A pig revolution: nursing standing up
Factory farming is a terrible thing. When sows (aka mom-pigs) are about to give birth, they’re locked in a ‘crate’ (cage) that restricts them to a laying-down position and are kept there for the ‘safety’ and ‘health’ of their piglets. Depending on which factory they’re at, the sow can be kept in this position for the entire time she’s nursing her piglets. In reality, this is not about health or safety: this is about making animals into controllable, uniform commodities and placing profits over animal welfare (and quality!).
Right-o, that was a bit dark for a beginning, but here at BOTL Farm, we’d like to make the world a better place. One of the ways we’re working on it is by raising all our animals from birth on pasture, where they can express their normal behaviors. They can do what they want, even start to invent new pig behaviors.
So, we officially have two sows who nurse standing up. It’s bonkers. Sows, even happy sows on pasture, will lay down periodically to nurse their piglets, but we have two sows who are fantastic mothers but only nurse standing up. Our only guess why they’re doing this is because these two sows grew up on another farm that had cows and they saw the cows feeding their young standing up? No one knows. But, their piglets are totally up for it — they might even get more milk this way!
Holiday market
We love teaming up with Assawaga Farm so much that we decided to join their holiday party/market! This will be our first holiday market ever and it takes place Sunday December 11th from 11am to 5pm at Assawaga Farm in Putnam, CT. Not only will we be there with meat, but Assawaga will have an assortment of their naturally-dyed textile products, along with vendors with soap, candles, a taco truck, music, art, mulled wine, a bonfire, and oh-my-goodness, this sounds like the most fun we’ve had recently. A full list of vendors and more information is available on Assawaga’s website.
We’re also doing the Coventry Winters Farmers Market. We’ll be there next on Sunday December 18 from 10am to 12:30pm.
The next pre-order-only at Saw Dust Coffee in Sturbridge, MA is Saturday December 10th from 10am to 2pm. Place pre-orders by filling out this form.
Bacon countdown
It’s harvest season here, so we’re bringing a few pigs each week to our butcher and stocking up on cuts that have been out of stock. That’s right, we’re makin’ the bacon. Okay, technically, our bacon has to be USDA-certified, so our butcher is making the bacon for us, but you know what we mean.
We’re hoping to have bacon back by the holiday market on Dec 11, along with other things like cottage bacon, Canadian bacon, Kielbasa links, and tenderloins! The other stuff we’re out of (chorizo! country-style ribs!) will only be a few weeks behind our first batch of bacon.
Speaking of bacon, let’s talk about that elephant in the room called ‘nitrates’
We’re often asked if our bacon contains nitrates. The answer is yes and let’s taco ‘bout why.
According to USDA regulations, if a meat product (bacon, sausage, ham) contains a nitrate curing salt, it’s a cured product. All BOTL Farm bacons are cured according to this definition. As farmers who think about meat and meat labelling, like, all the time, we've carefully made the decision to sell cured products. Why, since uncured products are marketed as more healthy/natural in stores?
We consider bacons, hams, sausages, and other meats that are labelled uncured to be misleading, as most customers understand the term 'uncured' to mean 'no nitrates/nitrites.' Instead, the 'uncured' label designates that celery extracts, such as celery juice and celery powder (or cherry or beet root, etc.), are used in place of curing salts. This is disingenuous because celery, beets, cherry, etc., have natural but variable amounts of nitrates! Since the amount of nitrates/nitrites in vegetable extracts are not measured or regulated, the customer ends up with a product with an unknown and variable amount of nitrates/nitrites, even if they expected their uncured product to be nitrate/nitrite-free. It's entirely possible that an uncured product can have higher nitrate/nitrite levels than a cured product.
We’re much more comfortable with making our bacon with curing salts, which have a carefully-measured amount of nitrates/nitrites because they use a known amount of a regulated product.
Also, let’s note that adding nitrates to meat doesn’t do much until it reacts with naturally-occurring bacteria in meat, which chemically converts nitrates -> nitrites, which starts the curing process.
So yes, our bacon has nitrates/nitrites because we believe it's a more consistent, better-quality, not-misleading product. We are always happy to talk more about this or our other farming decisions if you have more questions.
Our one-and-only foray into growing plants
Once upon a time, we thought we would grow plants. Turns out, it’s not great. We now leave it to the pros. However, we have one exception. When we bought our house, we planted an edible hedge on the property line of perennial (is that the one that comes back every year? we told you we aren’t great with plants) berries. Turns out, this was an awesome decision and we high-five our previous selves for doing it. Every year we have an abundance of berries, of which we eat as many as we can and freeze the rest. Then, in October, we make an awesome multi-berry jam. This year’s drought-mix is predominantly blackberry with a strong showing of raspberry plus some cherry, blueberry, and strawberry.
We find it fun to leave the berry mix full-seeded, so we don’t strain out any of the seeds (okay, we do remove the cherry pits, that’s real weird to leave them in) so we’re left with a sweet, crunchy, great-on-biscuits jam! We have 8oz and 4oz jars available for sale.
New Country Organics animal feed: hold on to your belts
The good news is that prices over the past few months for the feed bags themselves have stabilized. Yay!
The bad news is that we’ve been told by several reliable sources that shipping costs are going to be crazy volatile after the first of the year. So, we may be back in the (now-familiar?) uncharted territory of price increases then. Hold on, everyone, we can do this!
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