SCHUYLKILL HAVEN - On a hillside in Wayne Township, a collection of black and white pigs gobbled clover and took turns putting their snouts to a spigot for water Wednesday morning.
While they were only a few months old, their bloodline stretches back more than 200 years.
"They're pure-blooded Berkshires. I'm raising 33 of them. We've been raising these kind of pigs for two years," Wayne E. Herring Jr., one of the owners of a small, family-run animal farm, said. Herring's Green Grass Farm is raising specialty meats, including these heritage breed swine.
And they're among the "heritage breed" animals being raised in Schuylkill County, Dave Hartman, an agriculture educator and part of the livestock team at the Penn State Extension office in Bloomsburg, Columbia County, said Wednesday.
Leslie Kraft, a literacy coach at Pottsville Area High School, said Wednesday she's fascinated by heritage breeds, recently read a book about them and got together with a friends to raise 12 Bourbon Red turkeys at Herring's.
"Heritage breeds are traditional livestock breeds that were raised by our forefathers. These are the breeds of a bygone era, before industrial agriculture became a mainstream practice," according to the website for The Livestock Conservancy, www.lifestockconservancy.org.
The conservancy, based in Pittsboro, North Carolina, is a nonprofit organization which promotes heritage breed farming to protect "nearly 200 breeds of livestock and poultry from extinction," according to its website.
Heritage breed farming is a trend being adopted by some small scale, direct market farmers, according to Herring and Hartman.
Another heritage breed farmer in Schuylkill County is Rebekah Noecker, who runs Diamond N Farm in Schuylkill Haven with her husband, Matt. The Noeckers sold the Bourbon Red turkey chicks to Herring's.
"I've been doing a lot of research about heritage breeds because some of the more common breeds used in factory farming are used to being raised in factories and warehouses and being slaughtered very quickly. They're quick growth products rather than something that's prized for its flavor or tenderness," Kraft said Wednesday.
She was inspired to raise Bourbon Red turkeys after reading "Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life" by Barbara Kingsolver.
Aside from the Noeckers, Herring didn't know of any other farmers in Schuylkill County who were raising heritage breed animals.
According to the conservancy's website, the closest heritage breed farmer to Schuylkill County is Dorian Nygard, Hamburg, Berks County, who breeds Gloucestershire Old Spots pigs.
"We've been breeding them for four years. While they're not on the endangered list, there's not a lot of them in the world. Right now, I have three adults, two sows and one boar. They have piglets twice a year. And each time they have eight to 10 piglets," Nygard said Wednesday.
"I think you can easily say interest in heritage breeds is growing, backed by a growing consciousness of where people get their food and how it is produced. We have also seen heritage breeds become very popular among the country's top chefs because of the noticeable presence of flavor in meat, dairy and eggs compared to much of the products people are used to buying in grocery stores," Ryan Walker, the conservancy's marketing and communications manager, said June 19.
According to the website for Oklahoma State University Department of Animal Science, the Berkshire hog was discovered 300 years ago by Oliver Cromwell's army at Reading, the county seat of the shire of Berks in England.
"This original Berkshire was a reddish or sandy colored hog, sometimes spotted. This would account for the sandy hair still sometimes seen in the white areas of some modern Berkshires. Later, this basic stock was refined with a cross of Siamese and Chinese blood, bringing the color pattern we see today along with the quality of more efficient gains. This was the only outside blood that has gone into the Berkshire breed within the time of recorded livestock history. For 200 years now, the Berkshire bloodstream has been pure, as far as the records are known today," according to www.ansi.okstate.edu.
"They're not as popular as they were a long time ago. But for people who have developed outdoor systems, they have gotten pretty popular," Hartman said.
Hogs like these and Gloucestershire Old Spots pigs are unique in a few ways, including the way they're raised.
"Heritage breed pigs graze and the nutrient value is really good for us because, as humans, we really need to eat nutrient-dense food," Nygard said.
While the Berkshire hog isn't on the endangered species list at livestockconservancy.org, the Gloucestershire Old Spots pig is "critical" and the Bourbon Red turkey is listed as "endangered."
"I didn't know that. I know they are very hard to find. Last year, I found some eggs at an auction. We hatched out a couple eggs and got a couple hens," Rebekah Noecker said of the Bourbon Red turkey.
"The Bourbon Red turkey is named for Bourbon County in Kentucky's Bluegrass region where it originated in the late 1800s. It was developed by J.F. Barbee from crosses between Buff, Bronze and White Holland turkeys, though the initial steps actually took place in Pennsylvania, where Buff turkeys of darker red hues - called Tuscarora or Tuscawara - were bred and then taken west with settlers bound for Ohio and Kentucky," according to livestockconservancy.org.