What you should know our Hog Production.
Rancho Llano Seco is a place where we think deeply and constantly about how animals should be raised.
We wanted to take a moment to highlight why we raise pigs the way we do. We believe raising animals is a huge responsibility. Pigs are smart, sensitive and social creatures who are very curious and love to interact with their surroundings. They thrive in a low stress environment which caters to their instinctual needs to have ground to root and space to roam.
We use humane husbandry practices. It is the ethically correct thing to do and luckily produces the best meat. This takes heavy lifting and lots of work. We are proud of what we do and the care we provide our pigs. There are unique attributes to our system that go beyond any legislation or regulation. In fact here in California, we are the only operation of our scale that can make all these claims:
Our pigs have both indoor and outdoor ground to root through unimpeded 24/7. They are kept with their birth group their whole lives. Our pigs are never confined, we never use farrowing or gestation stalls and they have 24/7 access to feed and drinking water.
Our sows have 100 square feet of total available space with 18 square feet of bedded space. Our hoop barns allow 10.5 square feet of bedded area per hog along with 52 square feet per hog in open air areas.
The majority of the vegetarian feed for our pigs is dry land farmed on our own Rancho. A pig eats 3 times its body weight during its life. The distance the feed travels is 3 times more important, from a carbon footprint perspective, than the distance the pork travels. Eating a local diet can save the equivalent of 1000 miles of driving a year.
We are a single California farm based in Chico, with a distribution footprint measured in hundreds of miles versus tens of thousands of miles. Many other producers are forced to truck their live pigs long distances to a harvest facility. Our pigs travel 20 miles in small-scale, comfortable trucks with their same birthing group.
We run a vertically integrated operation. Llano Seco owns and operates our own USDA inspected and regulated cut - and - wrap facility only 31 miles from the slaughter facility and 14 miles from Rancho headquarters.
As one single family farm we are personally responsible for living up to every claim we make. Llano Seco pork is certified by Global Animal Partnership and appears on the ASPCA's list of certified farms/ products.
