A Day in the Life of a Pig Farmer in New York #farm

There's kids today now that don't even know farming is a job because it's not being taught anymore. How did you start tonight? I mean tell me you were in New York City or where? What do you want a snack? You want a snack? I would say 40 percent of my time is spent educating the public and helping the public to find what they're looking for. Come on guys. I wanted to get back into local farming mainly because the values that stand behind it. His name is Kevin. Yes Kevin Bacon right here. You should kind of know where your meat's coming from and don't just take a label and trust the label because some of those labels are bought and paid for. Recently I watched a documentary called No Farmers No Food. Excellent documentary, highly recommended. Shocking subject matter. Why is that? It seems there is a war against farmers which means we are in trouble when it comes to food. So today I came here to a local farm. I'm gonna have a chat with Nate. Great dude. He really does a great job with his farm. Excellent product. He has donkeys as well. I will get back to these guys later. I want to have a chat with him and see how he's doing. What are the challenges that he's facing because again if we have no farmers we have no food. Let's do it. All family farm and we run purebred Berkshires and we also have Misty's mini donkeys here that we just got into because obviously farms when they start out they have one niche and then obviously they go from one niche and they add other businesses to the farm to obviously keep the farm up and running. But right now all I'm going to do is I'm going to start doing chores and we're going to start feeding the feeder pigs and feeder pigs are basically the ones that we're going to be sending to market later on this year. Depending on how bad the barn is like this morning this isn't bad. I mean you got a couple areas that they go to the bathroom in then they obviously had some urine. Our barn's really not that bad this morning but some of your bigger farms they basically have pits. So underneath here would be like a six foot pit so as the animals go to the bathroom everything falls into the pit. Now the other thing is if you don't go down there and clean those out then obviously the animals will start getting affected by the methane, the urine fumes. As you can see our urine as it pools down here we just push it out here and it gets mixed right back in because it's not gonna it's not gonna affect the soil or the ground. Now your manure obviously that gets transported once a month and we bring that down to a local farm and that basically helps with the their produce and their lavender fields and all that. And right now our feeders we we feed them like a 16 percent protein grain. A lot of people are like oh why aren't they on the grassy field? You can put them on a grassy field and they're going to eat and they're going to root it up but your grassy field is going to look like that sacrifice lot. You can rotate them on pasture if you have the land which I can get into that that's a challenge for local farms. Land is basically being sold to developers obviously especially here in New York. If I'm to buy agricultural land for a farm it's anywhere between three three thousand to about six thousand dollars an acre for agricultural land. Then you got a developer coming in from Manhattan and he's offering you 25 to 30 thousand dollars an acre. So as you can tell the system's pretty screwed up because you're not going to get farmers to be able to buy especially in my age bracket. So that's probably one of the biggest major challenges in actual local farming in New York. Come on guys come on hey hey hey come on guys all right back up and right now I'm actually driving out to Ohio to pick up our purebreds. I'm getting five more of them hopefully they're going to actually start having piglets here by the end of the year and then what we can do is we can we can actually start producing our own Berkshires here at our farm. Which that will save a hectic cost. The girls are known as jennies and the jennies will be our breeders. This is Miss Hayley. Say hi Miss Hayley. So what we're going to do is we'll breed them and our jack is over on the other side. As we have the the yearlings we'll end up selling them eventually to other farmers. What do you want a snack? You want a snack? You get what you're looking for? A little snacky snack? They only need a lot roughly this size. Small acreage. You're gonna get two. A lot of people think they'll come in and buy one. They're very sociable animals and they need someone to basically play with and lay with and kind of talk to right Hayley? It seems they like apples right? You do? You only get one yearling out of one donkey which means they'll only have one baby. It's a life commitment. These aren't dogs where they only last like 10 years. It's basically you're investing in these animals. They'll be alive for probably 30 years. These guys are gonna stay around for 30 years. Holy cow. Yeah so these guys will be up here for 30 years with us and basically if they're around longer than me guess what? My family gets to inherit them. How did you start Nate? I mean you told me you were in New York City or where? Yeah so my background is basically I was born and raised in Maine. You know my family was kind of broken up when I was a