Farmer Julia's Blog

Going from a 40 foot walk-in cooler to solar powered chest freezers has been a hell of an adjustment. My days of offal hoarding are behind me. Offal is the rather unfortunate name for the parts of the pig that don't usually make it on to your table.... organs, bones, heads, tails... all that good stuff. It's a real shame actually, because some of these things have the best flavour and the most nutrition but most of us have never even seen them, let alone know what to do with them. In another time, every part of the pig was...

We are expecting a bit of a piglet storm here with 5 litters expected in the next month or so. We had the first of the five early early Tuesday morning. First time mom "Guinness" farrowed (gave birth to) 10 perfect piglets which is a good number for a first litter. Summer farrowing sure is a lot less stressful than winter farrowing! The weather is warm and beautiful here now meaning I can pretty much let the sows do their thing without any help from me. In the winter, the piglets could easily freeze to death if I don't get them dried...

Following is a copy of the first newsletter we ever sent back on November 11th, 2011. Back then we were running a (totally illegal at the time) urban farm out of a yard on the west side of Vancouver. We've sure come a long way. I've just gotten off the phone with the new health inspector for our butcher shop who needs to me send him the many food safety plans we wrote for the last guy. He would have a heart attack if he read this newsletter. We certainly don't have a secret fridge of goodies tucked away around...