How we farm

We do not spray. No pesticides, no herbicides, not on the flowers, not on the vegetables, not on anything that goes to the stand.

That is the question people actually ask, so it goes first. The rest of this page is more detail than most people want, because the ones who do want it have usually been told a lot of vague things by a lot of farms.

No pesticides, no herbicides

Not minimal. Not only when we have to. None.

That costs us, and we should say so. Some years we lose a planting. Aphids take the dahlias in a wet spring, or blight moves through the tomatoes in August and there is nothing to do but pull them. When that happens the stand is thinner, and we tell you why.

The trade is that nothing you buy here has been sprayed with anything. It is a simple claim. We either keep it or we don't.

What actually goes on the ground

Four things.

• Compost. The base of everything. Garden waste, bedding and manure from the farm, turned and aged.
• Chicken manure. From our own birds, composted before it goes anywhere near a bed. Raw manure burns plants and is a food safety problem.
• Blood meal. Nitrogen, for the heavy feeders early in the season.
• Bone meal. Phosphorus. Mostly for the dahlias, worked into the hole at planting.

That is the whole list. No synthetic fertilizer, no fumigants, nothing you would have to read a label twice to understand.

No corn, no soy

Almost all pork in this country is corn and soy from the first day to the last. Ours is neither. The hogs get a non-GMO ration with no corn and no soy in it, whatever they find in the woods, and hay to fill the gaps.

If you avoid soy, for an allergy or by choice, this is one of the few places you can buy pork without reading a label and hoping. There is a longer version of that in what our hogs actually eat.

The pigs are clearing the woods

We are turning woodland into pasture, and the pigs are how we are doing it. They work the understory over, grass comes in behind them, and then they graze it.

That is the actual reason they live in the trees. It is a job, not a photograph, and the place looks different every year because of it.

Grazing, not pasture raised

Pasture raised describes where an animal stands. Everybody says it, and most pork sold under it is pigs standing in a field eating corn and soy out of a trough. The field is scenery.

Idaho Pasture Pigs are a grazing breed. They were bred to eat grass, which is a claim about what the animal does rather than where it happens to be. Three facts, one argument:

• The breed grazes, so grass is food and not bedding.
• The ration has no corn and no soy, so forage is the diet and not decoration.
• Rooting the understory is how more grazing gets created.

The rooting is not a contradiction of the first point. These pigs root far less than a straight snouted breed does, which is the whole reason the ground they open comes back as pasture instead of staying mud. They turn the woodland floor over, grass comes in, and then they eat it. The rooting is how the grazing gets made. More on the breed and its trade-offs in Idaho Pasture Pigs.

Born here

Farrow to finish. Our own sows, our own boar. The sows farrow outside in shelter, with no heat lamps and no crates.

Most farms selling pasture pork buy weaner pigs at eight weeks. There is nothing wrong with that, but it means the first two months of that animal's life happened somewhere else, and the farm selling you the meat cannot tell you much about it. Ours are born here, and they do not leave until the day they are hauled to a USDA inspected plant. Nothing arrives on a trailer.

Why we don't say organic

We could describe what we do as organic methods, and plenty of farms our size do. We don't, for two reasons.

The first is legal. Organic is a regulated word in the United States. It belongs to farms certified under the USDA National Organic Program, and using it without that certification is not a grey area.

The second matters more. Certification is a whole-system standard, not a list of approved inputs. It covers the seed, the history of the land, the records, and for animals it covers every mouthful of feed. We meet parts of it. We have not gone through any of it. Borrowing the word would be borrowing credibility from a system we have not submitted to.

So we tell you the specific things instead. No pesticides. No herbicides. Compost, composted chicken manure, blood meal, bone meal. No corn and no soy in the ration. If any of that matters to you, you now know more than a label would have told you.

The land

Eight acres between Key Center and Home, bought in March 2023. Most of it was woods when we got here.

It is becoming pasture and growing ground a piece at a time, and the hogs are doing a good share of that work.

The stand is open daily, 9am to dusk. Pork boxes are on the pork page.