By Emily Buehler, Weaver Street Market Website Coordinator; Photos by Stacey Sprenz
Last spring, we took a field trip to several of our produce and meat suppliers. We gathered at the ECO-HUB in Durham, where we toured the offices and storage areas of Eastern Carolina Organics (ECO) and Firsthand Foods. Then we drove two hours east to Rose Hill, to tour two organic produce farms that sell through ECO: Cottle Organics and Uncle Henry’s Organics, who supply us with berries, greens, muscadine grapes, and more. After lunch, we toured Wallace Farms, who sells pork via Firsthand Foods. This is the last in a series of posts about the trip. Read part one here.
David and Melissa Wallace and their son, Darren, met us as we pulled into the driveway at Wallace Farms in Duplin County. Surrounded by trees, the farm was a shady respite after the sunny, open fields we’d driven past. The Wallaces have been raising hogs on their small family farm since 2012, but the farm has been in the family for five generations, and David’s Irish immigrant ancestors included farmers.
The Wallaces walked us over to the nearest pens, where giant sows lay in the shade of their houses, surrounded by wriggling piglets. Then we headed over to a shed that housed the still-pregnant sows. Melissa told us that she helps when the kitten-size piglets are born. The most live piglets she’s ever seen born was 16; she had to foster some of them onto other mothers, or there wouldn’t have been enough room for them all to get milk. On the first day, there is a lot of squealing, as the piglets jockey to get the milking spot they want, but once the pecking order is settled, things calm down. A piglet’s size doubles in three days.
As part of their Animal Welfare Approval (AWA) certification, required for all NC hog growers who partner with Firsthand Foods, the Wallaces provide the mother pigs with huts for shelter. The winter huts include heat lamps and door flaps to keep out the cold. All the huts have a “pig rail”—a rail that gives the piglets a place to get away from their mother, who might accidentally crush them when she lies down. Piglets stay with their mothers for eight weeks. The AWA standards include other aspects of animal husbandry and welfare, record-keeping, pasture-management, and feeding and nutrition programs, with a goal of raising animals humanely, on pasture, without feeding antibiotics or animal by-products, or using added hormones.
In larger pens under the trees, droves of older piglets run in packs, trotting out to see us and then darting away. And out in the fields, which we saw from a trailer pulled by tractor, the larger pigs roamed in pastures. A common misconception is that pigs should be “grass fed.” Pigs are not ruminants like cows; grass is never the major part of their diet. The hogs are raised outdoors in their natural habitat of woods and pasture, and given supplemental feed.
In order to have a supply of non-GMO feed, the Wallaces started growing the corn themselves. They save 20,000 bushels of the harvest for themselves and sell the rest. They also grow soybeans and, with help from grants, invested in a soybean crusher that roasts the beans before pressing the oil from them. Altogether, they farm 700 acres. They buy minerals to supplement the corn and soybeans. The Wallaces do not add antibiotics to their pigs’ feed. Confinement operations often do because the pigs are kept in such close quarters, but the Wallaces have never needed antibiotics. The piglets get antibodies from their mothers’ milk, and they live in a natural and healthy environment.
David and Melissa both grew up on farms. They used to focus on growing row crops and commodity crops like wheat and corn. For nineteen years, they didn’t raise hogs because of all the large hog operations surrounding their farm, but they started again and now partner with Firsthand Foods. (Update: Sam told us that The Pig and Lady Edison both buy pork from the Wallaces as well.) They’re both passionate about farming and enjoy trying new methods and continually seeking to improve their operation.