Pork Production Standards

Daffodil Spring practices ecological and ethical agriculture and holistic land management. This means that pigs are frequently rotated every two weeks to fresh pasture. What the pigs have rooted up is sowed with a cover crop mixture of buckwheat, crimson clover, and annual rye in the spring and summer and winter wheat and crimson clover in the fall. This builds our soil and provides food for the animals. It also makes for a pollinator paradise when the cover crop flowers!

Between 2017-2019, Daffodil Spring sourced its heritage-breed pigs from Melinda Brown of Never Ending Farm in Sugar Grove, NC, a Certified Animal Welfare Approved farmer. Beginning in 2019, Daffodil Spring purchased a sow from Never Ending Farm and began work towards becoming a closed herd, raising Tamworth-Hereford cross pigs and Berkshire cross pigs.

To supplement the pigs' food, they are fed a GMO-free feed, by hand, twice a day. The GMO-free feed includes wheat midds, milo, and black oil sunflower seeds and is sourced from the locally-owned feed store. The pigs always have fresh, clean water available and ample room for them to root and graze. Feeding them by hand, allows us to assure that they remain healthy and makes them easier to work with and better natured.