Heritage breed pastured pork in Western New York

Welcome to

Four Hands Farm

A first-generation farm located in Western New York, our goal is to supply our local community with the highest quality food possible and seasonal, farm fresh flowers through use of truly regenerative, ethical practices. We firmly believe that it is a farmer's responsibility to leave the ecosystem in better shape than they found it.

Our Story

"The care of the Earth is our most ancient and most worthy, and after all our most pleasing responsibility. To cherish what remains of it and to foster its renewal is our only hope."
Wendell Berry

Pastured Meats

As regenerative farmers, our practices focus on the wellbeing of our soil, animals, and community. We use nature as our guide in all things, leaning into patience, observation, and creativity to help us manage our pastured livestock.

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Heritage breed pastured, grass-fed pigs in Western New York

Pastured Eggs

Always organically-raised, always from happy hens. Our flock spends its days in the fresh air and sunshine doing all of the things chickens love to do. Once you give our pastured eggs a try, you'll never go back to commodity grocery store eggs again!

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No-Dig Produce & Flowers

Above all in our agricultural practices, the health of the soil comes first.

No-dig principles in the market garden ensure that the soil microbiology is thriving and soil structure remains intact. This, in turn, yields the most nutrient-dense produce and an incomparable culinary & floral experience.

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Welcome to the latest edition of the Four Hands Farm Wild Woman Academy!
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Today, our big project was skinning and breaking down our deer harvest from this weekend. Our little farm girls were spellbound! Over the course of this process, we discussed the topics of life cycles, death, ethical harvesting of game, food system participation, the musculoskeletal system, the nervous system, cloven-hooved mammals, and knife safety (to name a few).
Our eldest girl, Cora, is doing preschool at home. I feel beyond fortunate that, despite the fact that our curriculum is unconventional, our day-to-day is filled with simple, rich experiences like this that spark such deep, thoughtful, open conversations. Being a farm parent to curious farm kids is incredible.

The food is pretty good, too.

Top-dressing our existing no-dig garden and getting ready to double the garden's footprint before the snow flies! 🤩

Fresh eggs at the road, y'all! 🐔 Could there be a more beautiful October day to go for a drive?

The roadside egg cooler is back! It's been a heck of a year for us with not nearly as much farming as we'd like, but we have eggs for sale just the same! Stop by and help yourself at the road, or send us a message and pick up some cuts of our pastured pork while you're here. 🐖 As always, you can bank on our products being certified organically-fed and pasture-raised!

Giving our baby blackberry plantings some love this morning. I used old cardboard around the base of the plants to suppress the grass, then topped with ramial wood chips. Here's hoping it's enough to convince these little troopers that they're growing at the edge of a forest, not the middle of an old field! 🤞🏻 Spending some time with these plantings has me really looking forward to picking out some fruit trees to add to this row in future seasons! (Next spring...? 👀)

A crisp Sunday morning adventure to check trail cams and make sure that the apples are still delicious. 🤌🏻🍎

The chickens are back at the farm!
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We're currently moving most of the eggs that these beautiful birds lay, but if you find yourself in need of a fresh dozen, send us a message and pop over to the farm for a visit! Always all organically-fed and pastured-raised! 🐔

Not every season can be your best season. That's what I keep reminding myself as I plug away at unearthing the most overgrown "market garden" I think I've ever seen. It's row after row of stunted tomatoes and bug-riddled cabbage lost in a sea of weeds that are easily a foot taller than I am. It'd be so easy to walk away, defeated, but I know what this garden can look like and the nourishment and beauty that it's capable of producing.
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We had high hopes that we'd return to the farm in the spring of this year, but setback after setback landed us here just as the first hints of fall started to show. Definitely not the plan, but here we are! Time to put our heads down and DO THE WORK. The crystal clear vision that we have for this property and for our family is enough to keep us moving forward.
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If you need me, I'll be lost in a sea of pigweed and lamb's quarters. 🫡

What are you grilling on the Fourth of July?! 🥩

Up your grilling game this year by stocking up on cuts of our 100% organically-raised pastured pork! Our online farm store is restocked and ready for you! Here's how it works:

We are taking pre-orders through our online store now through this Wednesday, July 3rd at noon. Orders will be ready for pickup at 86 Center Street in Bemus Point anytime from 4 PM until 7 PM that same day. We won't be offering pre-order/pickup again for a few weeks, so stock up while you can! Send us a message with any questions you may have. Link to the online store is in our bio!

You better believe that I'm living my dream, especially on days like today. The part that I never saw coming was how pig-centric the dream life would be. It is such a joy to love on these big beasts and giving them a good, peaceful life while they're in our care. It is also an honor to feed our friends and neighbors food from animals that are raised with reverence.
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We still have a half share available from this spring batch of pastured pigs. Always raised 100% on pasture, always fed certified organic feed. Processing day is June 17th, so don't wait much longer to get a deposit in! DM for more information.

EDIT: Only a half share left!

We're officially down to ONE whole share (or two half shares) from our spring batch of organically-raised pastured pork!
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Ready to hop on the pastured pork bandwagon? Stock your freezer with a custom-cut whole or half share for the summer months! By purchasing in bulk, you're getting the very best price on our coveted pastured pork, AND you get the added bonus of completely customizing your order to suit your taste. Don't have the freezer space? Find a friend or family member to split a half share with! Only a couple of weeks left until our butcher date, so don't wait! Send us a DM to reserve your share.

