Educators return to Arkansas to begin a small, productive farm
BIGELOW, ARK. – “It tastes like sunshine.”
That was the only way Holly Payne could describe what bacon tastes like. But not just any store-bought packaged product. Holly was referring to the unique flavor that she and her husband, Aaron Baldwin produce on Porch Swing Farms near Bigelow, Ark.
“There’s a richness to our meat that is incredible,” Holly said. “There’s no mistaking it for, and I’m just going to generalize here, grocery store pork. People talk about terroir and providence and all that about where it came from. It tastes like sunshine. It tastes like it is supposed to taste. It tastes like pork of years ago, whenever most pigs were raised like ours. It’s not generic. It’s special. All of our signs say we do exceptional pork. And I think that’s what it is.”
To hear Holly talk, it would seem like she and Aaron had been raised on pig farms and had been cultivating the swine their entire lives. However, that is not the case. The former college professors have only been in business for five years.
Yet, in that time, Holly said Porch Swing Farms has grown each year as they learn more and more about their newly chosen profession.
“To go from not even having the land five years ago to where we are now makes me the most proud,” Holly said. “We have a weekly farm meeting and we were just sitting down and we are actually a little low on pork right now, which is a great problem to have, that we’ve got to figure out exactly how do we ramp up production, how do we increase our so herd, what do we do for that? It’s a good problem to have in the world.”
Before Holly and Aaron had to deal with these good farm problems, they were living and teaching in Milwaukee, Wis. Aaron was a biochemist while Holly was a costume designer.
“We were both teaching and we had just moved to a little piece of land just the other side of Conway and had decided that we wanted to make the most of it,” Payne said. “We were both from Arkansas and we had been in Milwaukee and lots of other cities and had to come home and thought, what can we do in Arkansas that we couldn’t do in our downtown Milwaukee rentals? So we got a house in the country and about four acres.”
The duo immediately began raising chickens and grew a garden. That led to other ventures such as pickle-making, perfecting pimento cheese and glazing amazing local pecans.
But all the while, Holly and Aaron’s focus had been on pigs.
“Aaron is a long-time lover of all things pork, for good reason. And he’d been experimenting with doing curing bacon, all sorts of good stuff,” Holly said. “He’s the better cook of the gang and good ingredients being good food. And so he had been experimenting with bacon for a long time, just curing it here at the house and then smoking it. He built one of those big metal 55-gallon drum smokers, and he was super into it. And we thought, how can we have the best possible bacon? Which sounds like an easy question to ask, but then you go down a rabbit hole and then you learn about processes and large-scale farming and all that stuff.”
Instead of having to rely on grocery store chains for pork, they didn’t even like, they made the decision to raise their own pigs.
“So we went whole hog into it. So we started looking for a piece of land because we didn’t quite have enough here set up for that,” Holly said. “We found some just down the road we found 23 acres that were completely open. It had been used as a hayfield for years. We went about turning that into a pasture-raised, heritage breed pig farm.”
But finding the right amount of land was only the first step. It was deciding which breed of pig to invest their time and money into that was going to determine their futures.
“We did a lot of research finding breeds that would suit us as far as the pastured setup, all of that. And also what tasted the best We raise a Gloucestershire old spot and large black pigs, which are both old English breeds. Good looking, big, beautiful pigs,” Holly said. “Neither of these breeds was in the mix for the commercial line, the industrial pork stuff that they do right now, because neither one of them does well in confinement. They go a little crazy. But it makes them great for pasture. They thrive on it, they love it, and they are gentle, good mothers, all of those things.”
Grazing predominantly on kale and turnips, it takes eight months from the time the pigs are born to the day they are taken to the processing plant. In between, Payne says they live a great life.
“Any given time, we’ll have between 50 and 75 pigs on the ground,” Holly said. “They come and go of course as the bacon comes and goes. So we are what they call a pharaoh to finish or a birth to butcher enterprise. We breed the pigs, we raise the pigs up and then we take them to the processor. So they only have that one bad day, they call it that they’re off to the processor and the rest of their life is spent pigs being pigs. They get to roll around in the mud, they get to snoot around. They’re really impressive sunbathers. We like to say ‘Happy pigs equal happy pork.’”
According to Payne, that happy life shows itself in the taste of the products produced at Porch Swing Farms.
“The number one criteria, of course, was that they are delicious,” Payne said. “It’s a red meat. It’s definitely not the other white meat. And if you remember that ad campaign of a few years ago. There’s very little white meat in our life. So yeah, it’s a red meat, it’s marbled. The fat is beautiful and delicious, and we make the most of it. So we also have a little small USDA-approved kitchen. So one of our other loves is a delicious sausage, so we make a lot of varieties of that from the meat.”
Aaron and Holly chose to be a direct-to-consumer business early on in the process. Everything from their pork products to their eggs to their cheese can be bought on their website.
“There’s not a lot of margin in farm goods. The secret to that is direct-to-consumer stuff,” Payne said. “So, we do farmer’s markets, we have an online store, all of those things to try to get our pork into people’s hands and mouths and bellies and we have spent a lot of time working on that, creating those relationships, creating those supply chains, which basically is a direct line from us to them.”
