Big Red slumbers in a nest of wood chips, leaves, and straw. If he weren’t pushing 550 pounds, he’d look like a fuzzy dirigible moored to the floor of his pen. Across the barn are the three Blonde sows that over the last four years helped him produce more than 60 pure-blooded Mangalitsa pigs, a friendly, wooly-haired, slow-growing Austro-Hungarian breed that had almost gone extinct in the early 90s.
Earlier this month, Lee walked me out on one of his pastures where his third-generation Mangalitsa and Red Wattles roamed, digging deep holes in the earth and scratching their itchy flanks on tree trunks. When they saw us coming, they trotted over in a slow wave, the Mangalitsas snouting around our pant legs and the Wattles tugging at our bootlaces.
“They take a really long time to raise,” about 18 months to two years, Lee says, but they’re given indoor-outdoor access 24 hours a day. Lee harvested his first Mangalitsas after 20 months, stored their meat in a chest freezer, and gradually started selling to neighbors, friends, and friends of friends. “Quite a few Latinx, Asian—mostly Filipino—and European customers come by the farm for meat,” he says. “Popular items are pork skins for chicharrones, shoulder for carnitas, belly, and heads. Europeans typically come for the Mangalitsa fats, hocks, soup bones, organs.”
And this year, with the help of one of the Blonde sows and Thor, the gargantuan Red Wattle boar that resides a few pens away from Big Red, “we’ll have our first Red Wattle-Mangalitsa hybrids,” Lee says.“The meat is supposed to be really red, a little meatier, but still maintaining the quality of fat of the Mangalitsa. We will have some of that come March, so we shall see.” v
2130 128th St. Pleasant Prairie, Wisconsin 224-255-9377russellroad.farm
Village Farmstand 810 Dempster Evanston 847-425-0398villagefarmstand.com
