who wants breakfast?

Steve Ash

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Michigan
I have long had a fondness for hogs, we used to finish out 1200 per year, a far cry from what what is todays norm, but back in the day we were considered a large hog farm. We also raised 600 head of cattle a year, then went into the cow/calf side of things.

I left the family farm in 1989, I was to be the fifth generation farmer, but with drought and then floods I couldn't take the poverty anymore and decided to leave the family farm and become a building contractor.

....problem is....I never really wanted to leave the family farm.....raising a family and hoping to give them a chance at a good life was the root of my leaving......so, now that my kids are raised and doing well, I have this gnawing in the back of my head to get back to my roots, where I was comfortable, where I felt a closeness with who I really am......

I know I can never return to what once was, but I can still hang on to my past....my roots. It is part of the reason to keep 30 acres and grow crops, part of the reason I built a gambrel barn......the reason I bought the 3020 John Deere.......the reason I help dad restore all these tractors, it is who we are and what we are.

So......a very long story short, I got a few hogs today to raise for meat.....they go along with the chickens I been raising for eggs.


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Bacon and eggs will be served every Saturday morning with hot coffee.....now the wife wants me to get a few steers.

Who wants to come over for breakfast?
 
Good to see you heading back in a direction you want to go. Farming definitely seems to get in peoples' blood, and it sounds like you've got it bigtime. Congrats on the new hogs.

LOML would never make it as a farmer's wife, though. :rolleyes: All the animals would have names, and butchering them would be out of the question. I, on the other hand, have no qualms about raising animals for food. I like to eat red meat just to remind myself where I am on the food chain. :D
 
Steve.......With us it's pork sausage.....Sunday brunch.......sausage, eggs (either an omelet or scrambled with peppers, onions, sausage and cheese), homemade biscuits and gravy, and potatoes.

Sunday is the one day a week that we have a "real farm" breakfast.

I can remember sitting down to the breakfast table at my maternal grandparents farm.....a platter of eggs.....a platter of sausage or bacon......a huge bowl of milk gravy.......a platter of biscuits........Everything served "family" style. Of course, milk from the spring house (it saved on the cost of ice in the summer), fresh churned butter for you biscuits.

BTW....the chickens end up paying the ultimate sacrifice too! Fried....thank you.
 
Nice looking pigs Steve.

I think its great to see more people getting back to raising their own food.

As for the pigs themselves, I think they have a very bad, uncalled for reputation. First off, if given the environment they prefer to be, very, very clean. They also have incredible ability at smell and can detect good and bad food,and will go for the good food first. But the last thing is their intelligence. They are incredibly smart animals.

Growing up we had one named Mr Bacon. What a great pig, though he thought he was a dog. He would play with us kids, wait for us to get on and off the school bus,and even went down the slide...until one day his size got to be too big for the flimsy steel slide and he folded it in half.:rofl::rofl::rofl:
I think it was not too long after that Mr Bacon "ran away", but it was not too bad, shortly after he ran away we suddenly had in influx of bacon in the freezer.
 
LOML would never make it as a farmer's wife, though. :rolleyes: All the animals would have names, and butchering them would be out of the question. I, on the other hand, have no qualms about raising animals for food. I like to eat red meat just to remind myself where I am on the food chain. :D

Vaughn, I have often heard that myself, the line being "If I meet it, I can't eat it", but that is not as true as it sounds. With every animal, it gets easier and easier and after a bit of time you forget that the bacon was Mr Bacon and its just bacon.

Then there is the taste. There is a HUGE difference in pork, beef, lamb and chicken that you have raised yourself (or at least know were raised right). I eat off-the-shelf-grocery-store meat myself, so I am not afraid of what is in the beef, lamb and chicken, but I do wish they would clean up the beef and poultry business some. The difference between the two is quite profound.

As for the names, I take great pride in naming my animals cutsie names like this just to remind myself of what they are on this planet for. :thumb:

Ribeye: Beef
Tenderloin: Beef
Big Mac: Beef
Lassie: Pork
Lambchops: Lamb
Mr Bacon: Pork
 
Travis, I grew up around fresh butchered meat, even helped slaughter hogs as a kid, so I can deal with it easily. My city slicker wife is a different story, though. For starters, she's not a vegetarian, but about the only meat she really likes is bacon. (She says ham and pork chops and pork roast etc. are "too fatty".) :rolleyes: She also doesn't really like beef, and what little beef she eats had better be cooked within an inch of its life. When we first started dating, I took her to a nice steakhouse. She did order the fillet mignon, but when she told the waiter she wanted it "well done" I thought he was going to have a hemorrhage. :rofl: She'll eat chicken, but since it's about the only meat she eats regularly, she gets tired of it. Oh, and seafood is out of the question. She for sure won't eat it, and she won't even let me cook it in the house...says it stinks the place up too much. :bang:

That said, I still wouldn't trade her in. ;) She puts up with me, after all.
 
