If I were to boil down our farming philosophy into just one sentence it might be this… pasture is essential to raising healthy and happy animals and producing really extraordinary meat.
In the warmer months, accomplishing this is pretty straightforward… we grow and maintain the pasture and then we rotate the animals through it. But during the winter months, it’s a different story. The fields are too wet (or frozen solid) and the pasture too fragile for rotational grazing.
Hay (as opposed to straw) is basically protein rich pastures all dried up and neatly tied together in a bail so that farmers like us can (relatively) easily distribute it amongst the animals when we can’t get rotate them through the fields. And it’s essential to us over the wintertime especially. Why, you might ask?
The pigs don’t just eat the hay and these dried plants don’t just provide energy, diversify their diet, and keep their digestive tracts healthy. It gives the meat it’s amazing flavor, it acts as a source of warmth (the pigs like to bury themselves under it), and it absorbs moisture inside their houses, preventing microbial growth that can cause infection.
We don’t have the acreage or the expensive equipment to grow hay ourselves, which is why we’re so happy to have another local organic farmer, Ryan Gansz, nearby who can grow it for us.
This week, with the help from Ryan, his father, and his teenage son, we worked together to move 300 bails of gorgeous hay from the Gansz’s big red farm truck into the Stonecrop barn. We stacked it in a criss-cross pattern so the stacks won’t topple over and we filled the upper and lower floors of the barn, to the brim.
As the Gansz’s truck drove away, Greg said we have more than enough to get us through the year and I could see the look of relief across his face. All I know is that it’s bright green, it smells sweet, and the animals love it. And for all that, we’re eternally grateful.
Your Farmers,
Jenney & Greg