Welcome to Deer Run Farm, a humane farming operation, raising a diverse selection of humane meat. Deer Run Farm is located in central Missouri on two sites totaling 71 acres, where we raise grass-fed beef, pastured poultry (Pilgrim geese and standard Cornish chickens), rabbits, and are soon to add heritage pork in the form of endangered Mulefoot hogs.

We began raising our own meat in response to the barbaric and inhumane factory farming practices that stock our local supermarkets with tasteless meat pumped full of antibiotics, growth hormones and fillers. Our decision was made purely on ethical grounds, but we were amazed to find that the animals we raised ourselves, living in the grass and sunshine, tasted incomparably better than what we had been buying and eating for years from the grocery store.

Perhaps this shouldn’t have surprised us; factory animals live in a miasma of dust from their own waste, eating the cheapest possible processed feeds laced with enough medication to keep them from dying before butcher time. A diet of natural things, filled with variety and color, translates into firmer, more flavorful muscle tissue and an animal that is happy and healthy until the moment it is butchered humanely in familiar surroundings.

If this method of farming appeals to you, then feel free to browse around our site and see what we do here. Scroll down this page to read our blog and find out what’s happening at Deer Run Farm. And if you’d like to get in contact with us for any reason, you can do so by clicking HERE.

Eat well; live well.

Wow- how did that happen? Apparently it’s been ten days since our first litter of four mulefoot pigs was born. After some initial gender confusion, it turns out we have two males and two females. One of the males is a runt (and has had a bit of a tough time of it), so he will be castrated once he is stronger. We’ll keep him as a meat animal, and he will have a short but happy life living with his parents and aunt on pasture, before being humanely butchered with a single gunshot to the head, on our property, by our wonderful custom processor, Danny Wolfe.

The other male and the two females will be for sale as breeding animals at weaning. We also have a second mulefoot gilt due to farrow later this fall.

As promised, here is a short video of the adorable mulefoot pigs born yesterday. This is their first drink at momma pig’s milk bar. They are only an hour old or so, and you can see the sow’s heavy breathing as she recovers from giving birth. Mother and babies are all doing wonderfully this morning, and it appears that our year of only having female mammals born on the farm continues. (Though I only got a quick look at each of them, so I may have missed a set of tiny male plumbing in the group.)

The older of our two mulefoot gilts (young female pigs) delivered a healthy litter of four purebred mulefoot piglets this afternoon. Dharma, the new mother, took to her job as if she’d been doing it all her life, carefully herding her new charges out of the way each time she settled her bulky frame to the ground so the little ones could nurse.

Mulefoot pigs are a critically endangered breed of swine according to the American Livestock Breeds Conservancy, so we here at Deer Run Farm are honored to help ensure the recovery and secure future of this unique and valuable breed.

I took some video of the babies less than an hour after they were born; I’ll post it as soon as I have time to get it processed.

I’ve been studiously ignoring quite a bit of folk wisdom about raising swine. One gem in particular warns of how mature boars will savage and eat their own offspring if allowed to live full time with their females. Apparently, Gordy the Boar failed to get this memo. After a brief and very gentle investigation, he pretty much lost interest. I expect that the little buggers will be crawling all over him inside of a week. All three members of our little herd were happy to let us join in the occasion as long as there were frequent bouts of petting and scratching.

At least two and possibly three of these young mulefoot pigs will be for sale at weaning. Keep an eye out for more information in the coming weeks.

To get Buckeye chickens, you start with buckeye chicks.

Well, actually, with Buckeye eggs, but Anna and David Puthoff took care of that first step for me.  It’s so exciting to have the chicks here!  They just arrived this morning, and are alternating between taking naps under the heat lamp and bombing around in the brooder sampling the water, grit and feed.

As with most of our animals, this includes spoiling them a little.  Well, maybe more than a little.  Our regular chickens are spoiled a little: they’re on pasture during the warm months, get treats every day, and are given jugs of ice when it gets too hot.  Our Buckeye chickens are going to be spoiled a lot: they’ll be given names and handled every day.  Tomorrow morning I’ll start by picking each one up, handling it gently, giving it a mealworm, and talking to it.

