Here at BOTL Farm, we post pictures on social media of our farm that are relatively real-time and not AI-generated. Earlier this month we were at Tree House Brewery/Orchard in Woodstock, CT (who now sells our Soppressata!!!) and the farmer there asked us about a picture we had posted on social media. It was early May and he thought the picture must have been from last year, since the grass was so tall (>2 ft) and lush. He demanded to see photos on our phone and didn’t take us at our word that the photo was taken the week before. What a jerk (actually, he’s very nice, you should stop by Tree House, buy some Soppressata, and say hi). Anyways, we were able to produce photographic documentation to satisfy his dubiousness regarding our grazing situation. We’re growing grass like pros. Note that we cannot successfully grow any plants besides grasses, legumes, sedges, and rushes. But, we grow so much grass that people have trouble believing it. 
This wasn’t always the case. Growing this much grass, especially this early in the season, is a direct result of the ecological and environmental benefits of intensively managed rotational grazing (moving animals to new grass to simulate grazing patterns of undomesticated animals). Grazing animals for the win!

Have you ever, like, really thought about where all the different pork cuts come from on a pig? If you’re eating sausage, what does that really mean? Can you get babyback ribs and bone-in pork chops from the same pig? Where is cottage bacon from? Is the Boston Butt really from … ? It’s wild out there. 

As serious pig farmers, we’re totes familiar with different cuts and cut lists but we still sometimes struggle with overall yield. That is, if we take 6 pigs in and they’re each ~250 lb live, how much of cut X will we get from the group? The hardest part is asking each other questions like, “what do we do with the loins?” 

• “Do we have enough pork chops for market season?” [answer: ???]
• “Should we make loin roasts instead?” [answer: no. No one likes pork loin roasts]
• “Canadian bacon?” [answer: no, we just got hundreds of pounds from the last batch of pigs] 
• “Save the babyback ribs and cut the rest for future Soppressata?” [answer: yes]

This month we are trying to put aside enough pork so that we can make another batch of our nearly world-famous (okay, at least New-England famous) Soppressata. We checked our pig sizes, our pig numbers, our cut lists, the stars, the moon, and made a decision. Unfortunately, estimating overall yield is still hard; we’re about 120 lbs short of what we need.

For now, we’ve safely tucked the future-Soppressata-pork into our favorite commercial cold storage facility where it’ll wait until we can make up the remainder, hopefully from some of the pigs going in June.  

One of the reasons that we are drawn to farming is that we love food. Whether it’s growing it, cooking it, eating it, and making sausage out of it, we’re in. When we were young and foolish, the only breakfast sausage we cared about had maple in it or was maple flavored. Now that we’re old and serious, we’ve started to appreciate a traditional breakfast sausage (without maple!) that’s flavored with sage, thyme, and salt. 

We started recipe-testing a breakfast sausage this month and tweaked several batches until we had something that’s uniquely delicious. Also, we’ve eaten A LOT of breakfast sausage this month. Similar to our other farmer-made sausages, this one is fatty, salty, and has the highestt-quality, simple ingredients. We used our new patty-making equipment to batch out packages of six breakfast patties each, totaling around 1 lb. Many thanks to our brother/brother-in-law Eric for testing a bunch of sausage with us and helping out at more than one commercial kitchen processing day to get these put together!

When we talk shop with other farmers, we sometimes discuss working ‘in’ your farm vs. working ‘on’ your farm business. This can also be framed as ‘daily operations’ vs. ‘systems building.’ Many small farmers mostly focus on daily operations, but one of us really likes to build systems and we both, of course, love to have a good plan. 

This month we spent some time building a new system for online animal feed orders and we’re hoping ya’ll will use it regularly and, perhaps, grow to love it. Or hate it. It certainly isn’t perfect, but hopefully it brings clarity to which items we try to stock vs. things that need to be pre-ordered. We’d like all (most?) of our feed customers to use it as it helps us organize our orders and stocking.

On farm store: Tuesdays noon – 2pm, Saturdays 1 – 3pm. Pre-order [We’re excited to show you our new glass front freezer! Thanks, FACT for the grant support!]

On farm self pickup: Everyday 8:30am – 8pm. Pre-order only

Assawaga farm market: Every Saturday from 9am to noon starting May 25 until the weekend before Thanksgiving. We’re there (mostly) every other week. Dates we’ll be there in June: June 01, June 15, June 29. Pre-order 

Sturbridge Farmers Market: Every Sunday from 9am to 1pm starting June 02 until October 13. NEW THIS YEAR we will be at Sturbridge every Sunday! Dates we’ll be there in June: June 02, June 09, June 16, June 23, June 30. Pre-order

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Page Last Updated on 2025-02-16