A Food Tech Call for Bacon…

Short answer:I can give you some insight as a farmer. We raise all naturally raised pastured pigs in the mountains of northern Vermont and deliver to individuals, stores and restaurants year round. There is no seasonality because that is what the market demands.

We spent years developing our techniques for raising pigs naturally outdoors even through our cold and snowy Vermont winters. In the warm months they rotationally graze on pasture along with our sheep, chickens, ducks and geese. In the dead of winter they live up on top of the snow pack in sacrificial paddocks which become gardens where we grow pumpkins and beets for them during the next warm season. That crop in turn is their next winter’s food. We buy no grain or commercial feed for our pigs – raising them primarily on pasture/hay and excess dairy.

It takes a lot of work to breed, farrow and raise them year round but that is a big part of our niche – it is what keeps our product on store shelves and restaurant menus. Seasonality is gone because that is what customers demand and because it gives us a competitive edge.

A big reason for the demand for foods out of season is that people no longer have pantries, cold cellars, can or dry food. They mostly live in cities or urban situations now and shop weekly or even more frequently. This change came with the availability of long distance transport and home freezers. To compete with this we must produce year round for our farm to be viable. We can’t just take off the winter and lose our store shelf space and our income for six or nine months of the year.

Farming is what pays our mortgage, taxes and other bills.There is another issue: a seasonal crop of hogs would have to be so huge over a short period of time that we would not be sustainable on our land. To do that we would have to dedicate far more land to a short season or go the way of CAFOs – not something that is at all appealing. I like seeing our livestock out enjoying the sunshine.

By working year round and spacing the deliveries out to weekly as customers want we gain a weekly income that makes our farm more stable so we’re there in the long run. Chefs and stores need long term stable suppliers so they know where their product is coming from.

Raw bacon, pork bellies, isn’t actually a prime cut. The high-on-the-hog sirloin, tenderloin, loin and upper shoulders are more in demand. However, we still sell out of bacon and hams every week. There are other cuts like back fat, bones, trotters, hocks, head, tail and organs that are a harder sell.

We work with the chefs to sell every pig nose-to-tail every week. A particular restaurant will feature hocks or tongue on their menu for several months. In turn for helping sell the low-on-the-hog they get priority access to high-on-the-hog cuts.

Our other way of selling the rest of the pig is that the good meat that doesn’t sell as cuts goes into our all natural sausages and smoked hot dogs. Each batch sells out months in advance – they’re that good.The hardest thing to sell is heads, back fat and bones. We use them in our own family cooking and work to educate consumers how to cook creatively.

I write about cooking low-on-the-hog on my blog and directly to buyers and chefs to help them better make use of every bit of the pig. As to “whole hog buying” it is only about 2% of our sales for full size pigs and ~11% for roasters (smaller whole hogs for events). Retail sales of cuts makes up about 2% of our sales and the other 85% is wholesale cuts to stores and restaurants.

We don’t sell a lot retail cuts because our farm is out of the way. It is inefficient for customers to drive to us for small orders. Better for them to buy at the store when they buy their other groceries. We are delighted to sell directly to individuals through our CSA but the reality is most of our weekly sales are wholesale to stores and restaurants with standing orders.

As to technology, we use the web, desktop publishing techniques (keeps down the inventory of print materials) and then email for communicating with our regular buyers and with new customers. We don’t have fax and telephone is a minority of our communications. Email is just so easy – its asynchronous. 

Our biggest piece of technology is we’re building our own USDA/State inspected state of the art on-farm meat processing facility that will give us control from breeding to butchering all the way to delivery. You can read about that here:http://SugarMtnFarm.com/butchershopThat was the short answer from a pig farmer in the field. It was longer than I meant to go. I hope it helps with your questions. I’ll email you the long answer rather than taking up more space in comments.

Cheers,
Walter Jeffries, Sugar Mountain Farm in the mountains of Vermont