(Barn) Raising Humanely Raised Pork

Many of you already know that Tom has been working to bring small hog farms back to northeast Colorado. Back in 2013, with grants from the United States Humane Society and the Rocky Mountain Farmers Union, Tom was able to convince two aspiring farmers to get serious about raising heritage Berkshire hogs with high standards of humane treatment (GAP3 for the humane treatment nerds out there).

There’s more good news too. Spring boarding off the early success of these two operations, Tom has convinced two other young men to begin heritage pig farms, one producing the critically rare Mulefoot breed. A total of four farmers are a direct result of Tom’s efforts. While we obviously are proud of Tom’s dedication to the pork project, ultimate credit goes to these enterprising farmers taking on risk and hard work to provide value-added pork to the Front Range and beyond.

The vast majority of the pork is sold to restaurants and top-end grocers in the Front Range. Though, back in January, we sold one of the hogs from our youngest farmer, Austin Kuntz, through the Sun Prairie website. Inspired by the outpouring of support from the Sun Prairie community, we asked Austin to provide us more hogs. It took some months, but we finally convinced him to sell six more through Sun Prairie. They are available through our website here.

Austin, a high school senior, is a member of Future Farmer’s of America (FFA) with a desire to remain and work in our rural community as a young farmer. Let’s show Austin how much we appreciate him!