Aren’t they cute?  As with most straight runs, there are more cockerels than pullets, but you can see at least four pullets in the batch.  They’re the ones with dark stripes on their heads.  That means more chicks next year, and more chicks the year after that.   Not to mention eggs from the hens and meat from the extra cockerels.  Buckeye chickens are not only good layers, but they have more and richer dark meat than other chickens.
It isn’t right that birds as all-purpose and sturdy as these are on the endangered list, while Cornish Crosses, which don’t lay very well and tend to drop dead of heart attacks for no obvious reason, number in the millions.  We at Deer Run are thrilled to be able to help conserve this rare breed.

I have to say, I have been utterly overwhelmed by the demand for pilgrim geese and goslings this year. As far as I know, everything is pretty much pre-sold for 2011 at this point. I’m going to hold back an extra female for next year, and we’ll probably buy a second incubator so that we can artificially incubate a lot more eggs in 2012. I have — just this morning, in fact — shipped my first ever batch of day old poultry to a lovely lady in Arkansas. If that experiment goes well, then I will be shipping goslings anywhere in the lower 48 states next year.

So, in honor of my breeding flock, who have worked so hard laying extra eggs for the incubator and also setting their own nests this spring, here is a photo of Mother Goose with her remaining day-old brood (minus the ones that I shipped to Arkansas this morning), being lovely and maternal. Or, possibly, threatening to bite my head off if I even THINK about taking any more of her babies away… depending on your interpretation.

Antibiotics in pork: it may not be at the top of the national consciousness, but it’s certainly made the news recently. As with chicken, swine are given low-dose antibiotics in feed almost as a matter of course, and research indicates that these practices may be at least partially responsible for breeding “superbugs”– antibiotic resistant bacteria responsible for dangerous and hard-to-treat infections in humans.

So, anyway, my mulefoot boar is supposed to be delivered on Sunday (yay!), which means that this week’s feed store run needed to include a swine ration in addition to the usual horse and poultry feed. So I pick up the phone and call feed store #1:

Me: “Hi, do you have any non-medicated pig feed?”

Person on phone: “Let me check. No, sorry– we only carry medicated pig feed.”

Me: “Okay, thanks.”

I hang up and call feed store #2, which happens to be MFA Agri Services of Columbia, MO:

Me: “Hi, do you have any non-medicated pig feed?”

Person on phone: “Oh, yeah, sure. We’ve got 14% and 16% complete pellets.”

Me: “Cool. I’ll be there in half an hour.”

At the counter at MFA, half an hour later:

Me: “Hi, I called an hour ago about a non-medicated swine ration?”

Counter  person: “Uh, huh. Do you want 14% or 16%?”

Me: “I’ll take 100 lbs. of the 14%, please.”

Counter person: “Great. That’ll be $29.35 total including the rubber feed pan.”

Back at the farm, half an hour later:

Me: *unloads first bag of pig feed* “Gah! This label says ‘medicated’! GAH!! This feed contains antibiotics!” *storms back into house and calls MFA*

Me: “Hello, I was just in to buy some UN-MEDICATED pig feed, but you sent me home with MEDICATED pig feed. I can’t use this.”

Person on phone: “Oh. Well, the antibiotics are just to increase weight gain and combat stress. They don’t even have a withdrawal period for the meat.”

Me: “That’s nice. Let me try again. I raise antibiotic-free meat. This feed contains antibiotics, despite the fact that I requested feed with NO antibiotics. I CAN’T USE THIS.”

Person on phone: “Well… ALL swine feed contains antibiotics. The person you spoke to probably didn’t even notice when you said ‘un-medicated’.”

Me: “… ”

*awkward pause*

Me: “Oooh-kay. Do you carry plain cracked corn, plain soybean meal, and kelp in 50 lb. bags?”

Person on phone: “I’ve got the cracked corn and soybean meal. I can order the kelp and have it next week.”

Me: “I’ll be there in half an hour with my receipt and these two bags of feed I can’t use.”