Winecap babies fresh from the garden for dinner tonight. 🍄‍🟫

Little Winecap mushroom babies! These beauties are growing happily (and growing EVERYWHERE) in the pathways of our market garden. They're delicious and super savory, plus they add an important element of ecological diversification to the growing space. So many wins! Thanks @northsporemushrooms for marketing such an easy-to-use product!

A placid family walk to visit the happy pigs this evening. A gorgeous time of the day during such a hopeful time of the year. How fortunate we are is not lost on me.

Hopped the big boys over to a BIG grassy pasture this morning! Everyone is grateful for the fresh spring growth. We've raised quite a few different breeds of pigs, but we've never seen foragers quite like these Mangalitsas! They are far more interested in the pasture than they are their feed bin. We're so excited to see how this tendency translates to the finished pork!
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Just over a month until these guys will be ready to go, and we still have a couple of whole/half shares available! DM for details!

A peaceful end to a glorious day of good farm stuff.

Tossing some picture-perfect spring seedlings in the garden today! On the docket for transplanting:

🌱 Summer cabbage
🌱 Broccoli
🌱 Head lettuce
🌱 Romaine
🌱 Storage & fresh onions
🌱 Shallots (one of our absolute favorites!)
🌱 Scallions
🌱 Snapdragons

Thank GOODNESS garden season is here! Anyone else coming down with spring fever as bad as we are?!

Big boys on fresh pasture today! It never gets old seeing these big goofy guys waiting at the gate while their new paddock is being set up. They just sit there and talk the whole time with their low, growly grunts. Then the partition fence is dropped, and they zoom into the fresh grass, gobbling down mouthfuls as they explore their new digs. It just never gets old. 🐖🌾

Just a reminder that we have a couple of whole/half hog shares left for our spring batch! DM for details!

One of our (many) favorite quotes from the great Wendell Berry always steers us back to the spark that turned us down the road of regenerative, ethical, Earth-based agriculture. We saw the state of our food system and knew we wanted to participate somehow in a change. We knew we as a family could do better. We wanted to nourish our bodies with the foods that our species has evolved to consume, and we wanted to see the process through from start to finish. Are we perfect? Not even close. But when we see our livestock healthy and romping in the fresh air and sunshine, full-circle food chain microcosms springing up alongside our lettuces and tomatoes, or native bird species returning to our meadows, you better believe it feels like we're doing something right.

Thanks for coming along for the ride, and thanks for letting us be your farmers. What we're doing together is a big deal, and having you all right there with us MATTERS.

Happy, happy Earth Day to you all. 🌎

Feel-good farmy tidbit of the day: we have had a serious surplus of eggs now that our laying flock is in springtime overdrive, so we were able to donate 300 of these beauties to the local food pantry today. Selling tip-top quality ingredients to our community feels great; donating our excess to bolster our community is indescribable. ✨️

When you've got bed prep to do and it's 70° in April, you move naptime to the garden. Every time. 😴

This picture may not look like much, but it should get all of you dahlia enthusiasts PUMPED for this season. This year, we invested in a bunch of stunning new dahlia varieties to add to our ever-growing collection! These tubers will provide us with hundreds of stems of swoon-worthy dahlias. Who's excited?! 🙋‍♀️💐

Send us a message to inquire! We only have a handful of shares available for the springtime, and they're going to go FAST! 🐖

Happy pastured pigs make our 🌎 go round!
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A big move for those curly boys today. We moved them off of the old vineyard and onto what, years ago, was the garden. We've been allowing the pigs to spend more time (read: make more of an impact) than usual on the vineyard land in an attempt to eradicate any remaining grapevines and knock down the raised rows that were left behind after the grapes were ripped out. It'll be interesting to see what kind of seeds have been laying dormant in the seed bank of the garden soil that the pigs will root up and allow to germinate! How incredible that these animals can yield such an amazing end product AND benefit the landscape through careful, adaptive management. It never gets old!

A fine morning to move some pigs!
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It usually takes a few rotations to get the hang of moving from an old paddock to a new one for a fresh batch of pigs, but these boys have it all figured out! Our move to fresh ground was smoooooth sailing today. We've been giving this group larger paddocks and more time in between moves, as they are working on eradicating old grapevines from this field. The way that this group has been methodically turning the sod over in search of earthy goodies is an absolute joy to watch! The snow has since moved in, but don't worry, these boys brought their sweaters.

A big morning of to-dos checked off in a really short window of time thanks to a few extra sets of hands! An entire 50' no-dig row of weird little Asparagus babies were tucked in under a fluffy layer of compost (pictures 1 and 2), and a bunch of fruit tree whips and young fruiting shrubs were heeled into another corner of the garden (picture 3). Once the ground dries out later this spring, these fruiting perennials will make up our first forest edge-style planting along the ridge just beyond the garden. Slides 3 & 4 are happy little garlic and rhubarb plants that are just waking up. Spring is coming, friends! 🌱

Mud season has us in its clutches, but MAN these pigs seem happy to be in the field. These are, without a doubt, the hardiest pigs we've ever raised. Even during the blast of winter weather we got a few days ago, these boys were out foraging in the field without hesitation. That'll do, pig.
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Info about our June whole/half hog shares will be public soon! Stay tuned!

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Four Hands Farm

"The care of the Earth is our most ancient and most worthy, and after all our most pleasing responsibility. To cherish what remains of it and to foster its renewal is our only hope." Wendell Berry

Pastured Meats

Pastured Eggs

No-Dig Produce & Flowers

​

Follow Us On Instagram @Fourhandsfarmchq

"The care of the Earth is our most ancient and most worthy, and after all our most pleasing responsibility. To cherish what remains of it and to foster its renewal is our only hope."
Wendell Berry