Red Wattle hogs are named for both their distinctive hair color, which also displays a beautiful iridescence in the sunlight, but also for the fleshy, non-functional appendages (wattles) hanging off their necks.

We selected this breed to raise at Terra Farma for a number of reasons:

•         They are well-suited to a pasture-based system due to their ability to forage, winter hardiness, and their hair color and skin pigmentation protects them from sunburn.
•         They produce decent size litters of 8-10 piglets and are typically excellent mothers.
•         Their meat is of superior quality; they are one of only four breeds of hog listed on Slow Food’s Ark of Taste
•         Red Wattle pigs are very rare, with estimates of only 2,000 breeding animals in the US. We feel good about doing our small part to save the breed, both by keeping a genetically diverse herd and by introducing consumers to the wonderful flavor of these animals.

We keep several sows (the term for a female pig of breeding age) and breed them on our farm so that all of the pigs that we raise spend their entire lives on our farm, from birth to slaughter. Like all of our animals, we treat them with respect and try our best to make their lives as natural and stress-free as possible. Our practices include rotations onto new pastures so they forage fresh grass and express their natural instinct to dig in the dirt, providing them shade during the summer as well as allowing them to dig wallows which we fill with water so they can take mud baths to cool off, and supplementing their foraging with a diverse diet of locally-milled feed, surplus fruits and vegetables, and any extra dairy produced by our cows and goats (this is their favorite!).

How to Buy

We sell pork by the “side,” which is half a pig, making that the minimum order. While this can be an intimidating prospect if you’ve never purchased farm-direct meat in this volume, but it’s actually an easy process and you get tremendous value by purchasing a whole (or half) animal. Your first step would be placing a deposit at our online store to reserve your pork and letting us know if you have any preferences for either a smaller or larger animal. Then, we arrange with a mobile slaughter operation to perform the on-farm slaughter and transportation of the carcasses to the butcher shop. Within a few days, the shop will call you directly to go over how you want your pork cut, prepared, and packaged. They are very patient and will walk you through the process step by step, you don’t need to be a “meat expert” to do this, you just have to know what you like to eat and how much of each cut you want per package (i.e. how thick do you like your pork chops and how many do you want packed together, or what flavor of bacon do you prefer and how much per package, etc.). When it’s all done they’ll give you another call for you to pick it up directly from their shop and you’ll pay them separately for their cut and wrap services. You will get an invoice (payable online) from us based on the hanging weight of the animal, plus the fee for the mobile slaughter unit. This averages about $500 per side, but can of course vary depending on the size of the pig.