teenager. I had a best friend up there. They basically adopted me. They have a pretty big farm up in Maine. They run beef cattle. They run Berkshires like I do down here. Served in the Marines for eight years. I got out and I became a New York City fireman. I moved up here up to Sullivan County New York. I still continue to work for New York City Fire. I wanted to get back into local farming mainly because the values that stand behind it. I noticed that there's a problem within the food industry in the U.S. right now. The animals that are being utilized for food consumption in the U.S. were not being treated correctly. So I wanted to get started in farming. So what can I do here in New York on small acreage? And my family obviously in Maine they did Berks. So I said you know what? Listen I'm going to look into Berks. I guess they're hungry. Yes yes exactly. They definitely let you know when they're hungry. It's a big investment. You're going to take a lot out of your own pocket to get started. Everything here has been started by ourselves. And then we got a couple grants. I have to give the shout out to Homegrown for Heroes. The Veteran Fellowship Fund. It's a bunch of veterans across the United States that are now starting in my age bracket in local farming. So this is the other challenge of local farming. We're judged at the same standard as these factory farms. Dude I don't even have an administrator to handle my emails, my financial records, my ordering of my feed. It's me. I'm the mechanic. I'm the veterinarian. I'm the electrician. I'm the contractor. I'm the farmer. I mean the list goes on. Local farmers they have to do all this stuff themselves because they can't afford to have those people come in and take care of it. Our livestock up here. We just got this boar which is Mr. Kevin Bacon. His name is Kevin. Yes Kevin Bacon right here. Our customers on Facebook we gave them about four or five names to vote on and they were the ones that picked up on Kevin Bacon and picked that name. Her name is Whiteface. That's Whiteface. This is Ducky. That's Daisy. Come on Daisy. Come on. Come here. Come here. Hi. Good morning. Good morning. Oh are you all done Whiteface? Are you all done? You're all all done. How do you deal if they turn on you? How do I deal if they turn on me? This right here. That's how you deal with it. People trying to tell me that I shouldn't carry a gun. Well why are you carrying a gun up here walking around your own property? Well that's because I have a 500 pound boar sitting in here with tusks that can rip my chest open like a play. They still are animals so the point is is you never know. They could still turn on you no matter what. What are you doing? What are you guys doing? Oh my gosh Whiteface you're so heavy. What are you doing? About the documentary the thing that I found the most shocking and concerning I think it's the fact that there are a lot of farmers who are taking their life. They're committing suicide because they cannot handle the situation they're in which is really tragic no farmers no food. Suicide rate is very high in reference to farmers because the amount of labor that they do and the work that they put into their farms they're not the finances are not equal to what they're working. They're working night and day and they're trying to support their families but as they're paying their bills instead of them looking at the computer and they're looking at their shotgun in the corner because they just they don't know how to handle it because they're losing everything or let's say their third or fourth or fifth generation farm and their family has done this farm for hundreds of years and now we're in the 21st century and that farm's going under now well their only answer in their head is suicide. It becomes more of a emotional thing and even with me running this small micro farm here in New York it's an emotional attachment you have to it to the animals to your family to your community and the thing is is if you don't succeed you feel like you failed all those people you failed your family you failed your community first time farms starting out fail within the first six years and they don't make a profit for six years yeah and you said you survived because you have another job yes we survive and we operate because of my second job and my wife's two jobs that she works that's how we pay the electric bill that's how we pay the mortgage that's how we pay all those things the farm does not pay for those things the farm right now five years later is now paying for itself that's farming 101 you will do everything this year for free and you may make an income next year maybe because farms now are having a hard time financially sustaining in today's economy and how we've been raised you know to go to walmart go and get all your stuff from these big things who cares how the animals are treated who cares how how much chemicals they're putting into things because i don't know about it i don't want to see it all i want to do is buy my stuff and get out right now this moment there's kids today now that don't even know farming is a job because it's not being taught anymore if we brought that back into our school systems we made it a financial job that can sustain and they can pay their bills and they can do farming and we educate them in farming you would have more people getting into that