Pork is Nearly Ready

This time of year presents perfect conditions for livestock, especially pigs.  The weather is warm but not too warm, with the occasional thunderstorm to help keep the dust settled.  The fresh spring grasses are loaded with nutrients that the pigs and cattle graze down as fast as they can.  During the warmest part of the day, the pigs hide out in their shelters and take a nice long nap.  They also lay in the wallow and enjoy the cool mud.  When they wake up it is cooling down and they get up to eat again.  Call me crazy but I can sense their content and happiness.  Under these optimal conditions that pigs start growing at unbelievable rates.  They will average 2 - 2.5 lbs of gain per day!  The cows can easily gain 3 lbs a day on nothing but pasture grass.  The pigs and cows finish out wonderfully with bright white fat loaded with nutrients marbled throughout their muscle.  The deeply flavored pork has a delightful slightly beefy taste, a result of grazing the grasses.  It is moist and tender and is so easy to cook as the marbling keeps the juices evenly distributed throughout.

This time of year is also a time that we start to fire up the grills and plan outdoor activities.  We have gatherings, camp outs, family reunions, class reunions, vacations, and backyard parties.  Of course most of the events are enhanced by good food shared with one another.

Bottom line, this the perfect time of year to stock your freezers with our gourmet meats.  We have meat and you have events.  Our Berkshire Pork and Grass Fed Beef will help make your summer activities a hit.  As always, we invite anybody who is interested to come visit our farm and see how your food is grown.  We welcome any questions about our farm or products.  We have a variety of ways to order including 30 lb CSA Share packages in stock ready to go, 1/2 or whole Berkshire Pork orders, 1/4, 1/2, or whole Grass Fed Beef Orders, as well as Family Packages.  Our goal is to ensure that all of our customers are comfortable and confident in giving us their business.  Jump on our website and get your order in!

We appreciate you showing your support for our family farm by sharing our website, blog, and/or facebook page with your friends, family, and coworkers.

 

The Happy Farm

The past few weeks have been busy as we have tried to get projects done on the farm.  Of course this rainy weather has slowed us down as we wait out storms and fight through the mud.  We are slowly getting our garden planted as the weather permits.  Our 90 day growing season makes it challenging to grow anything, but we keep trying.  When our finances permit we would like to build a greenhouse.  Despite the rain and cooler weather, Spring is a wonderful time of year.  It seems that there are baby animals everywhere!  There is something about the rejuvenation that Spring brings to nature that brings a smile to my face and just makes me feel good.  I love to see the green grass growing, trees budding, birds chirping, new calves playing about, and baby chicks scratching about and chasing the occasional unlucky bug.

This past month we have had a couple restaurant owners/chefs visit our farm.  We are excited to be building relationships with these talented individuals.   During one of these recent visits, we showed a restaurant owner around our farm.  We watched the pigs graze while we talked business.  I believe he was caught up in the zeal and energy of Spring when told me that our farm was a "happy farm" and that visiting our farm offered similar feelings "as going to Disneyland as a kid".  I kind of laughed as I though about what he had said.  We enjoy quiet yet beautiful surroundings.  The animals are certainly therapeutic to watch as they roam about.  They do seem happy which we attribute to lots of space, gentle handling, and a healthy diet.  We also feel a good conscience knowing that our food and the food we sell is raised sustainably, humanely, and without all of the added junk, chemicals, antibiotics, and extra processes.  The chef I was with determined that from now on he was going to call us, "The Happy Farm".  I must admit that it felt good and was somewhat flattering to realize that other people see and feel what we are blessed to call home.

Defining Ourselves

As the word spreads about our little farm, it is interesting to see who contacts us.  We get all sorts of questions and requests from people.  If I get a call from somebody wanting to order a pig, I will always ask how they would like the pig processed.  (Cured or fresh ham etc...) Once in a while, before I have a chance to explain their options, a customer will eagerly give me their order.
"I would like 100 lbs of bacon, 12 pork chops, and the rest ham."

While this may seem humorous to those who understand a little bit about the various cuts of meat, it is somewhat reflective of how disconnected from our food our general population has become.  If I could grow a pig that would yield 100 lbs of bacon, I would be a rich! : )  I don’t want anybody to feel bad if they are one of the customers who tried to place an order like the one above.  We welcome all questions and want to be perceived as approachable.  I just offer it as an illustration that part of our role as the farmer is to help educate our customers about their food.  This is not something we foresaw when we decided to offer the food we were growing for ourselves to others.

