The mind of a pig
Here at BOTL Farm, we don’t typically allow visitors on our farm. Not because we’re trying to hide unsavory practices or don’t want people to see where their meat comes from, but because there are a lot of diseases that can be swapped from people to livestock. We know ya’ll are great, but you can also be disease vectors. So, we’ve never done a farm tour and never had a bunch of farmers over to see what we’re doing. Until this month!
We hosted our first-ever farm tour for farmers and farm workers. It was terrifying and we made everyone sanitize themselves, but the tour went well. The focus was rotational grazing but lots of other topics came up along the way. At one point, the group of us were standing outside a paddock, looking at pigs. The pigs stopped what they were doing, stood still, and looked back at us. Upon reflection, we decided that our pigs, quite possibly, didn’t know that there were more than two or three people in the world. A bunch of the tour group looked at us funny when we said this, so it got us thinking. Since the pigs are born on our farm and only take one trip off it to the slaughterhouse, they don’t see humans beyond us.
We spend a lot of time trying to put ourselves in the shoes of our animals (notably, our animals do not wear shoes [editor notes: one time dog-shoes were put on Pup and she high stepped hilariously]). If you’re especially dorky about old German philosophical ideas, you may have heard of the concept of umwelt. Umwelt is the idea that the way different animals (and insects and plants) experience the world is different from how humans (who are also animals) experience the world. What does a pig want? We think she’d rather be with her pig siblings, mom, cousins, aunts, and uncles rooting around in the woods than seeing many people. Nice.
One other note: we got lots of questions during the tour about the emotional attachment of farmers to livestock. We’ve written about that in our FAQ if you’re interested.
Some label claims are not like the others
Good branding and marketing is unobtrusive. You recognize it when you see it, but you can’t describe it when asked or put your finger on how it looks. If we asked you, could you describe the labels on our meat without looking? We’ll give you a hint: they’re boring black-and-white labels that our slaughterhouse provides and blend into the background with lots of other farms’ labels.
We decided to update our labels with color, pictures of our animals, and label claims. Wait, what is a label claim? Depending on how much time you have to devote to the answer, consider watching one of us give a 75-minute seminar on the topic. Assuming you have less than 75 minutes, common label claims are ‘cage free,’ ‘pasture raised,’ ‘hormone and/or antibiotic free.’ It’s anything about a feeding standard, breed standard, and/or raising practice.
USDA regulates meat label claims and has a process for approving them, which may or may not be very rigorous, depending on how big your lobbying budget is. Full disclosure: our lobbying budget is $0, so we had to write 45 pages of documents that detailed our raising practices, feed ingredients, animal handling, and other boring stuff. We totes got our label claims approved! We can’t wait for people to start seeing our new labels.
Continue on our Sausage Adventure… choo choo
For those of you who are new (or have forgotten our exciting update from five months ago, shame shame), a small company that makes organic spice mixes had reached out to us and asked if we’d be interested in trying their stuff. We did some quick market research (aka made, ate, and shared a bunch of sausage) and decided to buy a variety of the mixes to do one-off sausage batches for sale. Stop one on the Sausage Adventure was Sage & Spice, which we did as a loose sausage and is sold out. This month we made time to go to the commercial kitchen and hand-make two new sausage batches.
Stop two is Krazy Kielbasa. Naturally, people ask about why it’s called Krazy. The answer is that one of us (who shall definitely remain nameless) was having her (😁) first time in charge of looping the linked sausages, which defines the size and mouthfeel of each sausage. The resulting sausages are … delightfully variable in size and density. Krazy, if you may. Flavorwise, this is a mostly traditional Kielbasa spice profile with the addition of some allspice and an untraditionally prominent marjoram note as well. It’s fun.
Stop three is Sprechen Sie Brat (pronounced SPRECK-en zee brat) and is loosely based on a northern German or Bavarian bratwurst, but has warm notes of mace and cardamom. It’s different from the brats we’ve perfected over the years and sell as our ‘normal’ brats, but we’re excited to hear how others think they compare.
Organic animal feed: the dreaded update
We’ve had shipping costs for New Country Organics (NCO) feed go up not once, but twice in the past few months. We ate the first increase, but the second put us over the edge and we had to re-price all NCO feed we sell to account for this increased cost. The pricing on our website is up-to-date with the new prices, which work out to (roughly) 50 cents per bag. Sorry about being so mean, but we have to pass on rising costs as they occur.
Find Us
On farm store: Every Tuesday noon - 2pm, every Saturday 1 - 3pm. On-farm stores where you will need to Load Your Own Bags (LYOB) in September: Saturday September 13 and Saturday September 27. Pre-order
On farm self pickup: Everyday 8am - 8pm. Pre-order only
Wooster Square, New Haven CT: This market runs every Saturday from 9am - 1pm until the end of November. We will be there every other week. Dates we’ll be there in September: September 13 and September 27. Pre-order
Assawaga Farm Market, Putnam CT: This market runs every Saturday 9am - noon until the Saturday before Thanksgiving. We will be there every other week. Dates we’ll be there in September: September 06 and September 20. Pre-order
Sturbridge Farmers Market, Sturbridge MA: This market runs every Sunday 9am - 1pm until October. We will be there every week. Dates we’ll be there in September: September 07, September 14, September 21, September 28. Pre-order
It's too many dates! Save me!
Super-secret meatball recipe
For those of you who were promised our meatball recipe, here it is. More recipes (and explanations of why we’re publishing recipes) to come in the following months.