Last month, we sent a few of our pigs off on a working holiday. A friend of ours in Castlemaine (Joel Meadows, co-founder of Yimby Compost and Permaculture designer) asked to borrow a few pigs to help turn over some new garden beds at his place. This is the perfect job for free range pigs with their strong, rootling snouts, diverse diets, and ready production of plentiful rich manure. It sounded like a win-win to us as we were getting a bit crowded back home with all the August piglets growing fast, so we packed them off for a few weeks of adventure and fine dining on the best food scraps Castlemaine has to offer. We’ll pick them up once they get the job done, and if it works out we might look at setting up some similar arrangements in the future.
Meanwhile back at the farm, things are running pretty smoothly. We’ve got more pork available at the moment after the baby boom so we’ve started supplying an additional two restaurants in Castlemaine: Mrs Finch, a farm-to-table, nose-to-tail joint making the most of every part of our pigs, and Table Bistro, an established favourite in the area serving up reliably delicious top-shelf dinners. Since we’ve been spending more hours in the boning room lately we thought we’d give you a peek into an essential component of the Pig and Earth ecosystem: the butchering.
We butcher all our meat ourselves at the Jonai Farms boning room down the road from our farm. For three days a month, we rent this purpose-built space that was created in 2013 as a community initiative for local farmers to be able to process their own animals.
The boning room was built both in response to a lack of skilled butchers in Central Victoria, and as a concrete way to reduce food miles and build community resilience. Several other small-scale farmers in the neighbourhood rent the space on other days of the month, and over the years there’s been plenty of reciprocal relationships formed where one farmer helps out another during a busy butchering week. It consists of a 20 foot shipping container carefully constructed from reclaimed and recycled materials hosting a cool-room, butchers blocks, a bandsaw, the cryovac and labelling machines, and plenty of well-tended and sharpened knives. The thoughtfully considered design of this small space means up to five people can work in tandem together breaking down carcasses, packing, labelling and boxing up delicious cuts of meat, swapping butchering skills and knowledge, and catching up on the news of the town while we’re at it.
Over the three days we break down around eight pigs and six lambs into the variety of cuts our CSA and market customers enjoy each month. In months where we process beef we book the boning room for extra days to take on that mammoth task. Every consumable part of the animals gets used including the hocks which are smoked as we work, the bones which are used for stock, and the ears which are dried for dog treats. Anything that truly can’t be used gets composted in an on-site biodigester and returned to the soil.
Doing all our butchering ourselves means we’re able to keep costs as low as possible, which helps make our business viable and our meat affordable. It also means we get an immediate, direct feedback loop of how our animals are doing on the farm. Changes in feed, for example, are immediately apparent in the carcass of the animals and we can quickly make adjustments to their ration if we notice any room for improvement in composition or texture of the pork.
The most important reason we made the leap several years ago to take on our own butchery is because it’s deeply satisfying work; this is the harvest season of a livestock farmer’s calendar. All those days outside in the weather tending to our livestock, followed by three long days of chopping and processing, culminate in a full coolroom of tubs brimming with carefully butchered, packaged and labelled meat cuts, ready to go out into the homes and onto the dinner tables of our community.
If you’d like to get your hands on some regularly, sign up for our CSA for a monthly delivery.
