Harvey

I was rushing to the teacher's lounge with my lunch in one hand and my phone in the other, when I saw that my husband had left a voicemail. In typical fashion, I skipped the voicemail and went straight to calling, which saved some of my precious twenty minutes for lunch.

As I slid into my seat at the usual table, I informed the other teachers that we were the proud owners of a pig. They bombarded me with questions, to which I could barely answer. A friend of a friend at my husband's work found a pig on the side of the road, and it needed a home. We said that it could come to our house, which started a new round of questioning because we lived in town.

My 6'8 giant of a husband had this little piglet in his Carhartt coat snuggled against him. The piglet was all scrapped up, which resembled road rash. His deafening screams when I touched him made me think the poor thing wouldn't survive. We put him to bed in his straw nest that I had penned in with Rubbermaid tubs in the garage.

Like parents putting their baby to bed, we started talking softly so he wouldn't be disturbed. My husband explained that he was found in the country where a gravel road intersects a blacktop with a four-way stop. His rescuer was on her way to work and noticed him beside the stop sign. We spent the rest of the evening speculating how he got there.

I predicted that the farmer was weaning him by moving the piglets to the nursery in a trailer, when he did a Houdini act and jumped out through the slates in the trailer. With that reasoning, it was hard to imagine how the fall from the trailer hadn't killed him or how he hadn't been run over.

After two weeks, he was thriving like Wilbur from Charlotte's Web. He was even mischievous like Wilbur when he got himself stuck in the arm of my old fleece coat that I had donated to him to keep warm in the cold spring weather. However, he was too cute and too stinky for us to keep, so we packed him up and took him to my parent's farm.

We never named him because we knew he was destined for the freezer. However, my mom had no qualms and immediately named him Harvey. My parents had operated a farrow to finish operation for over ten years but sold off everything in the mid 90's. Aside from my siblings and I raising animals for 4H and FFA, my parents were out of the business. This stray pig brought them back into it, and started a partnership with us.

Harvey sparked our passion for providing the highest quality of meat with the best conditions for the animal. We saved Harvey only to kill him for our freezer, but he gave us the realization that our food should be personal. It should cost more because it's a life. Harvey woke us up to what the food system could be. After Harvey, we started doing the marketing for my parent's pigs, which they started raising in their pasture. Then we bought our acreage, and started raising them ourselves. Now the same customers that bought from us in the very beginning, buy from Limestone Station. Harvey is where it all started for us. Eight years later, we are still perfecting the art of producing pork.


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