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?
Pastured Pork is Ready Just in Time for Fall and Thanksgiving
“Back in the day…”
Grace and Faith sometimes roll their eyes when I start to tell stories about the good old days, when things were done differently, and usually better. But, back in the day, in this area of Stedman and Fayetteville North Carolina, local farmers raised hogs on pasture and then processed them for pork in the fall of the year.
Heritage hog on woodland pasture
In late fall–November and December–the chilly air was just right to aid in what was a large task. Butchering and cutting pork is not an easy job. At that time of year, many of the other harvest tasks had been completed and families or neighbors would have more time to get together to butcher hogs. A killing frost would have taken care of any flies or other insects that could spread disease and spoil the meat.
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.
Fall Broilers
Our fall batch of broiler chickens arrived 2 weeks ago.
Peepers! (Now you know why those marshmallow things are called what they’re called!)
Cute as can be, and Grace and Faith enjoy unpacking them and loading them into the brooder as one of their favorite chores.
We pasture raise 2 or 3 batches of broilers each year for ourselves and our customers. So far, we’ve only raised the Jumbo Cornish Cross breed of broiler, and have been satisfied with the results. They grow from chick to butchering size in 8 to 10 weeks, depending on the season and the quality of their feed.
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.
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