The Old Hog Farm

👩‍🌾

During a piglets first week of life farmers (both big and small) notch their ears, dock their tail, cut their teeth, pierce their nose, castrate the males, and then put them in confined mud pits.

It doesn’t have to be this way and I want to show you how…

The good life.

Today marks the first birth on our farm 🐷

The Old Hog Farm circa 1985 & 1987.

I bet Dude would be proud to know we are restoring this farm and keeping his legacy alive.

Forest raised pork because pigs don’t belong in pens!!

You can set your clocks back and forth if you want to but the rooster still crows at dawn, the bees don’t work in the dark, and the pigs aren’t getting up until they are good and ready.

Time is irrelevant on a farm.

The more we get into farming- the more I learn about green-washing.

Keys words like grass-fed, pasture-raised, grass-finished, organic, natural, farm fresh, free-range, etc… all leave room for interpretation.

The very best thing is to
K N O W Y O U R F A R M E R
and to know what those words mean to THEM.

To understand their practices, to see the way they treat their animals (with your own eyes), and to truly know where your food comes from.

You know it’s going to be a good day when you have all your “pigs in a row!” 🐷🐷🐷

We can do even better!

Come shop directly out of our farm freezers and garden or let us delivery directly to your table!
🐷🐮🐣🍅🫑🫐

Yummy 🤤 🙌

That was one heck of a good burger!

Nubians make farms feel magical 💫

❤️Absolutely love connecting with other farms❤️

Got sticker in the mail today!!!!!! Yayyyyy so excited

We had a hard time keeping up with the demand of our pasture-raised and rotationally-grazed eggs, so we tripled our flock size this Spring!

Happy to say the new ladies are laying 🐣

$4 a dozen.

OH HEYYY, calcium, magnesium, potassium, phosphorus, protein collagen, vitamin A, vitamin K2, iron, boron, manganese, glucosamine, chondroitin, selenium, omega-3, omega-6 fatty acids and other trace minerals, GET IN MY BELLY!

After our pigs move to a new paddock we spread seeds in their previous paddock.

A salad bar of kale, turnips, radishes, rye, and a few other things will be waiting for their return to this paddock!

We feel it’s a valuable step in increasing nutritional density and soil health.

Plus, foraging is fun and we know our pigs appreciate it!

I’ve wanted to be a beekeeper for many years.

The closest I ever came to this dream before now was choosing a bee as our wildschool mascot 😬

One semester we visited a beekeeper with our children and learned a lot of the basics.

It was FUN!

I thought for SURE I could do that, no problem!

I walked away thinking my greatest obstacle would be not getting stung 🤷‍♀️

What I didn’t realize was that bees are EXTREMELY temperamental and lots of things can and will go wrong.

Their soul purpose in life is world-domination.

They know YOU a whole lot better than you know them and they already have a plan for every mistake you might make.

So as it turns out- beekeeping is a whole lot more than just sticking bees in a box and harvesting honey when it’s ready 😅

With that said, I feel extra proud of our second attempt and first harvest 🐝



Today is the day!!!!

Our first fully homegrown meal.

The not so giant, Jersey Giant.

Don’t shoot the messenger!

LEFT: Photo we want our husband to take.
RIGHT: Photo he actually takes.

Relatable 🙋‍♀️

THIS is a pig pen.

It’s not the easiest way to raise pigs but it’s the best way!

It’s meat our family will be proud to put our name on and begin selling this year 🥰

What a good life!!! 🐷

We had some exposed patches of land from doing grading work and decided to turn it into a classroom.

We sowed heirloom wheat and multiple cover crops into 4 different environments.

The one with the most diversity grew the best!!

Such a cool experiment and visual to show our children how mono-cultures are NOT NATURAL.

Plant (and human) diversity is superior🍃

40 chicks graduated to pasture today 🐣🐥

Some of them will be for egg laying, some for meat, some to do work, and others to begin hatching our own!

Gentle reminder as we approach growing season ❤️

How are you celebrating Earth Day today?!