Because the supermarkets have their meat processed a little different than what we offer, some customers don’t always know what to do with certain cuts.  The frequently asked questions we get are what do you do with a ham hock?  (Hollie will be posting a delicious ham and bean soup recipe soon.) What do you do with a beef soup bone?  What is the difference between cured ham and bacon and fresh ham and bacon? (Another post coming soon.)

Side Note: We are working on improving our website with a FAQ section and adding recipes, ideally at least a couple for each type of cut.

It is actually fun and rewarding for us to share a little bit of what we know with others.  We always try to remember to offer the disclaimer that we are not chefs!

Speaking of chefs, we have had a quite a few restaurants contact us wanting to buy our meats.  As a small farm this can be exciting and overwhelming.  For example, we have had companies like Creminelli Fine Meat and Café Rio who could potentially purchase thousands of animals per year express interest in purchasing from us.  We have also had smaller local restaurants contact us and inquire about our meats.  In these instances we have had to decide who we are as a farm and where we want to go.  We love getting out and meeting with our customers on a Saturday morning.  However, from a business perspective, having customers like Creminelli and Café Rio could offer some big opportunities.  It pleases us that companies are starting to show interest in buying local, humane, and natural meats from sustainable family farms.  (I hope I don’t get in trouble for posting this, but we have decided to supply Creminelli with a very small supply of pork as they test the market with delicious sausage and salami made from heritage breed pork.  Look for it this holiday season.) 

At this time we really aren’t interested in supplying the bigger customers with all of their meat needs.  For one, we don’t have the resources.  There isn’t a processing facility in Utah that could handle the quantities.  It would require thousands of acres of land and gobs of money.  In principle, we would like to see Utah be able to raise all of its own food which will require more farms and certainly farms bigger than ours.  It would be good for the economy, residents, environment, and animals, and it reduces dependency on one source which reduces vulnerabilities.

Working with restaurants can be a little tricky.  Chefs are used to ordering by the cut and getting terms on their purchase.  We try and carefully explain that we are a farm and not a processing/distribution facility nor are we a bank.  I could be wrong, but it seems that some chefs want to be able to offer buzz words like “local, natural, humane, family farm” on their menus but don’t understand what it means to work with and buy from a local family farm.  For us, these aren’t just buzz words but rather principles that we live and work by.  As a small family farm, we can’t just sell one cut from an animal.  What would we do with the rest of it?  We don’t have the time to go and find a home for each cut of meat.  Unfortunately, some of the local restaurants don’t care to work with us once they find this out.  (It really isn’t that unfortunate in a business sense, since we can’t keep up with orders as it is; just in principle.)

Other local chefs like Colton Soelberg with Communal Restaurant in Provo have been wonderful to work with.  They understand what it means to buy from local family farms.  They have even adjusted their menus to utilize the entire animal.  We hope to work with more restaurants like these in the future.

Some people contact us pretending to be customers but are actually interested in setting up a farm similar to us.  It is actually really funny when this happens because they will ask a few general questions and then slip in a very specific question that only a farmer would care about.  I usually will just ask if they are interested in farming and if so, what questions specific to farming they have.  We do not view it as competition.  We wouldn’t even be able to raise enough meat to support our little town of Vernon.

All of these people help us define who we are.  They require us to make decisions that we wouldn’t have made otherwise.  I suppose like anything else in life, figuring out who we are as a farm is a journey. We will likely try things that work and others that won’t work.  We are learning to structure ourselves better.  By this I mean having guidelines that we operate by.  We have limits and cannot accommodate every customer’s request.  We try and be flexible but can only do so much.  This year we sold out of turkeys very quickly.  We simply don’t have the room to raise anymore than the number we have offered and it is very difficult to tell our customers that we won’t have any more turkeys this year.  We could put some turkeys on a neighbor’s land, but this would strain our time running back and forth several times a day.  We hope that the land we are trying to buy will work out.  This will allow us to raise a lot more turkeys next year for both Thanksgiving and Christmas.  We have had several requests to raise guinea fowl, geese, ducks, sheep, goats, etc… While we would love to do more, at this time we are choosing to focus on our current offerings.  We can easily spread ourselves too thin.  We enjoy what we do and want it to stay that way.         

