Most of our 45 acres is in pasture and the animals do the majority of the work involved in keeping the grass under control. Oh yes, we do have to take a weed whacker to the fencelines and ever since the cows learned to jump the driveway fence, we have had to mow that ourselves as well, but with the exception of the barn yard area and the yard around the house, the critters do the mowing.

We have a nice sized yard around the house (on 3 sides of it anyway). We have this incredible Black Walnut tree in the back with a carpet of pretty, soft grass and clover all around and under it. On the other side of the house we have an ancient old apple tree that drops billions (or what seems like billions) of small, tangy apples in late October. Each year, we faithfully ride the lawnmower around and around, to keep the grass from overwhelming the house. We gave up on watering it years ago because we really don’t like having to mow, so the sooner it goes dormant for the summer the happier we are.

A few months ago, we moved the Guineas to their own pasture area as they were getting WAY to fat. As the Guineas ate and ate the grass in their pasture, we started to notice something. They were mowing that grass perfectly. They didn’t root, they didn’t dig, they just ate grass. Once the tall grass was gone, they started to perfectly manicure the whole area, not a blade out of place. It was a thing of beauty (except for the carpet of pig piles left all over the place. lol).

April came and Jim had to fire up the old mower one dry day to take his first trip around the yard. Ugh. Another year of mowing had arrived! Meanwhile the Guinea’s kept eating their pasture and were just about out of grass. Hmmmmm. There had to be a solution to both problems somewhere in this.

Delilah's hut in the back yard.

Well, you guessed it. We quickly decided to let the Guineas do the lawnmowing for a while. Jim put up a one wire hot fence around the walnut tree, then he built a Guinea sized tent hut for Delilah and we moved her to the yard for mower duties. It was serving two purposes. She was hopefully going to eat the grass so we didn’t have to use the mower and she would be close to the house so we could monitor her easier and be on hand to help with her impending piglet delivery if needed. Also having her close to electricity would be helpful, if it looked like her piglets might need a bit of extra heat after being born.

We only moved Delilah to the backyard, as the grower Guineas still had pasture left and they were then slated to move to the barn yard to do mowing down there.  Delilah has been in yard residence for about a month now. At first it didnt’ look like she was going to be able to keep up with the grass, but she is proving to be a prodigious grazer and is finally starting to make some headway against the spring growth.

A few weeks after she moved to the yard, she did indeed have her piglets. We now have a family of 9 living in the yard. I have to admit, while I appreciate that that grass IS getting mowed, I think that the best part of this deal is having the piglets right outside my front door. Piglets are my favorite part of the whole pig business and the Guinea Hog piglets are the best of the best. They are incredibly cute and tiny and fat and did I mention cute? 

American Guinea Hog piglets cooling off on a Spring day

What is a “super fat” you ask? Well, that is what we have taken to calling a few of our Red Wattle feeder hogs that have taken their job of eating and growing a little too seriously. They have eaten and they have grown and they have gotten FAT. We have tried cutting back on their food, but since they are the biggest hogs in the field, they still get more then their fair share and with 9 sows nursing litters, we did not have any extra pasture space available to seperate them out from the main herd. So they got to stay in the herd and continue to grow. 

Red Wattle pork chops before they go on the grill

When we took one of the Super Fats in to the butcher, we decided to hang out in the cutting room while they did the cut and wrap on the hog so we could make decisions about the amount of trim left on the meat as well as making other decisions on the fly. It was my first time in the cutting room and it was pretty interesting and not nearly as complicated as I thought it might be. Again I have to thank the patience of the men working at Mt. Angel Meats as I changed cutting orders time and time again. “cut more fat off there, leave it on for that piece”, “Hey, can you make those chops a full inch thick instead of 3/4 inch”, “OH! Can you slice those hock pieces into Osso Bucco cuts instead of smoking them”. and  ”Can you vaccum pack those cuts while doing the rest in butcher paper still?” Those were just a few of the many changes I pestered them with. When they cut the chops, we  knew that while the hog may have been overly fat, those chops were going to be out of this world. Talk about marbled!  Those are going to be chops worthy of a great dinner!

Fast forward to tonight.  Most of the time we grill porkchops on the gas grill, however a few weeks ago the gas grill broke down and we haven’t fixed it yet. Knowing that these chops were too good for the frying pan (not to mention too thick!) ,we figured we would have to cook them either on the old Weber charcoal grill (do we even have  any briquettes?) or we’d have to use the charcoal powered smoker. I went off to feed the hogs and left Jim (the grill master of our household) to figure out the chop cooking.  An hour later as I finished up the farm chores I could could smell the wood smoke and knew that Jim had opted for his favorite grill method : the smoker.  It is slow and smokey, but we’ve never had a bad meal from meat cooked on that simple smoker/grill.

