Today we drove down to Eugene to pick up the pig we bought a few weeks ago from a great little farm just outside of town. I found them on Craigslist, and after talking with the farmer and his wife about their practices and farming beliefs, we were happy to support them in buying a whole pig share from their farm. Their hogs are Tamworth, Large Black, and Gloucestershire Old Spot heritage breeds, raised in pastured family groups, and supplemented with loads of fresh vegetables and fruits from their little farm.
I am not entirely pleased that they eat standard hog food (which of course, if full of grains) but it seems pretty difficult to find pigs that aren't given some sort of grain. This will probably mean that as time goes on, we just don't include much pork in our diet, but for now...this little piggie is going to market!
The drive down to Eugene was beautiful, we got to the butchers with no problems, loaded up our meat, and turned around for the drive home excitedly talking about what we were going to sample first. The nitrate free hams and bacon? The succulent pastured pork chops? The luxurious lengths of lard? Surprisingly, that last one wasn't anybodies first choice!
When we got home we unloaded all the bags of wrapped, frozen meat to take inventory. We seemed to get a lot of meat! The top couple of rows are various roasts and hams, the smaller packages in the middle are the ground pork (we season our own sausage, so it is all plain ground), and the packages along the bottom couple of rows are the pork chops. And saving the best for last, all those skinny packages on the right are the BACON!
In addition to our meat, I had asked for all the lard and organs from our pig. The leaf lard had been separated out and packaged, but the regular lard was unwrapped and stuffed in brown bags. I think I got the fat from all three of the pigs that were slaughtered from that farm...yay me! It was seriously some of the nicest looking pig fat I have ever seen (do you know anybody else who would ever say that?!), and I am anxious to get it in the crock pot and melted down to make lard.
Matthew and I repackaged it (working with frozen lard outside in March is a very chilly endeavor!), and this is what we ended up with:
The ziploc bags are all the regular lard that we repackaged, the cone shaped wrapped packages are the leaf lard, and the smaller packages are the organs. Not sure what we are going to do with those yet...dog treats maybe? I just didn't want it to be wasted so I took everything I could get.
It feels great to be supporting local farmers raising animals the way we believe they should be raised, and to be filling our dinner plates with the best meats available. All in all, another very successful farm buy!
** Just for my own future reference, we paid $2.50 per pound hanging weight, a $50 kill fee, and 50 cents for cut and wrap (plus an additional .50 cents per pound for nitrate free curing). The total we paid for a whole hog (that had a hanging weight of 155 pounds) was roughly $487.00. **