Beyond Pastured Pork: Free Foraging Heritage Pigs

If you were a pig, how would you want to spend your life? With a ring in your nose so that you couldn't root in the dirt?  In a gestation crate where you couldn't turn around and couldn't be with your babies?  On cement?  Castrated at only a day old without any anaesthesia? We hate to mention such things on a site as beautiful and natural as this one, but we consumers CANNOT turn our backs any more!  Let's face it, pork is a wonderfully flavorful, nutritious source of protein.  But it comes from a pig...a pig that deserves a great life.

We don't think that's asking too much.

Free-Foraging, All the Time

Our rare breed Ossabaw Island pigs range freely in woods and on pasture, always with at least an acre to roam and often much more.  We have carefully bred maternal instincts so that sows can make their own nest and never have any help from us in terms of a farrowing hut.  They figured out how to reproduce perfectly well without us.  All piglets are weaned naturally by their mother for at least two months in the same wooded area, before being segregated in large, separate paddocks for girl and boy growers.  We have to separate the boys from girls because, unlike other farms, we DO NOT castrate piglets.  Even though this practice is accepted by third-party standards such as Certified Humane, we do not think it is at all humane, and it's certainly not natural.  Managing the herds the way we do eliminates any perception of boar taint.
You've likely never tasted pork like Ossabaw and you will taste the difference.  Our Ossabaw Island pigs are raised in our woodlots and adjoining pastures where they use their built-in plows to root for acorns and roots. They enjoy a varied diet of fresh grass, clover and bugs from the pastures. The pigs spend ALL of their time outside in the fresh air, and are free to root and graze.  Of course, like all of Nature's Harmony's animals, they are raised without the use of antibiotics or artificial growth hormones.

No Waste...Whey Fed Ossabaw Pork

Of course the primary focus of our farm is to create great raw milk cheese.  However, like everything on Nature's Harmony Farm, our goal is to foster symbiotic relationships and ensure that there is no waste.   Approximately 10% of the milk is actually used to make cheese, with the remaining 90% expelled as whey.  While our customers eagerly await the delicious cheeses, our rare breed Ossabaw pigs anxiously await the whey. We capture and deliver the whey to them after each cheese making, completing a beautiful cycle of:

  • sun, soil and rain growing grass,
  • cow harvesting grass,
  • farmers harvesting milk, 
  • cheesemakers making cheese,
  • farmers harvesting whey;
  • pigs consuming organic whey from grassfed cows; and, finally,
  • cows fertilzing old paddocks and harvesting grass from new paddocks.

The cycle is beautiful and complete.

Purchasing Ossabaw Pork

While the primary focus of our farm is dairy and handcrafted raw-milk cheese, we often have Ossabaws that we sell in whole and halves. When we do these sell out fast...no need to email us to inquire, just be sure you're on our email list and you'll be notified when we have some ready.