Red Wattle Pork Chops after they came off the grill.

Some time later the chops were done to perfection. They were seasoned with just a little bit of sea salt and some pepper. I know. It seems silly to put so little seasonings on it, but really that is all we used. We wanted to taste the pork, not extra seasonings. As usual, we cut off a little bite as a teaser taste before we officially sat down to dinner.  WOW!  We knew these chops would be good, but we did not expect them to be this good. They were juicy and moist (thanks to that marbling!) and the flavor was out of this world. I don’t even know how to describe the flavor, but if I told you that most of one chop was immediately eaten as part of that teaser tasting, would that tell you what we thought of it?

I won’t lie to you, we eat very well here on the farm. We have some of the finest beef, pork and chicken that can be had. I know because we raised each and every animal that graces the depths of our many freezers. When we raise meat animals we do it with the intent on providing the animals with the best, most natural life possible, which helps ensure that the meat is the highest quality with lots of flavor.  Each season brings with it different pork. Our fall and winter pork is finished on pumpkins, fruit and (yum) hazelnuts; while our spring and sumer pork is finished on grasses and clovers. We are going into grilling season and I am now a fan of these thicker, 1 inch chops. Heck, I might even like them thicker.  I am also a fan  of the Super Fats that we still have out in the field. They may be a bit on the “fluffy” side, but the flavor and marbling of the meat is outstanding.

So here is the deal. We have an extra Super Fat or two out in the field (might even be three of them out there). Normally we sell our Red Wattle pork sides at $3.75/lb based on hanging weight plus butcher/processing costs, but because these couple of hogs are overly fat and will yield a fair bit of fat, if you would like one of these Super Fats, we’ll sell them to you for $3.00/lb based on hanging weight plus butcher/processing costs. The upside is that you get an almost $100 per side discount  AND you’ll get a bit extra fat to render down into lard for cooking. Ok. you’ll get a fair bit of extra fat, but did you  know that fat is easily rendered down into lard and that pastured, home rendered lard is actually a fairly healthy cooking oil? And that lard makes the best pie crusts? If you don’t want the extra fat, but instead would like one of our nicely finished, NOT overly fat, Red Wattle hogs, well then we have those available too at $3.75/lb hanging weight plus processing.

Let me know. If no one buys them, I will be happy to have a summer long supply of thick, juicy chops for the smoker!

Wendy Parker

Yesterday Jim and I attended the Local Food Connection day down in Eugene, Oregon and I spent 90 minutes listening to 4 very different local food folks (2 farmers, a chef-restaurant owner, and a marketing guru for a grocery store) tell about how and why to use platforms such as Twitter…… Sigh…….  There it was again. Twitter.

Now admittedly I am often out in the field with the animals and I think about how cool it would be to post a short blurb and a picture for the world. Just a glimps into our life on the farm. Evidently Twitter is the way to do those glimpses.  Fine. I am sold, I’ll try Twitter.  We just signed up on Twitter, our username is “redwattlepork” . Please join up to follow along, because I hope to tweet up a storm.

Now my next challange is a way to get those posts onto the web from the field. We do not have smart phones or data plans (yet, perhaps later this summer).  But my Christmas present from Jim was an iPod Touch. Those have wi-fi if you have a hot spot to link from. I went out in the field and tracked how far my wireless signal would go from the modem. I could get all the way out to the end of “The Sow Aisle”, which is really cool because right now, that sow aisle is packed with new piglets; about 70 of them. FUN!  So I can do tweets from the sow aisle and once Jim gets a booster antenea  up on the rooftop I should be able to post from most anywhere on the farm.

See you soon!!

Wendy

I met Julia and Chef Wishard from La Medusa today who drove down from Seattle to pick up a half a hog.  First I would like to say what dedication for a Chef and Owner to drive 400+ miles to get a product that they would want to serve to their customers is only committment to excellence.  To the customer’s, you have  someone who really cares about the quality, sustainability and methods of how the animals they use are raised and by you supporting them you are supporting small farmers and not the CAFO’s.  If you are in the Seattle area, please give them a call and find out when they will be serving this rare treat.  I can honestly say from all the Red Wattles we have processed so far, this was the best looking carcass we have produced.  Top that with the pastured hazelnut finish for the past 60+ days and this could be almost a once in a lifetime meal.  Well perhaps at least until next year….

