The Difference Between Conventional Pork and Next level Pasture Raised Pork

You are born in a pen, part of a litter of over ten pigs just like you.  You will fight for your share of milk from your mother.  This period will be over before you know it.

It will be the last time you will ever put effort into anything, including walking, digging, and playing with other pigs.  The only time you will ever do anything that requires you to work at all will be consuming the lowest quality food they can possibly get away with feeding you without you dying.

You will be confined in a tiny pen with at most a few feet to move around and if you’re like a lot of pigs you won’t be able to even turn around.  You will be surrounded by 100s of other pigs in the same situation but won’t be able to touch or play with any of them.

You could swear that the smell of manure and urine should kill you.  Don’t believe your lying snout, they have you doped up on so many antibiotics and vaccinated to everything under the sun.

But don’t worry about the sun you’ll never see that from the day you’re born till the day you die.

This is the life of over 97% of pigs raised in the United States.

This isn’t just bad for the pigs (it’s obviously absolutely terrible,) it makes the end product bad for humans in tons of ways.

On top of the pigs well being and our well being eating them, the taste reflects their diet.  Conventional pork chops are so tasteless and dry you need to cover them in something sweet to even be able to swallow.

Let’s try this exercise again with one of our pigs.

You are born maybe in a shelter but during the right time of year most likely outside in the woods or pasture.  If you are inside you can wander outside freely once you and your brothers and sisters pluck up the courage to start exploring.

You will stay with your mother for at least 6 weeks and sometimes a bit longer while you learn your way around the world.  When you do leave your mom you will be with your brothers and sisters on a trailer to go to a very similar farm.  The trailer will be clean and have bedding to make the trip as comfortable as possible.

You will arrive at next level ranch and start in a training pen.  You can dig as much as you want and find bugs and roots to eat whenever you feel like it.  There will be shade, sun, and clean water.  Once you learn a few hard lessons about the electric fence you will start moving to a new spot on the farm every week.

Every time you start running out of rocks to dig up and clean areas to eat and play, you will be moved to a new spot and start the adventure over again.  You’ll make a mess and eat tons of different plants, roots, and bugs.

You will be given Non-GMO Soy free food and eventually lots of apples and garden waste from the surrounding farms.

You’ll get rained on, you’ll lounge around under shade trees on hot summer afternoons, and you’ll sleep outside under the stars.

When your times up you’ll take one last trailer ride to a place where they respect you and prevent you from suffering as much as possible.

Seems just a little different, doesn’t it?

I have to acknowledge that we are a ranch and we do raise pigs for meat.  This is a farm not an animal sanctuary.  However it’s not hard to see that it’s much better for pigs to be raised where they can express their natural instincts and aren’t trapped inside a tiny cage for their entire life.

The difference in the product is unbelievable.  It’s insane that we have gotten to this point in our society where we happily drench our tough tasteless pork chops in apple sauce just to be able to get them down.

Maybe there’s a reason that they are bone dry and don’t taste like anything.

You barely need salt with our pork chops.  I have never found one that tastes as good as ours yet.  You can feel good knowing that the pork you’re eating lived a full life outside, free to explore and do whatever they please.

Every time you support farms like ours one less pig has to go through the first pigs experience and one more gets to live their life outside in the sun.