We have raised a few hogs for slaughter. Wife even showed a champion at the county fair once. One year when the fall temps stayed very hot we put off slaughtering later and later......and later. What were supposed to be about 150 pounders ended up over 300 lbs at killing time. Cost us a fortune to feed them out in the hot weather. But those pork chops covered a dinner plate and were the best we ever had.
Good luck with the hog business. Ifn' we're ever in yer part of the country, count on feeding us breakfast.
Same here, Casa Fusco is always open.
 
"A cat will look down to a man. A dog will look up to a man. But a pig will look you straight in the eye and see his equal."
Winston Spencer Churchill

Nice looking beasts Steve.
 
So I'm curious... in this day of huge hog/chicken/steer operations... how easy is it to find an abattoir/butcher willing to process just one hog for you?

...art
 
Since we're throwing out quotes....

"The difference between 'involvement' and 'commitment' is like an eggs-and-ham breakfast: the chicken was 'involved' - the pig was 'committed'."

I, too, have friends that never got around to slaughtering because they made the mistake of naming their.... uh... pets.
 
So I'm curious... in this day of huge hog/chicken/steer operations... how easy is it to find an abattoir/butcher willing to process just one hog for you?

...art

I can't speak for Steve's area but where I am here in Maine, its kind of easy. Now I say that, but it really depends on the final product. Let me explain.

If I just want to take one of my beef cows and have him slaughtered for my own use, its as easy as going over to the next town, having Jason's Slaughterhouse butcher and wrap him for 25 cents a pound. It doesn't matter if its only one cow, ten sheep, or two pigs, five sheep and a goat. They will gladly do any of it. The thing is though,that slaughterhouse is not Maine Certified, so they can only cut up meat that you raised and meat you will eat. All meat packages will be stamped "Not for sale".

If I want to sell the meat from that cow, but stay within the state of Maine I can go to a Maine Certified Slaughterhouse. That slaughterhouse has a stamp that allows the meat to be sold, but only to inhabitants of the state of Maine. This will cost me about 30 cents a pound, and of course I have only a few slaughterhouses in the state in which I can go (about a dozen).

If I want to sell the meat outside the state of Maine, that requires a US Dept of Agriculture stamp which means an USDA Inspector has to be on site and inspect every carcass. That is expensive so only the biggest slaughterhouses do that. In my case the closest one, and the one we sell our calves, and culled cows to, is in Pennsylvania...quite a hike from Maine that's for sure. I don't know the price of that because its just unfeasible for me to even think of getting a USDA stamp for any of my meat.

Now there is a huge loophole we can go through in case you were determined to get my beef and still do it legally. Its called Locker Beef. What I do get a down payment from you and agree to sell you a quarter, half or full cow and figure out what you want for cuts. I then bring the cow to the slaughterhouse and a hanging weight is determined. The slaughterhouse tells me the weight, and I in turn tell you. You then go to the slaughterhouse and pick up the meat all pre-cut in the packages that you asked for. You pay the slaughterhouse for the meat and then square up with me.

Its all legal because what you are doing is really buying the live cow off me and having the animal slaughtered. The USDA figures since you are buying a live animal, you know what you are getting and thus do not need inspected meat.

I hope I am explaining all this well enough. Its kind of easy to understand, but hard to put into typed words. For the most part its all done to ensure that you get meat that is fit for safe consumption.
 
Great looking hogs Steve!:thumb:

Art, why not just DIY the slaughter, it is not a hard thing to do.:dunno:

Again, I can't answer for Steve, but for me its mostly a time thing. What I have found that works,and works quite well is where I avoid the kill-fee by killing my own animal and then quartering the cow, sheep, pig, etc into quarters and bringing it to the slaughterhouse. My butcher understands this and is willing to do this.

This is a big deal for me, because an animal that is killed without stress tastes better. An animal that has been taken for a drive down the road at 50 mph is pretty stressed when it gets to the slaughterhouse and it has hormones that get in the meat. This makes them tougher, or what is known as "dark cutters". The meat is literally riddled with stress hormones.

Killing at home prevents this, as well as letting me avoid a small kill-fee for putting down the animal, as well as the transportation charge. Still my butcher knows the best way to cut good quality steaks and loves the fact that the nasty, hard work (killing, skinning,quartering) is already done for him. It works for both of us I guess.
 
Art, why not just DIY the slaughter, it is not a hard thing to do.:dunno:

It ain't the killing I was thinking about Stu. Are you going to cut pork chops on Big Blue (your bandsaw)? I didn't think so. So how are you going to process the carcass?

Thanks Travis for the interesting explanation. All of that makes perfect sense.
 
I'm jealous.

My family has it's root in farming, and I was the first generation raised off of one. But it's not what I ever wanted. I've always harbored a serious amount of jealousy and respect for the members of my extended family that were still able to make a living on farms. I've always been attracted to the lifesyle and can totally understand where this is coming from..

Good luck the bacon and eggs ....
 
My wife is youngest of 10. When everyone still had kids at home Thanksgiving was hamburger and pork weekend, Christmas was beef cuts. Over Thanksgiving we usually ground up 1,000 pounds of hamburger and did at least 10 pigs. Don't really miss those days. Nothing like filleting a pigs head for headcheese and catching the blood for bloodsausage. yuk.
 
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