JP

So what happens when Heritage Farms Northwest meets Airlie Hills Farm?  Lots and lots of pumpkins transfer their location from their farm to our farm. Each year the pumpkin migration is looked forward to by eager Red Wattle pigs as well as by our mixed beef cow herd.

It all started 2 years ago in the fall of 2008.  We had just brought Red Wattle hogs to Oregon and I was on the lookout for good, local feed sources for them. After all, its better for everyone if you can feed your animals from local sources and sometimes it is even a bit cheaper. Anyway, there I was, driving down the road on a brisk Oct. day when I passed by a new pumpkin patch at Airlie Hills Farm. There hadn’t been one at that farm the year before, but lately all sorts of new things had been popping up at this particular farm. Hydroponically grown strawberrys and this new pumpkin patch were both part of their new projects.  I gazed longingly at their 3+ acres of pretty orange pumpkins and wondered what on earth they were going to do with all of them after Halloween had passed. Would they just plow them under or did they have some other plan for them? Pigs love pumpkins you know. Cows do too.

Jenna and her litter hide among the pumpkins

The "guts" are the best part, don't you know.

  This is likely the best time of year for the pigs and cows (in their opinion anyway). They get all they can eat at the pumpkin smorgasboard. Bellies are fat and faces are all smeared with orange goo. And for the humans, we get a good workout lifting, tossing and basically using our backs to move all those pumpkins. I’d love to weigh them all, but if I had to guess, I’d say we likely haul 5+ tons of pumpkins each year. This year Airlie Hills Farm grew very BIG pumpkins which meant fewer trips, but they were harder to pick up. Last year there were zillions of small pumpkins, which meant lots of trips, but we could stand 20 feet away and toss them into the pickup bed.  Each year its something different. One year it might be pouring down rain (last year!!) or it might be warm and sunny (this year!!!). But each year it is a great gift to have this fabulous local food source just up the road from us and we appreciate it. 

 Next year we will be setting Aaron and his wife Sarah up with a couple of young American Guinea hogs for their farm animal petting zoo that they have at their patch each year. Cutest pigs you will ever meet and friendly too!

How does one eat such a thing anyway?

Wendy P

If you never heard of a small black farm hog let me be the first to introduce you to the super practical, very rare and “just back from the brink of extinction” American Guinea Hog!!

They are a small hog that weighs just 200-300 lbs tops at maturity. Typical butcher size at about 6 months of age yields a carcass of about 75 lbs hanging weight.  Of course like any hog, you can grow them out longer to get a bigger carcass if you want one.

Delilah our AGH sow rubbing on her hut.

Guinea hogs are considered a lard hog which means that they make alot of lard in addition to their meat. These animals might have been the original homesteading hog. They are small (which makes them easy to transport across the country), they are gentle (very important for farming families and their kids), they require very little food and are excellent foragers (important when livestock feed is scarce, expensive or unavailable) and at the end of it all, they produce a nice amount of meat with a good portion of fat for rendering. Lard was used for so many things on a farm. It was for cooking and candle making and soap making and all sorts of things. If you didn’t have a hog that produced good amounts of fat, you were going to be going without some very important items in your household.

As families started moving off the farms and into the cities, there were fewer people keeping these small hogs. Additionally, as pork producers moved their animals into the big “factory farms” and the demand was for lean pork, these old lard hog breeds fell out of favor and they became more and more rare. Eventually this breed dwindled down to just 45 known breeding animals. Luckily for all, the American Guinea Hog has found a place on America’s small farms and homestead once again. While still very much an endangered farm animal breed (listed on the critical list with the ALBC), their numbers are up and breeders are found nationwide. There are even Guinea Hogs up in Alaska.

We had no real intention of buying any other breeds of hogs. We’ve been more then happy with our Red Wattles and our farm has RW’s in just about every field. Ok, I take it back, they are in EVERY pasture on the place. The horses have learned to love them, the cows have learned that they shouldn’t mess with a mature RW hog and her food.. lol. and the chickens have learned that for the most part, hanging with the hogs is a good thing. There is always food to eat from the hog feeders and when the chickens need a warm place to sleep, the back of a RW hog will hold 7 or 8 chickens.

Sampson resting his head on a cinder block.

 Anyway, back to the AGH’s. Back in August, Guinea hogs started popping up on my radar. They were in photos on a facebook friend. They were in articles in pasture magazines, they were everywhere so it seemed. Jim was wondering if I was coveting some little black Guinea’s. Nope, I told him I was not hog shopping. Honestly I wasn’t!!

