Freedom through farming
Feeding our family—and yours
How it started
I’m Stephen. Mayra is my wife and this is our farm. We met in New York City during COVID and we both knew that we needed a change from masks, mandates and authoritarian control over our food supply. I am an RN and Mayra is a project manager. We decided that the next logical step after getting married was to figure out how to grow our own food given our expanding family and the fragile supply chain. In 2021 we bought the farm and since then we have been working with our family to make up for lost time to get it up and running. Farming was not meant to be our full time job; it was a way of life and a philosophy that we wanted to build our family around. Neither of us had a background in agriculture so learning was painstaking and often times expensive—but always worth the effort.
How it’s going
I started farrowing piglets towards the end of year one (our youngest daughter was born 3 days before the piglets arrived!). I had 3 litters of babies to castrate and wean after a winter of frozen water lines. I quickly learned that people buy piglets in the spring and there is a need for breeders. I also learned that some sows struggle in labor and the stress and complications can be awful to care for. We improved the barn and prepared more space to act as a maternity ward for the following winter. I spent so much time with breeding and farrowing that I missed the time to butcher the two hogs that were supposed to go in our freezer that first year. Year two, I turned them loose in the woodlot and this past fall I butchered them. The quality of the meat blew our minds and we decided to add pork for sale as well as butchering services.
The vision
Our goal is to move into farming full-time with breeding, butchering, smoking and pork sales providing the backbone of our operation. We also want to help you take the next step in your homestead operation if we can—eventually moving into education and instruction. Farming is a collaborative effort and we want to serve those in our area of New England with high quality pastured pork, healthy piglets and professional custom exempt butchering.