….we took guests this weekend to a nearby farm store.\u00a0 As fellow pig breeders, I thought they would be interested in another approach to marketing pork.<\/p>\n
We’d tasted the sausage before and appreciated the flavor but without endorsing the management technique of using regular genetically-modified grain, plus day-old bread from a bakery (not only GM flour but other unknowns including chemical preservatives and flavoring) and finally “scraps”.<\/p>\n
Still this is the typical way most farmers raise their pigs in the local ag community\u00a0and it’s certainly better than the industrial pork that makes up the sausage you buy at the store or eat in restaurants.\u00a0 Here’s an excerpt from the “River Cottage Meat Bo<\/em>ok” describing the processing of commercial sausage:<\/p>\n “The very worst of them–which is, of course, most of them–are made from mechanically recovered pork slurry, blasted off the carcasses of factory-farmed pigs with high-pressure hoses, then (scooped) up off the abattoir floor.\u00a0 After being sieved and ground to an even paste, and stabilized with the addition of chemical preservatives, this is mixed with cheap cereal binders (as much as 50% of the final sausage), artificial flavorings and additional preservatives to boot.”<\/em><\/p>\n Thistle Hill pigs are raised strictly on a natural diet of grass, forbs, grubs, acorns and non-GMO corn.\u00a0 It’s a slower and far more expensive way of management but we think there’s no point in doing local farming if we’re not doing it as healthfully as is possible.<\/p>\n We do believe we have now found a source for raw milk and would love to feed that to our pigs.\u00a0 They’d love it, too.\u00a0 And so would you.<\/p>\n Our schedule now is to harvest our new pigs at the end of the month.\u00a0 Pork should be available a week or two after that.\u00a0 Contact us if you want to reserve your share:\u00a0\u00a0info@thistlehill.net<\/span><\/em><\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" ….we took guests this weekend to a nearby farm store.\u00a0 As fellow pig breeders, I thought they would be interested in another approach to marketing pork. We’d tasted the sausage before and appreciated the flavor but without endorsing the management technique of using regular genetically-modified grain, plus day-old bread from a bakery (not only GM flour but other unknowns including chemical preservatives and flavoring) and finally “scraps”. Still this is the typical way most farmers raise their pigs in the local ag community\u00a0and it’s certainly better than the industrial pork that makes up the sausage you buy at the store or eat in restaurants.\u00a0 Here’s an excerpt from the “River Cottage Meat Book” describing the processing of commercial sausage: “The very worst of them–which is, of course, most of them–are made from mechanically recovered pork slurry, blasted off the carcasses of factory-farmed pigs with high-pressure hoses, then (scooped) up off the abattoir floor.\u00a0 After being sieved and ground to an even paste, and stabilized with the addition of chemical preservatives, this is mixed with cheap cereal binders (as much as 50% of the final sausage), artificial flavorings and additional preservatives to boot.” Thistle Hill pigs are raised strictly on a natural diet of grass, forbs, grubs, acorns and non-GMO corn.\u00a0 It’s a slower and far more expensive way of management but we think there’s no point in doing local farming if we’re not doing it as healthfully as is possible. We do believe we have now found a source for raw milk and would love to feed that to our pigs.\u00a0 They’d love it, too.\u00a0 And so would you. Our schedule now is to harvest our new pigs at the end of the month.\u00a0 Pork should be available a week or two after that.\u00a0 Contact us if you want to reserve your share:\u00a0\u00a0info@thistlehill.net <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22,46,9,21,11,93],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3479","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-food","category-gmo","category-health","category-on-the-soap-box","category-pigs-2","category-pork-sausage"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thistlehill.net\/wpblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3479","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thistlehill.net\/wpblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thistlehill.net\/wpblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thistlehill.net\/wpblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thistlehill.net\/wpblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3479"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/www.thistlehill.net\/wpblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3479\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3482,"href":"http:\/\/www.thistlehill.net\/wpblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3479\/revisions\/3482"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thistlehill.net\/wpblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3479"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thistlehill.net\/wpblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3479"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thistlehill.net\/wpblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3479"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}