One day towards the end of August, I was home alone and Jim got a phone call. He wasn’t home, so the guy on the phone said he would ask me his question instead. Turns out that he and Jim had met at the abatoir that we use several months ago. They had talked and shared “what kind of animals do you have” sorts of things. Jim told Bernard that we had rare hogs called Red Wattles and now months later, Bernard needed to sell his small herd of AGH’s and remembered that. He asked if perhaps we might want to add a second breed to our rare hog endevors.

 Oh man, the chance to buy 5 AGH’s just dropped into my lap. I did turn him down at that moment. But a week later after much discussion between Jim and I, we decided that if one rare hog was good, two must be better.. And besides, they aren’t very big and they eat hardly anything. We can feed all 5 of them for less then it takes to feed one big hog.

Where to put them was the immediate problem. So we took a few few corners from one of the horse pastures and made them a quarentine area. They will spend about 30 days in that area, while we make sure they didn’t come with anything that might pass on to the rest of our hogs. They did come with a few lice bugs which we treated for immediately (the white powder you see in some of the pictures), so we are glad they are in their own area for the time being

 Once they get “cleared”, they will be moved down to one side of  our lower pasture where they will have good grazing and a small wooded area to forage in. Its our hope that they will be able to provide most of their food themselves. We’ve learned very quickly that too much hog food makes a Guinea Hog very fat!!!  And while lard is a great by-product from the market animals, it is not a good thing to have overly fat breeding stock.

Moving the hogs with the crate

A side by side photo of Jowl, Cottage, and Belly bacon from a pastured Red Wattle Hog

Anyway, back to the recently processed Red Wattle that we got back from the processor. Its been “home” for a few weeks now, and we have had a package of belly bacon (awesome!) but we had yet to sample the cottage bacon (from the shoulder) or the jowl bacon. Last pig we had the jowls smoked and returned to us whole. This pig we asked for them smoked and sliced; as bacon.  We were eager to see and taste how the various bacons turned out this time around.

The weekend of July 17th we had the pleasure of hosting Brian and Dot Jordan from Indiana. (That is a whole other post). Brian and Dot are also Red Wattle breeders, in fact Brian is the president of the Red Wattle Hog Association. While they have plenty of RW pork in their freezer, they have never had cottage bacon or jowl bacon, so we figure this was the opportunity to compare the three types of bacon. All three bacons are from the same hog. This was a Red Wattle hog that was a year of age and had a live weight of 320 lbs.

The Jowl Bacon has much more fat then the other two types of bacon.  It really has a lot of flavor as flavor is packed away in the fat. Its texture is fairly delicate and its easy to chew. Did I mention delicious?  The Cottage Bacon comes from the shoulder of the hog. It is  a much shorter, meatier cut of bacon and as such has a bit different texture. This hog was  grass/clover finished and as such isn’t as fat as the hazelnut pigs that we offer later in the year. The Cottage Bacon from this hog is almost all meat. Delicous meat. The Belly Bacon is the familiar bacon that most of us have grown up with. Not overly fatty with a good amount of “lean” to it.

 I love all of the different types of bacon. We tend to choose different types depending on how we plan on using it.  As far as the jowl goes, I think I prefer the jowl left whole. Jim can then chop it into chunks and fry it that way. We use it to flavor pasta dishes or just snack on directly from the pan.

A sampling of our Red Wattle Jowl Bacon

Cottage bacon which comes from the shoulder. Look at all that meat!

Traditional bacon from the belly of a Red Wattle Hog

Let me introduce myself.  My name is Wendy Parker and this is the online home of Heritage Farms Northwest!  Please  join with me, my husband Jim, and our two kids Anne and Daniel as we go about the daily adventures that are found on a small farm in Dallas, Oregon. 

We are a diverse family farm that focuses primarily on raising heritage breed animals in a pastured setting, with little or no confinement for any of our livestock. The cattle are 100% grass fed and finished. They never taste a bit of grain and rarely see the inside of a holding pen. Our hogs are also 100 % pasture raised, dining on a varied diet of grasses, clovers, seasonal fruit and produce. Because hogs are not ruminants, they do need supplemental hog feed (grains) to provide them with all their essential calories as well a balanced mix of vitamins and minerals. Our chickens and turkeys run free on the farm. This has its own  special set of joys and hardships, including the occasional chicken poo on the front porch and the all to often berry raids performed by the turkeys. They always know when the berries are exactly ripe!  The horses mostly get in the way of the “real farming” but we love them anyway.

It should be a great year of growth, farming adventures, hard work and the occasional play day.