“The ultimate goal of farming is not the growing of crops, but the cultivation and perfection of human beings.”
― Masanobu Fukuoka, The One-Straw Revolution
Just a few miles from the eastern shore of Lake Champlain, WhistlePig Farm in Shoreham, Vermont embraces more than 1300 acres, fertile in every sense of the word. Our lives may be centered around the cultivation of our farm’s potential, but there’s much more to the Shoreham story. While we are growing, harvesting, barreling, and bottling our favorite grain, the animals are also being fruitful and multiplying: Mangalitza and Kune Kune pigs, sheep, goats, and horses, to be specific. We raise them, herd them, and sometimes play in the mud with them (more about that later). We also cultivate oats, barley, alfalfa, honey, maple syrup, and an array of vegetables in a rambling garden outside the office. A flock of ducks occasionally calls the farm home, and each spring and fall we are serenaded by the chorus of migrating songbirds and waterfowl.
Rye makes it easy for WhistlePig to stand at the forefront of sustainable agriculture. It grows densely enough to exclude weeds, keeping the need for herbicides to a minimum. It’s also an excellent scavenger of soil-bound nitrogen, rendering heavy fertilization unnecessary. A winter crop, our main grain is planted in the fall, germinates the summer following the winter freeze, and is harvested midsummer. It’s as hardy as the early Vermont patriots who – in an audacious raid launched from the very town we call home – seized British cannon from Fort Ticonderoga, and hauled them across the frozen wilds of 18th century New England, over the great Green and White Mountains – directly through our Farm, and on to the heights of Dorchester in Boston. There, the British woke white-faced one St. Patrick’s Day morning to see their own guns trained on Her Majestey’s ships anchored below in Boston Harbor. The redcoats fled, and Boston was an American city ever thereafter.
Anyway – back to the mud. The real stars of our farm and brand have been a pair of oversized Kune Kune pigs: Mortimer and Mauve. They served as our global brand ambassadors, making appearances at events from Middlebury to the red carpet of the Lincoln Center in Manhattan. After a long day of feeding and mud-bathing, the two amorous hogs would settle down for a swiney snooze, marked by their high-pitched squeals and satisfied grunts. As we mentioned, the animals DO multiply.
Recently, our beloved Mortimer passed away defending Mauve in the barnyard. She misses him, as do we. So much so, in fact, that we devoted our 2014 expression of The Boss Hog to “The Spirit of Mortimer”. We raise a glass of his memorial whiskey to him often, and Mauve snorts and grunts in his memory alongside us.
Our soil and our history may be rich…
…but WhistlePig Farm is a simple place. Our rye is strictly non-GMO, and rye’s unique hardiness and virility allow us to keep chemical input to an absolute minimum. It’s important to us to position our family and Farm at the forefront of sustainable beverage agriculture. Fortunately, rye is a pig-headed grain that grows densely enough to stand up to the harsh Northern climate of our beautiful Farm.
Daily life on the Farm is peaceful, but never dull. Some mornings we hunt along the Lemon Fair River; others find us herding cattle. Still others keep us busy at the bottling line, which rests on two wooden picnic tables in a room near the barn. On any given night, one might stumble upon a bagpiper or bugler, neighbors strolling past the house to say hello, or a flurry of flaming arrows torching a dinghy, followed by a firearm salute. This is no ordinary place.
