Traditionally we’ve only sourced our protein from one source. Beef and pork from Ninja Cow Farm, chicken, rabbit, quail, etc from Brittany Ridge Farm, goat from Cooterville Farm. Things like that. But with the times we are living in, we are having to do things we’ve never done before.
I called this week to schedule another couple of hogs for the processor. I’m already using a processor that is hours away due to farming details that you don’t want to hear. Well when I asked if I could get in Monday, like this coming Monday, I was told I could bring two hogs, only two, on May 11th! And the next hogs would be June. Yikes! We need pork now, not a month from now.
And even if we scraped by from now till May 11th, it would not work to have no pork till June after those two hogs.
And we are getting short on hogs, period. Like, we don’t have enough to process and put in the freezers so we are going to run out no matter what.
So with all that in mind, I reached out to a farmer I know to see if he had any hogs he was willing to sell.
“I just dropped one off at the processor this week. Do you want him?”
Yes!
So that is the good news. Pork will be here shortly.
The bad news is, these are more conventional hogs. They are farm raised, local, all that stuff. But they have a diet of corn, not a diet of produce like our hogs here on this farm. That means the meat is going to be different that what we normally sell. They will be labeled under our farm name because we are buying them as live hogs going forward. I’m not sure how I’ll label them. Ninja Cow #2? Ninja Cow Emergency Backup Meat? I don’t know. I’ll come up with something so you can tell them apart. I’ll be able to tell them apart just looking at them.
Because they are more conventionally raised, we are going to just discount them from our normal prices to offset the difference in meat quality. That is probably more than you want to know but we don’t want two sets of items in the point of sale system. It would make checking out a nightmare. So we’ll just ring up pork chops and pork chops and put these new cuts down as on sale.
We are still working on producing more pork here. I found an old customer who purchased breeding stock from me a while back who is now breeding his own piglets. I just bought out his recent litter to give us more pigs going forward. I’m also working some other angles to get us back into higher production on pork here on our farm. In the meanwhile, we’ll bring in this other pork to fill some holes in the freezers till things level out.
As always, we are keeping you abreast and fully informed. I know some of you won’t want only our pork and I sincerely appreciate that, really. We are doing the best we can with what we have. If we have a price difference, and an availability difference, maybe some others will pick the lesser priced pork which will make our limited pork more available for those the choose it.