The Day We Put the Phones Down

We roasted a hog on the farm on September 7.

The animal came off this place. It ate what grows here, it was raised here, and it was cooked on the same ground it was raised on. There is no supply chain in that sentence. That matters to me more every year.

A sow and her litter in the barn, two weeks before the roast. This is where it starts.

The prep is the point

A roast like this is not a meal you assemble in an hour. It starts the day before and it takes more than one set of hands, which is exactly why it works.

Somebody has to get the pit ready. Somebody has to manage the fire and keep it steady for hours. Somebody has to be watching the temperature when everyone else has wandered off. The work spreads out across the family by itself. Nobody assigns it.

That is the part I would not have predicted when we started doing this. The cooking is slow enough that it forces people to stay. You cannot drop in for twenty minutes and call it a visit. If you are here, you are here for the day.

What happened while the hog cooked

The kids and grandkids played ball in the field for most of the afternoon.

I got into a water gun fight with my son and my granddaughters. I lost. I am not going to pretend otherwise, and I would do it again next weekend.

Nobody was on a screen. That was not a rule anybody announced, and it would not have worked if it had been. It happened because there was a fire to watch, food coming, kids to chase, and a reason to be outside for several hours.

I spend my working life in fifteen-minute increments. Patients, charts, calls, decisions. September 7 was not divided into fifteen-minute increments. It was one long block of day, and I was present for all of it.

Then we ate

This was one of our younger Meishans. Live weight 126.7 pounds, hanging weight 69.6. That is a dressing percentage just under 55, better than either of the two larger hogs we processed in June.

We started at eight in the morning. The hog cooked about five and a half hours, and we ate at three.

Five families feasted off that one animal, and there was plenty to take home afterward.

The pork was worth the day it took.

Why we keep doing this

The farm exists so that the people I care about have a reason to be in the same place at the same time, doing something with their hands.

The pork is real and the economics are real, and I have written about both. But if the only thing this place produced was days like September 7, I would still keep the pigs.

We will do it again. Next time we will invite close friends.

If you want a day like this

It starts with a pig.

We sell Meishan feeders to people who want to raise their own. $250 for pigs under twelve weeks. The litter born August 24 will be weaned and ready to go home the third week of October, and the list is open now.

You do not need eighty-five acres to do this. You need a pen, a water source, feed, and somewhere to cook when the time comes. We are happy to talk through what it takes before you commit to an animal.

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