Outdoors: 46°F/23°F 2″ Snow, Partly Sunny
Farm House: 61°F/50°F two logs
Tiny Cottage: 35°F/45°F Desk curve form prep, butter dish form
Jeffries Family Farm
Walter Jeffries Tinker, Tailor… A bit eclectic & a tad eccentric, polymath, quantum mechanic & Farmer. Also lucky at cards.Oven, Spit & Pit Roaster Pigs!
Enjoy Our Pork!
Enjoy pork butchered in our family’s Vermont state inspected on-farm butcher shop here on Sugar Mountain Farm. Affordable quality pork from our family farm to your family’s table. One time purchases or weekly, biweekly and monthly CSA boxes available from $40 each. Save buying in bulk as a whole, half or quarter pig. See the Pork Page for details.
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Pastured Pigs & Pork
Our family raises pigs on pasture in the mountains of Vermont and delivers weekly to stores, restaurants and individuals. We have our own state inspected on-farm butcher shop where we cut our own pork and make sausages. Look for our label in stores and restaurants... We hope you enjoy our pastured pork!
Pastured pork, piglets, roasters, half & whole pigs available direct via our CSA and at local stores & restaurants. Random Lucky Posts
Hi, Walter,
I’d wondered whether you were away, or my computer was doing weird things…still wondering since I got your ham/eggs posting dated 4/8 this afternoon (not there this morning!)…anyway, cute. Why is one pig “wearing” brown pants?
I’m very excited as it gets closer and closer to my coming up to get Babe and Bob(castrated!)…Still lambing til about the 18th, I would guess…
More April showers at the moment, but only about 5 inches I think, so far…
Hi Betty, I’ve been having some problems with blogger not putting up posts so I ended up writing some offline and saving them. Then Sharon sent me that photo and I used that rather than the one I had written for Sunday. Blogger seems to be working right now so I’m working on uploading the old posts. I still need to switch over to WordPress for this blog but haven’t had time. Now we’re moving into spring, according to the calendar. :)
It’s snowing down a storm here too. They say it will be 8″. Might be more than that already. Ben and I went into the cottage at 11:30 am to do some concrete block and mortar work and by the time we came out an hour later our tracks were gone.
The pig in the brown pants is just stylish. Fashion follows where she leads. I wonder though if perhaps she gets her style from Tamworth ancestors. I watch the piglets produced and try and guess at the ancestry of our herd.
Cheers,
-Walter
Wanted to share an interesting note about the goofiness of Certifications. Animal Welfare Approved forbids their farmers to feed eggs to pigs. How weird is that? We left the program, because of that. Eggs are a fantastic (and free) source of protein for our pigs. Glad to see that your pigs are able to enjoy eggs too! I sure wish more folks would invest the little bit of time it takes to meet their farmers rather than relying on labels. I love you “No Weird Stuff.org” label. Please let me know if it gets to the point where other farmers can be “No Weird Stuff” certified. I’m so fed up with all of the programs out there.
There are a lot of problems with the Animal Welfare Approved program. They have pursued me repeatedly to join them. I read through all of their requirements and there are serious flaws with their program design. They used to forbid the use of hay with pigs (I think they changed this after I pointed out the problems with it) and required that the animals be locked up in inclement weather which is more than six months of the year by their standards. Their rules appear to have been written by city people who lack any real experience with pigs on pasture. They are designed for pens and grain feeding. So I have repeatedly told them, “No thank you.” It is unfortunate that these sorts of programs get so much press. They look good at first glance but lack good sense in the standards.
If I may just touch on the egg issue as much as one may feel they are a great source of protein there are folks who don’t want meat animals fed animal byproducts and that’s reflected in the standards. Because AWA does not permit something is not a commentary on the practice but the reality of the standards we help the farmer market a particular production practice.
Andrew
Program Director.
Animal Welfare Approved
This confused me. How do eggs qualify as by-products?
By-products are secondary or incidental. Wouldn’t eggs be direct products of chickens? Now, if you process chickens into meat, and then grind up the leftovers and mix it into a feed or something, than yes, that’s a by-product. I can understand there being some concerns about the safety of such practices, as it could easily carry disease or contaminants from the processing facility. But eggs? Baffling.
Pastured pigs will clearly eat whatever happens to seem tasty. If you pasture a pig, it’s going to eat microfauna and the eggs of microfauna. Smaller vertebrates are also fair game. I doubt a pig will pass up an opportunity to eat a toad, frog, chick, duckling, mouse pinkies, or pretty much anything recently dead that they happen across that is slower than them.
Trying to closely restrict pigs to an only-vegetarian diet would require them to be taken off pasture and raised in boxes. Even then, you probably won’t keep them from eating some insects in their feed.
What is the AWA ‘s goals for pigs? Encourage factory farms because you are trying to restrict a pig’s diet unnaturally, or naturally & sustainably raised animals?