Imagine fresh air, green grass, organic and wild-harvested food, and lots of room to root. This is life for a Riverdog hog. Capay Valley’s Riverdog Farm, known for its high quality, diverse organic fruit and vegetable operation, now offers pastured-pork.

About 2 years ago, Tim Mueller and Trini Campbell of Riverdog Farm began raising “free-range” pigs at their farm in Guinda. Because they wanted to raise the hogs in open pastures, they looked for breeds with good foraging abilities and good flavor. The first herd began with a breed called Tamworth, a rare, primitive type pig breed developed in England in the early 1800s, and closely related to the native English pig. The Tamworth, inducted into the Canadian Slow Food Ark of Taste earlier this year, was a popular breed until the advent of confinement farming techniques. Tamworths do not do well confined to the small, crowded pens characteristic of hog mega-farms today, and so their breed has declined significantly in the last century.

Riverdog Farm has since crossbred its initial herd of Tamworth with other breeds:  Duroc, Yorkshire, Hampshire, and the European Wild hog. The approximately 200 hogs feed on Riverdog’s dry-farmed, organic grains (supplemented with other organic grains), organic vegetable culls, and they root and forage in 80 acres of pasture for acorns, black walnuts, insects, and plants.

Currently, Riverdog Farm pastured-pork is available to customers of its Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) program, to restaurants in the Bay Area and Sacramento, and at the Palo Alto Community Farmshop on Wednesdays.

Read more at the Riverdog Hog Farm Blog.