You Bought Your Heritage Breed Pastured Pig, Now What? (Pt 1)
If you’ve ordered a whole hog or half of a hog from High Grace Farm, and are waiting to have it processed, you’re in for a treat. I’m always excited to take a hog in to the processor, order the specific cuts I want, and come back a few days later to pick up some of the freshest, most delicious pork I could hope for. Our heritage breed, pastured pigs yield a delicious, rich, moist pork that is much different from the lean, dry pork marketed as “the other white meat.”
If you’ve never bought a hog before and had it butchered to your specifications, you may have some questions about what to expect. In this post, I’ll try to answer some of the questions I had the first few times I did this, and some of the questions others have asked when they processed the pork they bought from us. It is a long post with a lot of information, so I’ll break it up into several posts.
If you don’t want to read through the whole thing, use these links to jump to your particular question.
Part 2 – How Much Will the Processor Cost
Part 3 – What Are The Choices to Cut Up My Pig?
Who Butchers My Pig?
Local Raw Honey for Fall – While it Lasts
Well, the local raw honey is probably still available, because it doesn’t seem to last long once we put the word out.
As many of you know, our friend, neighbor, mentor and partner-in-a-few-things, Mr. Sam has 20 or so bee hives. He just started slinging honey from them for the fall. So far, he’s harvested about 16 gallons, or 120 pints. He still has more to do, but what he has already harvested is jarred and ready.
Local raw honey is a wonder product. It has so many health benefits and first aid properties, and it’s an absolute dream to bake with. In our family, we use it in bread recipes, we put it on cuts and scrapes, we seep onions in it as a cough suppressant, we use it as an antibiotic, which was very successful when our youngest contracted impetigo. Although our doctor had prescribed an antibiotic, we weren’t comfortable with the idea of the possible side effects. Honey did the job over the course of a week or so.
Yes, We Do Have Farm Fresh Eggs For Sale
Eggs, we got!
Lots of eggs. About 2 dozen eggs a day! Farm fresh eggs, pasture-raised, and did I mention, we’ve got lots of eggs.
When we moved to our farm, the first animals we added were our laying chickens. We didn’t know anything about chickens, our how to raise them, or their needs. We were such rookies, but we knew 2 things: we wanted to pasture raise our chickens, feeding them naturally as much as possible; and we wanted to be able to move them around instead of raising them in one area.
Sharing with Family and Friends
There is nothing we enjoy as much as having our friends visit us. It gives us a chance to cook and show off share the pasture-raised meats and fresh produce from our farm. And after all, we were foodies before we were ever farmers. To be totally truthful, it’s also a real benefit when our guests pitch in with the chores. What’s repetitive for us is new and exciting for them, and that can be like a breath of fresh air in the midst of our tedious daily work.
Over the Labor Day weekend, our good friends, Solomon and Kim Jagwe and their children, visited us from Washington DC. Solomon is an artist, whose photographs and graphic design are all over this website, and Kim is a teacher. We did more than our fair share of eating and we (mostly, Dana) spent a whole lot of time preaching about the benefits of pastured pork and chicken.
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