So… that’s how I spent my afternoon. Sometimes I really don’t know what to say about agriculture in this country. Because, apparently, having antibiotics in pork is totally normal… NORMAL, DO YOU HEAR ME?

But, on the positive side, here’s a picture of my boar-to-be, courtesy of his breeders, Joe and Angela Gries of Humansville, MO. Isn’t he cute?

On Monday the 17th of January our heifer, nicknamed “Slick” for her calf-hood habit of slipping out of any and every fence, decided to deposit her first calf in a snowbank, 42 days before her due date. Amazingly, it was alive when we found it. A momentary aside: I admit it. I made fun of the Chicken Taj Mahal– an insulated, heated outbuilding for the chickens that is nicer than my house– when Mom built it last summer. Because… dude. That was A LOT of money to spend on a chicken house. Seriously.

But the existence of the Chicken Taj Mahal saved me having to nurse a six week premature calf inside the house. Instead, I got to let my crazy dog and my not-yet-crazy-but-probably-well-on-the-way livestock guardian puppy play “mother” to the calf in the puppy’s pen for 24 hours, while I came out periodically and offered bottles.

At first, it didn’t look good. But by the following morning, thanks to the miracle of Crazy Dog Tongue Technology, things were looking up.

Mom and I looked at each other, both thinking the same thing, and had Dad carry the calf back out to the cattle pen. Slick, the mother, may have dropped the ball on the whole “carrying the calf to term” thing, but she won bonus points on maternal instinct, immediately re-bonding with her calf and– saints above!– letting down milk (she didn’t have any the first day after the birth).

We moved the pair to a horse stall bedded deeply with straw, where the calf started to receive mother’s milk in the bottle instead of replacer. With human assistance, she slowly began to nurse from the cow as well as taking milk from the bottle. The pair spent five days in the horse barn, at the end of which the little heifer calf was able to get milk for herself and maintain her body temperature comfortably without a heat lamp.

I moved the pair back out to the herd one week from the date of the calf’s birth, and spent a nerve-shredding day second-guessing myself as the calf was repeatedly almost run over, almost stepped on, almost laid on… yeah.

Things in the herd had calmed down long before dark, but it was still with a deep sense of foreboding that I walked out the door this morning to check on developments. Instead of the flattened calf pancake I half-expected, I found the baby, whom Mom has christened Bluebird, happily up and nursing while the other cattle lounged around, eating hay or chewing cud. Later checks today show that she has discovered the joys of solar heat, lying sprawled in the hay, letting the sun soak into her black pelt.

I am at a bit of a loss about this calf, really. I have a definite breeding date for this cow, no ifs, ands or buts, and six weeks is awfully premature. She is tiny… and she was weak… but she does not have nearly the degree of developmental problems I would expect to see with the lungs, suckle reflex, hair development and so forth. So, have I stumbled across a mutant genetic line of cattle that calve in eight months instead of nine? I guess time will tell… though it hope it doesn’t decide to “tell” again in the middle of January any time soon.

Meet Bekçi (pronounced BEK-chee), our new Anatolian/Pyrenees puppy and future livestock guardian dog. Bekçi, whose name is Turkish for “guard”, is eight weeks old today, and is enjoying her first full day in her private quarters in our chicken house after moving from her old home in La Plata, Missouri. In La Plata, her father patrols the borders of the farm where she was born, and her mother lives with the flock of sheep and goats that resides there. Six of her eight siblings are white, like Pyrenees, but she seems to have inherited more of the Anatolian genetics.

So far in the past 24 hours, Bekçi has been introduced to wearing a collar and leash, patrolling the fence line (cunningly disguised as “taking a walk with the big dogs”, and riding in a truck. She lives in a large pen next to other pens containing our breeding flocks of White-laced Red and Buff Cornish chickens, and will eventually live with the free-range flock of meat birds during the spring, summer and fall, protecting them from predators. She’s a cute little button-eyed pup right now, but before long, she’ll weigh well over a hundred pounds… so you can bet we’re taking care to instill good behavior while she’s still small!