeming with life. That’s the power of working with the land instead of against it.”

“My dad was skeptical, I’ll be honest,” Les says. “He’d been farming here for 40 years. But now, he looks out over those green fields, sees the rich soil, and he gets it. He’s proud of it, too.”

When the chickens reach harvest weight, they’re gathered carefully and transported to the farm’s USDA-certified processing facility. There are no robots or metal arms ripping the birds apart in some sort of industrial carnage, like you might see in a PETA ad. It’s all done carefully, slowly, passed from human hand to human hand.

“If you’re going to eat an animal, you need to treat it with dignity,” Les says.

After processing, the chickens are blast-chilled for quality and safety before they’re packaged and delivered to local customers and restaurants.

​​Riley Family Farms operates with a sales model that is approximately 50 percent direct-to-consumer and 50 percent wholesale. They deliver chickens directly to customers across northern Mississippi and Memphis, offering a personal touch with home deliveries.

“Most of the time, one of us will bring it straight to your door,” Les says.

Their wholesale accounts include butcher shops from Hernando to Nashville, catering operations like Southland Casino, and Memphis restaurants like Magnolia & May, where chef-owner Chip Dunham exclusively uses Riley Family Farms chicken on the menu.

“When I first tasted Riley’s chicken, it was almost like I’d never consumed chicken in my life before. It’s so much more flavorful,” Dunham says. “Part of our job as restaurant owners is to educate people. I want to show them you can get a local product that’s raised humanely, free of antibiotics, and still affordable.”

The benefits of this local model have been amplified during recent spikes in avian flu, which have led to the culling of tens of millions of chickens in the U.S. in 2025 alone. “A supply chain of many small farms is less vulnerable to large-scale consumer issues than a supply chain of a few large companies,” says Ben. At Riley Family Farms, they’ve seen a big increase in demand for eggs and are adding 1,000 laying hens to their flock this spring to help meet it.

While the farm initially aimed to sell locally within 100 miles, they expanded distribution to meet demand, delivering as far as Columbia, Tennessee, and Jackson, Mississippi.

To support this model, the Rileys handle their own logistics, with Ben alone driving hundreds of miles every week. Their USDA-certified processing facility ensures the chickens meet high standards, allowing them to supply both retail and wholesale channels. Despite their expanding reach, the Rileys remain committed to sustainability and local community engagement, rejecting long-distance shipping to maintain their vision of a hyperlocal food system. 

“We want to make sure our chicken doesn’t have to travel far to get to the table,” Ben says.

I met Ben the day he first knocked on my door. My empty chest freezer and I were awaiting a delivery of 10 whole chickens.

I did the same thing I do to every other chicken I ritualistically roast on Sundays: spatchcock and 48-hour buttermilk brine. I cranked the oven to 375 and waited for the skin to turn caramel brown. I let it rest. I did as I normally do, and pulled a whole leg and thigh from the rest of the body. I ate it right there over my kitchen counter, unable to sit down.

Chip said it best: It was like I’d never tasted chicken before in my life. It was like I was a kid again. It was the red pill of poultry. Of everything I thought I knew about what I put in my body.

I knew, right then, I’d never go back.

Riley Family Farms

Joshua Carlucci is a food writer and professional cook from rural Central California. He is a Memphis transplant by way of New Orleans and New York City. He has a BA in English from UC Berkeley, a culinary diploma from the Institute of Culinary Education, and is an MFA candidate in creative writing at the University of Memphis. @joshuadcarlucci

Erin Austen Abbott is a freelance writer, photographer, and author who has been published in over 20 publications. She is working on her fourth book while homeschooling her only child. Erin is based in Water Valley, Mississippi. @erinaustenabbott