Tuesday, April 8, 2008

Article About Wooly Pigs in the Seattle PI

There's an article about Wooly Pigs in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. It communicates how excited some folks are about Mangalitsa.

It is great to get some coverage in our major market! I hope everyone rushes to Monsoon and Le Gourmand to try the Mangalitsa. Or we've got the meat at the U-District and West Seattle Farmers Markets (and Bellevue and Kirkland when they open).


Heath Putnam (center) and Kylan Hoover (r) load Kylan's pigs

The article also mentions Mr. Oak, whose real name is Kylan Hoover. He has bought himself a huge herd of Mangalitsa and Mangalitsa-Berkshire crosses, which he'll be finishing in the Bay Area.

While we are killing our hogs relatively young, he'll raise his old and fat. Also, he's got acorns and other mast - the best feed possible - so his hogs will be better than ours for curing. We expect his hogs to be the best available in Fall 2008 for cured applications. You can reach him at:

kylanhoover@gmail.com
(925) 321-1210

There's an inaccuracy in the article. E.g. instead of one sow farrowing in quarantine, we had 13 farrow in quarantine and 2 en route from NY to WA. If it had just been one sow, one semi-trailer would have sufficed. As it was, they needed to build nests for 15 sows, which took up a lot of space. Would-be animal importers should know that it is inherently risky and expensive to import live animals. It was ridiculously foolish to have imported so many pigs in one load - but there is no "Animal Importation for Dummies" yet.

It was a lot of fun to have Rebekah and Meryl out to the farm. The only bummer was the Meryl got attacked by a nasty Berkshire sow, who knocked her really hard in the knee.

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