Know Where Your Food Comes From by Visiting Farms and Buying Local

For the last few weeks, we’ve been staying at Earthen Heart Farm in Bangor, Michigan for our second wwoof experience. We’ve had a great time here, helping Julian get his operation running for the summer, but one of our favorite things is that we have also gotten to explore his network of other farmers. Julian is all about building community and he regularly works with other farmers in the area. My husband has been over to another farm to help plant apple trees. We have connected with the Eater’s Guild to buy goat milk for yogurt, as well as to tour their operation. Most recently, we visited the Peterson’s Pig Farm where Steve and Jan Peterson were kind enough to give us a full tour.

 

 

We got to visit all of the pigs including the sows with piglets, the sows who are not pregnant or nursing and the boars. All of the pigs at his farm have plenty of room to run and root, as well as access to food and water all day and night. The Petersons have raised pigs for 35 years. Recently they have begun to sell quite a bit of their pigs to the Neiman Ranch, which supplies high end grocery stores like Whole Foods and restaurants like Chipotle.

 

 

This was the first time we visited a farm that has this wide of a distribution. As a consumer, I take care to buy sustainable meat and produce and to buy as locally as I can. However, I can’t always buy directly from a farm, especially now that I don’t have the freezer space to buy in bulk. Buying at the grocery store is hard for me because I want to make the good choices for my family, but I never know how much truth there is behind those labels. Even though my family doesn’t eat pork, this farm visit opened my eyes to the importance of getting out to these farms and meeting the people who supply the food that comes into places like Whole Foods. By talking to Steve, I learned about exactly what the company asks of him as a supplier and got a clearer understanding about what some of those labels in the supermarket mean. This may have been our first farm visit to a farm like this, but it sure won’t be our last. I want my family to become more and more aware of where our food comes from. As consumers of meat and vegetables, we owe it to ourselves to get out to the farms and ask questions, talk to the farmers, and know where our food is coming from.