I’ve always associated pigs with living in small square mud pens, dirty, and eating slop.

That’s how it was in every children’s story and field trip to farms in elementary school.

It wasn’t until we purchased an old hog farm and took an interest in raising them that I discovered mostly everything I knew about them was wrong.

First of all, there are not many pig farmers out there. If you do find one, they mimic old-timer ways of raising them in mud pens and are generally not interested in questioning things.

The entire focus is on how fast you can grow them out, at the lowest cost, with the least amount of work.

This means corn, soy, and confined spaces.

Now, because there are not many pig farmers that means most pork comes from factory farming, where living conditions are even more horrendous and cruel.

We made a commitment to ourselves when beginning to restore this farm that we would strive to honor the methods nature intended as closely as possible.

Through our research that meant putting them in the forest and rotating their paddock to imitate migration and allow time for the land to regenerate.

By doing this they are afforded plenty of room to play, exercise, forage, and be pigs!

As it turns out, pigs are the hardest workers on the farm. They do incredible land management and awaken many dormant plants and seeds buried in the ground.

They are also one of the CLEANEST animals on the farm!! Yep, you read that right! When given the opportunity they p**p away from their sleeping space and in the same spot every time.

They are not lazy, messy, or destructive- they just want a job to do.

The most shocking discovery for me is that pigs graze and eat grass the same way cows do! I can’t imagine sticking a cow in a pen (even though it does happen, just not as often) so why are we doing this to pigs?!

Anyway, despite knowing all of this there is still plenty left for us to learn and we have many unanswered questions- sometimes causing us to question our decision to go against the norm.

There is not a lot of information out there about pigs and what we do find is contradicting.

So I guess that means we’ll have to learn by doing and I’m really excited to share our finding and discoveries along the way.

Spring is in the air! Growing our flock to add blue and green egg layers to our basket 🐣

Basket full of fluff heading to their new home at The Old Hog Farm

The day after every party we host, I find children’s socks all over the farm.

To me it’s symbolic of being wild and free. It tells me these children felt comfortable and had a good time.

Instead of finding their owners, I’ve decided to start keeping them to make an epic garland in my garden 😂

Maybe one day when I’m old and gray, I’ll look at it and laugh...or maybe I’ll cry.

The newest members of our farm are in quarantine and have begun their forest training.

The difference between them and our other hogs is astonishing.

More on that later.

Raise your hand if you can relate to Maple! 🙋‍♀️

Heading home from Belle Terra Farms with the newest members of our farm family🐷🐷🐷🐷3 Yorkshire gilts and 1 Duroc boar (same as Maple)

There is no better feeling than knowing we get to turn them into forest hogs!

Right before we hit the road, I walked over and told these scared little pigs with excitement, “Y’all have no idea who just bought you. You’re in for a real treat!” 🤩

Onwards.

We sold out of eggs immediately after posting last week, so the only ones still available were in the coop- talk about farm fresh!

M got to collect them herself while I stood guard to protect her from the geese.

I love that Kyla snapped this photo of us 🥰 and now I’m dreaming of the day I get to do this more often as our offering to the public grows.

I think it’s so important to know, see, and interact with the food we eat and honored to be the kind of farmer that gets to fill those gaps.

(check out the comment section to see the eggs she picked!)

________________

Support your local farmer.
Vote with your dollars.
Say NO to industrial agriculture.

My teenager asked me if I did something different to the eggs at breakfast yesterday. He said this is the best they’ve ever tasted.

The short answer is yes. Yes, I did.

The longer answer is, we built a mobile chicken coop and ordered Premier One fencing. After winter we relocated them to pasture and move them to a new paddock every 4 days.

This means our chickens never sit on worn-down and degraded land.

They spend their days foraging through thick grass and rich soil full of critters.

On top of that we have the hardest working guard geese you’ve ever seen, so we never have to lock our chickens up at night.

The difference my kids taste is cage-free, pasture raised and rotationally grazed!

When that milk comma starts to kick in 😏