It's been a busy summer at the farm!

I haven’t had a lot of extra time to blog lately. The farm has been so busy and Meal & Market is coming along.

We have had A LOT of piglets born at the farm since May/June. Most of our Kunekunes have had piglets and those piglets are old enough to leave the farm. We are just waiting for our DNA verifications to come back from UC Davis and they are super backed up this year! We also bred our Gloucestershire Old Spot piglets to our Kunekune boar for an experimental meat pork grow out. We LOVE Kunekunes and their meat is incredible. The drawback to the Kunekune is also the thing that makes their pork so good and that is slow grow out. Kunekunes mature around 18 months to 2 years. The GOS grow out much faster and do extremely well on pasture grasses. Right now our GOS X piglets are around 3 weeks old and are larger than 6 week old kunekune piglets. The GOS X are already out on pasture and eating grasses. We are excited about this project along with our other pigs on the farm. Stay tuned for pork and piglet sales.

Summer is in full swing in Alabama! It has been a fairly mild summer, but this past week has made up for the nice temps. The 90s are here and so is the humidity. We have recently added 2 more barn fans for the animals and added a Stock tank pool for the humans 😉. Before we purchased the 8ft, 700 gallon stock tank, we were doing a lot of “creek sitting” in the afternoons to cool off. Wills Creek runs along the back of our property and is always flowing. It is perfect for cooling off and taking the dogs for a swim.

We are picking up around 1000 lbs of pure GOS Grass Fed Pork tomorrow from our USDA processor. After we get it sorted and to the freezers, we will post it up for sale next week. We will have local pick up only or delivery to Birmingham. Our Pork will be marketed under the name Rally Point Pork. RPP is David’s Pork venture that nods to his military days. Our other meats will still be marketed under the Red Boat Farm and Meal & Market brands. David has envisioned this pork business since the beginning of our farm venture.

We are beginning to start “talking” about building a home at the farm again. Life would be so much simpler if we lived onsite and dinner wouldn’t end up being at 9pm after a long day of farm chores. We’ll see how far we take it this time 😊. We have downgraded our design to more of a cabin instead of a larger historic 4 square design. Lumber is so expensive and we aren’t really going to need all of the space as the boys get older and move on with their lives. And we want to get in! We have some ideas, so we’ll move forward and see what happens. Stay tuned!!