We love our pigs. We want their lives to be as comfortable and as good as possible. We also want their eventual deaths to be comfortable and good.
Meat sold to a restaurant, store or farmer's market must be processed in a USDA facility. That means that the animal is brought to a slaughter house alive, and is killed, butchered and packaged there. We only use Animal Welfare Approved slaughterhouses, train our animals to load the trailer for transportation on their own (to reduce stress), and we unload our animals ourselves at the slaughter house to avoid rough treatment. Because our animals are born outside and live every day of their lives outside, any transportation and time spent in an unfamiliar surrounding is stressful to some degree. In an ideal world our animals would all be killed on-site while they are happily chomping away on forage, and can remain blissfully unaware. This is the lowest stress scenario for the animal.
We just did our first on-farm pig slaughter. The pig was hanging out in the woods, she died quickly and peacefully. The pig was gutted on site, transported to a butcher shop to be aged, and was butchered, and packaged there. NY state law allows meat slaughtered on-farm to be sold from the farm and through CSA. The pork we sell through our CSA will be from pigs processed this way....its an ideal world!
CSA sign-up forms coming very soon!
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Interesting, I did not know that law allows for CSA meats to be processed at the farm. That is great news indeed :) And yes, beautiful liver!
ReplyDeleteJohn
PS Any idea if the same is true in Massachusetts?