Busy Preparing for Winter

Will life ever slow down? Hollie and I ask ourselves this nearly every day. It seems like every time we get close to catching up on our projects a new one pops up that costs both time and money. Here is one of those extra projects we had last week.

We bought 12 tons of premium dairy grade alfalfa that is a staple ingredient of our All Natural, Humanely Treated, Pasture Raised Berkshire pigs’ diet. We purchased the alfalfa from our neighbor Scott or “Scooter” as us locals call him. Even though I learned how to judge alfalfa in college, I am sure that anybody could take one look at this alfalfa and recognize quality when they see it. Scooter, does many things well but he excels at putting up quality hay. Because he was so busy selling his hay this year, I arranged for another neighbor, Marlin or Vern as us locals call him to pick the bales up out of the field with his bale wagon. (Are you noticing a pattern here with nicknames? I don’t dare ask what they call me : ) ) A bale wagon is a nifty piece of equipment that picks up and stacks the hay 9 or 10 bales high. When Vern came to drop off the hay, I was prepared with a 16’ long steel section of pallet shelving to serve as a brace as his bale wagon slowly scooted the hay stack from the wagon to the ground. As I was bracing the hay, the 12’ high stack started to swagger and I dove out of the way as 4 tons of alfalfa came crashing down. Unfortunately, the next two loads didn’t go any better and when we were all done, I had a huge unstable mess with rain in the forecast. I quickly realized that I wouldn’t be able to restack this hay by myself before the rain came. So I called the biggest kid in town Melvin or Big Mel, and offered him a higher wage than he normally charges to come help me stack hay. Then I called Vern and asked him to come over with his tractor so that we could stack bales in the loader and lift them as we stacked higher and higher. For the next two nights we met after Vern and I got home from work and Melvin got home from baseball practice. My brother in law Stan and good friend and neighbor Rich were kind enough to stop by and help stack as well. We finally got the hay stacked and covered. When I woke up the next morning, it had rained all night and fortunately, the hay was dry.

Extra projects like our hay experience can quickly eat into our time and profits. We closely track our farm budget to help make sure we are staying profitable. However, when we forecast our budget it is difficult to anticipate these unforeseen expenses.

Once the hay was stacked, I was able to finish my watering station. This is my own invention consisting of a pressurized pipe with watering nipples lined with a heat cable and then heavily insulated. We will see if it keeps us from chopping ice all winter. Part of this project was pouring a concrete pad all around the watering station to prevent a mud hole. I decided to mix and pour my own concrete which ended up using 38 bags. It honestly was a little easier than I anticipated and I have some other projects I will attempt next spring using concrete. In order to power the heating cable, I needed to run electricity out to our pasture. So I bought lots of wire, conduit, fittings, and outlets and went to work. I decided to run the conduit on top of the ground along the fence lines. In this case the cost of the extra wire and conduit around the perimeter was cheaper and faster than trenching a line across the field. While I was at it, I ran a line up to the chicken coop so that we can heat the chicken waterer and provide extra light so we can have a few eggs through the winter. Once you have eaten fresh eggs, you just can’t go back to store bought eggs regardless of the bogus labels they put on their eggs.

In between these projects, we also decided to till up an acre and replant it with new pasture. It is coming up nicely and hopefully by spring it will really take off. Prior to tilling our field, I dug up and moved some fruit trees that we had planted a few years ago. They just haven’t done so well. When I dug them up, I saw why. The gophers have been eating the roots. On some trees the trunk was just a sharpened stick in the ground. So now it is World War III at our place. With the field plowed, it is easy to identify the new mounds that they dig. I have been digging their mounds until I find their tunnels and then set traps in the tunnels. With just one acre, I have already trapped 18 gophers; including one great big gopher that dug a huge mound right in the middle of our new lawn. It would be much easier and quicker to poison the gophers but we are committed to keeping our land free of chemicals and such. Besides, with chickens and pigs roaming the pasture, we don’t want to ever risk poisoning our animals and food.

As you can see, we have been busy, but we love (almost) every minute of it. : ) I hope we have made all the necessary preparations for winter.