Pastured and Forest-Raised Pork

Our pigs are raised naturally and humanely, resulting in rich flavor and more nutrient-dense meat that is incomparable to factory-farmed pork. We are a farrow-to-finish operation, meaning we keep our own herd of breeder pigs and our piglets live on our farm from the day they are born until they are harvested.

Depending on the time of year and just how much rain we’re getting, our pigs are raised on pasture or in the woods. We raise weaned piglets in deep littler hoop houses to keep them dry and cozy until they are trained on electric fence to rotate on pasture or in the woods.

Unlike ruminants like cattle or goats that have four-chambered stomachs and can digest more fibrous plant matter, pigs have a digestive tract more similar to humans and need a feed ration to thrive and gain weight beyond what they can forage. Our pigs eat a non-GMO grain, legume and mineral ration from our feed company, Reseca Sun Feeds.

Pigs are omnivores and curious foragers, so we often see them rooting around for earthworms and grubs, munching on grasses and shrubs as well as mushrooms, roots and tubers and of course in the fall, they get their fill of the acorns that drop from our oak trees. With our high water table, we’ve even seen them dig up crawfish holes and crunch on crawfish, too!

Why You Want to Avoid Factory-Farmed Pork

Pigs are very smart and social animals, which also makes them very susceptible to external stress. Conventional farms raise their pigs indoors, separated from their litter mates, where they often never see real sunshine and are confined on concrete floors with metal drains. Thus, they are extremely stressed for their entire lives, making them chronically sick and abnormally aggressive. The sickness is treated with regular doses of antibiotics in their feed and the aggression is overcome with measures like clipping teeth, docking tails and putting rings in their noses. Their manure is pumped out to lagoons that pollutes the environment, instead of being properly composted and used as the potent natural fertilizer that it is! Most breeding sows live in even worse conditions, in metal gestations crates where they can barely turn around.

Further, conventional hogs have been breed to have exceptionally lean meat. Because of this loss of flavor, most grocery store pork is injected with brines, salts, nitrites and nitrates, as well as phosphates to overcome the lack or flavor from fat.

Just like with pastured eggs, heritage breed pigs raised outdoors in low stress environments produce meat with higher nutrients, more fat and better flavor. Notably, pastured pork has been shown in some studies to have significantly higher vitamin D, simply because the pigs bathe in the sun, versus living their entire lives inside under artificial lights.