The Pigs of Wallendbeen Park

Two weeks ago, Mr Bone, accompanied by our lovely Singaporean chef intern, set off on an overdue road trip to visit a few farms, leaving the rest of us to contentedly manage the website crisis in the bucolic environs of Marrickville's industrial precinct. (No problem there, really.)

They visited several farms and had a lovely time and arrived home exhausted but happy. (We were exhausted and happy too, really, here in our straitjackets at the Marrickville asylum.)

One of the farms they visited was Wallendbeen Park Farm which is new to the Feather and Bone fold. A 150 acre slice of a much larger, family-owned property in the Hilltops region of NSW about 40 kms south of Young, Wallendbeen Park is home to Annie Jacobs, her partner Christoph Preussmann, their son Theodore and a herd of mixed breed pigs and some Speckled Park cattle.

With backgrounds in experimental photography (perfect for farming), Annie and Christoph relocated to Australia from Germany and have been living at Wallendbeen for six years. It is a return to the family farm for Annie but an enormous change for Christoph.

Last year they took their first tentative steps towards pastured pig production and some of our regular customers may remember the first of the pork from Wallendbeen we received back in May this year. The Wallendbeen herd is a mix of Duroc, Berkshire and Large English Black and they live a lovely life wandering around pastures and wallowing in mud. It shows in the quality of the pork which is very good.