What’s your favorite farm task? Hands down, making wallows for the pigs on hot days. Watching them flop into the wallow with a grunt of satisfaction always makes me smile. I’m also “in the zone” when pressure washing, mowing, and turning compost with the tractor.
Greatest farm fail? It’s possible that I got the tractor stuck in the mud one evening while transporting a trailer of eight grumpy gilts, but I seem to have erased it from my memory -_- (thanks for getting us all un-stuck, Phelan!)
What’s your favorite Pigasus product? I’ve had a lot of pork chops in my life, but the ones from Pigasus are my favorites: excellent flavor, generously portioned, and fat-capped, they are truly so delicious you’ll gnaw on the bone afterwards, guaranteed. Now that we’re talking about it, I guess I’ll have to take a break from this interview to go thaw some pork chops for dinner…
Let’s talk food. How do you sustain yourself throughout the day? Any go-to snacks? I always have some sort of snack in my pocket for Second Breakfast. Oh, not everyone partakes in Second Breakfast? It’s between 10 and 10:30, when the animals are all fed but the humans have a long way to go until lunch.
What’s been your biggest learning about farming and food systems since working here? Learning more about cold storage has been eye-opening. If you want to produce pasture-based meat and eggs, it turns out you’ll need access to refrigeration and freezers to store all that product before it makes its way to restaurants or stores. It’s something that’s easy to forget about as a consumer, but actually a big part of the logistical gymnastics in producing food.