ILLINOIS (WCIA) — Anna Morrell doesn’t have the biggest operation. But she is proud of what comes out of The Little Farm At Weldon Springs.
“We raise geese, ducks and chickens for eggs and we raise chicken and turkey for meat,” Morrell said.
While some farmers focus on produce, Anna is all about her birds.
“At the height of the season, we’ll have 250 birds on our property. As you know, we’ve got turkey and chicken being raised at the same time,” Morrell said.
You have probably seen chicken eggs if you stop by a local farmers market. But what you haven’t seen is any processed birds.
And with farmers markets popularity continuing to grow, that’s a lot of missed opportunities for producers.
“In the last three years, as we’ve been selling our product in public, I have seen it probably double or triple. Saturday’s especially, it’s been so busy down here you can’t see very far down the road for people standing,” William Gross, with Gross Farms, said.
Anna and some of her fellow producers with the Illinois Stewardship Alliance went to work to find a way to let poultry into farmers markets.
They connected with lawmakers who helped draft a solution.
“We wanted we wanted to make processing just more accessible to smaller producers. And so that’s what we set out to do,” Morrell said.
The culmination of all of that hard work was House Bill 2196, which was signed into law earlier in August.
The new law will let smaller producers like Anna process more of her own birds, saving her time and money that would have been spent at big meat lockers.
“A lot of the processors are reserved for red meat and with rising cost, a lot of the processors now have minimums and so small producers that are raising less than 100 birds in a batch can’t get into the most popular processor in like a three hour radius,” Morrell said.
But more importantly it lets her sell those processed products right at the farmers market. This will help her farm and she hopes it will help the next generation of small producers too.
“But you know, this is just going to open the door for smaller producers that can only raise 50 at a time or 60 at a time, which is where we started very well,” Morrell said.
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August 24, 2025 at 01:55PM
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