Back-to-basics innovation: How two former vegetarians revived a 5,000-year-old pig breed in the hills of Platte County
First comes an unexpected rustling of leaves, followed by soft groaning and the patter of dozens of unseen hoofed feet hitting the Platte County earth. A stampede of 30 pubescent Meishan piglets darts out of a wooded location at the base of a rolling hill covered in native plants, vegetables and organic maize.
Meishan pigs, Odd Bird Farm
“They look like elephants,” joked Molly Diven, who runs Odd Bird Farm along with her fiancé, Jonathan Kemmerer– for sustainable farming is driving innovation within the fields and pastureland of Weston, Missouri.
“We enjoy to encourage people to reevaluate what normal is,” she included.
The 22-acre farm– with a few of the greatest elevation in the county, abundant with deep loess soils and isolated from runoff contamination– is the ideal setting for Kemmerer’s against-the-grain method: antibiotic- and hormone-free, non-GMO, sustainably raised Meishan pork, he said.
About 100 pigs– descendants from four Meishan piglets and two bred sows Kemmerer purchased in June 2018 from a breed preservationist in Tennessee– grace the land, which includes a small natural vineyard, as well as all the corn, alfalfa, acorns and yummy foraging plants needed to feed the heritage hog breed in the self-contained environment.
Click to learn more about Odd Bird Farm, which boasts meat included at such dining establishments as Tannin Red wine Bar & & Kitchen, the Antler Room, Dining Establishment at 1900, Freshwater and Noah’s Cupboard.
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Meat the neighbors As adorable as the 5,000-year-old type of Chinese pigs may be– with their long snouts and elephant-like floppy ears– they’re a product, Kemmerer said of the severe reality that regardless of their uncommon look and soft temperaments, the animals aren’t pets or toys.
Jonathan Kemmerer, Odd Bird Farm
Click to find out more about Meishan pigs.
And they couldn’t produce a more different meat than their traditional oinking equivalents, which in contemporary times are raised most often on agriculture that leech taste, texture and character from the meat, Kemmerer said.
“There’s a reason why there was that marketing project of the ’90s: ‘Pork, the other breast meat,'” he stated.” [Farmers] figured out how to get pigs to grow actually, really quickly. As an outcome, you end up with this very lean, tight, flavorless white meat.”
Mieshan pigs, by contrast, use an option– a pointer of centuries-old quality enabled by a renewed interest in ethical and sustainable procedures rather than convenience, Kemmerer said.
“They are naturally inclined to produce this extremely red, extremely steaky, marbled meat,” he added, detailing distinctions rooted in the lardier animals’ slower development rate– a crucial reason traditional farmers have refused to raise Mieshan pigs and one aspect that led to Odd Bird Farm’s status as house to the second-most genetically varied herd beyond China.
The effect for Kemmerer and Diven’s farm: more powerful, more resistant genes, bigger litters and a breed that can thrive on a diet of just 20 percent grain– with the supplement of Odd Bird Farm’s on-site grazing greenery and byproducts from such fellow organisations as Crane Brewing and Ibis Pastry shop– rather than 100 percent grain in lots of business operations.
Lowered dependence on farm equipment for harvest is an additional advantage of Kemmerer’s throwback processes, he said.
“There’s in fact a method called ‘hogging down,’ which was really commonly done in the early 1900s in the Midwest where you grow a stand of corn and after that you just send out the shovel it in there,” Kemmerer said, also referencing a French farming guide published in the 1980s. “If you have an animal that’s capable, why invest all the money and time harvesting and processing, saving and feeding back to an animal that can just go out there and take care of itself?”
Click to explore Odd Bird Farm’s meat products, which are readily available for regional pickup or delivery, and at the Overland Park Farmer’s Market.
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