Feeding Customers Like They're Family
Four Daughters Farms
It started with a simple desire to feed their family right. When Brandon and Breanna White’s oldest daughter developed multiple allergies, her parents found themselves spending a lot of time poring over the labels on their food and worrying over what to put on their table.
“At some point I said to Bre, ‘We’re eating a lot of chicken—let’s raise our own,’” Brandon remembers. “It’s not really cheaper, but it’s so much better.”
Brandon and Breanna purchased their 14-acre homestead in 2015 out of a fondness for the wetlands and woods in rural Parrish. Brandon has farming in his blood and happy memories of childhood visits to his grandfather’s commercial farm in Indiana.
“When my grandfather grew up, they didn’t go to the grocery store. They had their pigs, their cows, their own giant gardens. They canned everything. What people are ‘getting back to’ now, they did it because they had to,” Brandon says. “I remember going down in their basement where they kept a massive cellar room, and there were jars lining the whole thing. Everything they ate came from their farmland because they couldn’t call up Kroger and have something delivered to the front gate.”
“At some point I said to Bre, ‘We’re eating a lot of chicken—let’s raise our own. It’s not really cheaper, but it’s so much better.”
Brandon and Breanna felt the calling to raise their family in a similar setting. Still, neither foresaw how their self-sufficiency project would blossom into Four Daughters Farms, raising some of the most highly sought-after poultry and pork from Tampa to Fort Myers. In addition to offering pickup orders, Four Daughters partners with other operations, including Grove Ladder Farm, Gamble Creek Farms, Hunsader Farms, Bearss Groves, and Oikos Food Buyer’s Club to distribute their nose-to-tail, foot-to-beak product line. Over nine years on the property, the White family has continuously invested in expanding and improving their operation, with the highest level of animal care as the key ingredient in their recipe for success.
“Yes, our piglets are meat pigs—but at the same time, if a piglet is down, it’s in the house,” Breanna says. “With our first litter, the mom rejected all the piglets. I was up every two hours, feeding them all night, all day. We raised them up for processing, but I think one thing that people don’t understand about farming is it’s not that you just put them out in the field, and then you come see them when it’s time to pick them up for processing. You have to be in it 100 percent.”
The Cornish Cross hens on Four Daughters Farms are raised outdoors in roomy, lightweight hoop houses that move continuously around the property’s shaded groves.
“We make sure that we move the birds as soon as the sun comes up in the mornings so it’s nice and cool, which eliminates a massive amount of stress on them,” Breanna explains. “That way, they’re not walking in the heat. We don’t want to walk in the heat, and we’re not covered in feathers, either, so we’re not going to make them do it!” Four Daughters has the capacity to process and finish their meat products on-site, eliminating other significant stressors of crating and transporting animals prior to harvest. After the sun goes down, the Four Daughters’ six Great Pyrenees begin their night shift, patrolling for predators and keeping the peace across the farm.
“When we put our Thanksgiving turkeys in the field, our oldest dog comes running right up to them,” Breanna says. “He knows that it’s his job to keep them safe, and he’s the happiest thing ever.”
As Brandon and Breanna’s kids grow (you guessed it: four girls, ages 3 to 9), they’re already pitching in, helping to rotate chickens in the pasture and tending the Pekin ducks.
“The most positive part of requiring them to work alongside us is they know where their stuff comes from, far more than any other kids,” Brandon says. “The first time somebody sits down at our table without knowing a whole lot about our kids, it might catch them off guard. Most kids are, like, ‘What is this?’ If it’s pork or beef, our kids ask, ‘Who is this?’”
“And then they’ll say, ‘Oh, they’re so good!’” Breanna adds.
“If you get chicken from the regular grocery store, you notice it’s tough. There’s bruising, and it’s kind of like eating a sponge,” Brandon says. “You can take ours, cook it, and literally cut it apart with a fork. People ask if we brine the meat ahead of time, but we don’t do anything special at all. 3-year-old twins can taste the difference.”
When you buy meat from Four Daughters Farms, you can trust you’re being fed just like a family member.
