How our animals raised and fed
BEEF
Born and raised on pasture, our beef live their days grazing and frolicking in the warm sunshine! The calves are weaned from their mommies around 6 months and continue to have a sole diet of pasture or rangeland until they reach 1000lbs. Here on the irrigated pastures, they are rotationally grazed, moving them into fresh pasture about once a day.
Once they reach 1000 lbs, we continue to raise them on pasture and also start supplementing some barley into their diet of greens. Grass fed only beef can have a stronger flavor and be more on the lean side. By adding in the gmo free barley, it gives the beef a really good flavor as well as helping to marble the meat, making it flavorful and juicy.
PORK
Our pigs are born and raised on our farm. They start out on their mommy’s milk, of course, and within 2-3 weeks, they are starting to steal some of their mommy’s food. We feed our lactating sows crimped barley, extra milk from GRD, and alfalfa.
The piglets are weaned around 5-6 weeks, depending on how well they are growing and also the condition of the sow. Piglets are weaned right onto the same diet that their mommy had, other than they don’t get the same amount of alfalfa. It’s harder for piglets to digest the alfalfa, so we mainly stick to feeding the alfalfa to our adult pigs.
Once the piglets are 2-3 months old, they are big enough to respect an electric fence, and get moved out into the 1/2 acre pastures that we rotate our grower pigs through. That’s where they spend the rest of their days, being brought in morning and evening for the meals of crimped barley and milk.
Pigs are not like ruminants, who can grow just fine on strictly grasses. Pigs love to eat the grasses, weeds and roots in their pastures, but they would be in very poor health on greens alone. That’s why we add in dairy and barley.
Being in the dairy business, there is always extra milk, most of it being skimmed milk from cream making or buttermilk from butter making. A large part of our pigs diet is milk. Other than milk containing protein, fats and sugars, milk also contains lysine, which is a crucial nutrient for pigs to grow and be healthy. Nutrients from milk are much more bioavailable for pigs, rather than the synthetic ingredients used in a lot of grain mixes.
We use barley to feed our pigs for the three following reasons.
#1. Barley is a winter crop, which means it’s growing during the coolest months of the year. Weeds and bugs are not as prolific during the winter months so the barley doesn’t usually get sprayed with pesticides and herbicides, like a summer crop might.
#2. Barley is one crop that has not been GMO’d.
#3. Barley is lower is PUFAs. PUFAs (Poly Unsaturated Fatty Acids) are highly inflammatory. Ruminants are able to eat these, convert them and release them. Pigs are not able to do this. A pig eating a diet high in soy and corn, results in a pig who has a high PUFA content stored in their fat. When we eat a nice fatty strip of bacon, those PUFAs are then being absorbed by our bodies, and can wreck havoc on our overall health. Being that barley is lower in PUFAs we are now reducing the amount transferred from the pork when we eat it.