career and the funny part is if you got rid of all the factory farms and you local all your local farms were up and running in all 50 states you could supply the food chain and the clothing industry within your state if they actually had local farming come back problem is local farming has been dying over the last 50 years in this country so the point is now you got corporate and factories that are taking over this is such a nice place guys look how well they keep it because a lot of people are getting a lot better at knowing the quality of their their their meat and where it comes from you know whether it's beef whether it's poultry whether it's pork you should kind of know where your meat's coming from and don't just take a label and trust the label because some of those labels are bought and paid for hello good morning how are you i do have pigs but we do not do roasters i'll do a roaster for you but it's going to cost you because we do berkshire pork i can text you a business card of a place where you can call them and see if they have roasters available you're looking for a roaster pig because you're looking to do a smoker all right you have a great day sir we get these calls all summer long and people don't understand they're like i want a whole pig and they want to only pay four or five hundred dollars my pigs cost me four or five hundred dollars within three weeks of having them so then me i could say okay i'll do the roaster for you it's going to cost you a thousand dollars the guy's going to go what it's just a pig it's just a pig no a pig is a pig is a pig no that's not how it is that's a very ignorant comment i would say 40 percent of my time uh is spent educating the public and helping the public to find what they're looking for because the problem is is our society here in the u.s we haven't really taught food quality right so i got this book it's basically a guide on meat so what i do with my customers when they come in they don't understand meat is i always turn to this page here and i always say to them i go yo tell me what pork chop you're used to buying they go i buy this white one over here i said where do you get that at and they go oh well i get it from my local grocery store i get it from walmart or sam's club i said well your pork right now at 1.0 that's your grade that means it's the lowest quality of pork okay which means your tenderness your taste your juiciness your marbling your fat content that's why they're charging you $1.25 per pound for that now they're genetically engineering it with drugs and chemicals to basically get that animal to grow even quicker so they can put it through the processing line even quicker so now we're not even treating these things like animals that god put them here for for us to utilize but also respect in the same sense they're basically treating these animals like they're on an assembly line the main thing here in local farming you're going to find your pork in the 5.0 in the 6.0 area is the goal of your local farmer so we run berkshire okay berkshire is a purebred breed it gives you a higher quality of meat it's a more leaner pig it's not a fattier pig you cannot go wrong with sausages i want to buy local how do i buy local we're part of pure cat skills it's a magazine that comes out that lists all the farms in the county where you can buy poultry where you can buy chicken where you can buy produce all these things that are better for you and for local farming right stuff that you can order online okay and it'll be shipped to you through the mail so you have two avenues you can do direct sales like we do which is retail cuts right and then you can do basically your online ordering as a consumer the the options are out there you can actually go and meet your farmer like my micro farm you come here you buy out of the farm store directly you order wholes or halves and you put it in your freezer for the year or you buy retail cuts every weekend because you're not far from the farm and you order it from your iphone or your computer and it's very self-explanatory it goes hey you're gonna get this for meat and blah blah blah press the button and guess what it's ubered to your house so the factory farms are jumping on the farm fresh food free range those labels that are bought and paid for by some of these companies well guess what local farmers are jumping on the bandwagon now where we're gonna make sure that the stuff is ubered to you you can go on your iphone we understand the society we live in people are not about going out they want to shop in one place at one time we have a local farm here nearby we sell our pork directly to them they have a bigger farm store and guess what they do they sell all local beef all local pork all local poultry your eggs your produce your maple syrup it's all local bought and it's a one-stop shop you're basically sending the uh the farmers with the pitchforks up against the british army sounds familiar we're basically doing the same thing all over again just in a different sense you know you got all the local little small farmers running up with their pitchforks going against the bigger british rule that's basically filled with tons of money maybe this time you can use online pitchfork yeah yeah yeah okay nate thanks a lot all right listen i appreciate you coming out and that's you i'll see you next time of course awesome thank you