Pigs are Here!

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May 24, 2021

As we continue our regenerative journey, pigs are now here! We added some "feeder pigs" this Spring. These will be ready to process in the Fall. We will be selling "wholes" and "halves." This means that people can buy volume pork for their freezer to go along with Carver Family Farms LLC Chicken! We hope to offer a small amount of pork by the cut but mostly we will offer pork in bulk. We want our customers to have the same food security that we enjoy. A chest freezer that is filled with healthy, nutrient dense proteins is life changing! Grocery store trips are fewer and there are no worries that the shelves will be out of meat.

Our pigs are raised on high quality, locally milled, non-gmo feed. They are pastured and forested. This is extremely unlike conventionally raised pork. Our pigs are raised as pigs. They root in the dirt, they interact with other pigs, and will not have their tails docked.

If you are anticipating pork you can get in a grocery store, that is not what this is. Pigs raised in a pasture/forest environment get fresh air and exercise. That combined with a high quality feed ration produces excellent pork. Pork should NEVER be called "the other white meat." Future blog posts will go into more detail of pig breeds. Our pig supplier for 2021 (and the future) is Bev Eggleston with Ecofriendly foods in Moneta, VA. He raises and markets exceptional pork.

We are excited to see what this next level of land stewardship accomplishes toward our goal of improving soils. Pigs have the ability to transform a landscape and so we are excited to have them clear undergrowth and then we can grow forage behind them. If you are interested in pork or land stewardship accomplished by pigs, we would love to further discuss it with you.

Piglets!

The next chapter of Carver Family Farms has begun. Farrowing pigs is a new enterprise that we are excited about! 10 healthy pigs were born to our first gilt on February 3, 2022. We have two more pregnant gilts that are due soon. Why farrow?

Snow!

I love living and farming in Virginia! We like to call our home county "God's Country." After growing up in Florida, I truly appreciate living somewhere that experiences all four seasons. Snow is beautiful and I enjoy exactly one snow per winter. We have now exceeded that and personally I am ready to move on to Spring. This winter has already thrown significantly more challenges at us than all of last winter combined.The Snow is beautiful! It makes for fun pictures and we did enjoy some sledding this year. Snow is a good example of why we do not raise our pastured chickens in the winter. We choose not to fight nature. If we had birds on pasture during the two recent snow storms, we would've either had to raise them indoors (no longer pastured) or we would've experienced catastrophic losses and difficult/dangerous farm chores on the iced over snow. We will start back with our meat chickens in early Spring.Even though our poultry is seasonal, our pigs are a year round enterprise. We have pigs during the winter and they thrive! The snow does not phase them in the slightest. They love the hay that we supply for them to bed down in. They stay warm as they bed in "pig piles" covered in hay. They have a shelter but it is more for our peace of mind than the pigs. As long as they have sufficient access to hay they can handle any winter weather that Virginia can throw at them. The frozen ground is problematic for some of our infrastructure projects but we do them as the weather allows and are constantly learning and improving.This time of year is a great time to focus on healthy eating and cooking new things. We eat pork or chicken from the farm nearly every day. We make bone broth year round but we seem to go through it more rapidly in the winter as we make soups and chilis. I also drink a mug of hot bone broth every day. In the near future, we will write more about our weekly menu and showcase how we eat almost all protein from Carver Family Farms.In the future we will have cattle and sheep as additional year round enterprises. We are excited to learn and grow! I hope you will join us on this journey of healthy land, healthy animals, and healthy people.

Happy New Year!

We are off to a snow covered start to 2022. This means we are longing for warmer days and green grass. At the same time we are enjoying the harvest from 2021 and making plans for 2022. We hope and expect 2022 will be our healthiest year yet. Healthy land, healthy animals, and healthy people will continue to be our focus. Here are some goals/changes for 2022...

Pigs are Here!

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Piglets!

Snow!

Happy New Year!

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