Duncan Farms

03/01/2024

Howling Fresh Farms CSA Program is NOW OPEN for enrollment! Memberships are LIMITED.

This CSA offers 2 different subscription options (classic or veggie lover) with the ability to add-on products to your CSA order delivered straight to your home!

Please support our local small farmers and register at
www.howlingfreshfarm.com
Howling Fresh Farm

01/05/2024

With another year ending, we look forward to a great 2024. We know that this is the time of year a lot of us look for clean, locally grown fresh food to kick start our new year. We want to take this time to share with you a NEW CSA PROGRAM by Howling Fresh Farm that runs through March to December.

This CSA offers a variety of items which can vary from premium organically grown produce, locally sourced meat (beef, pork, poultry), pasture raised eggs, mushrooms, artisan breads, specialty items, seasonings, and sweet treats with 2 different subscription options and the ability to add-on products to your CSA order.

Your decision to support local people helps small farmers, our environment and our local food scene.

Please tell your family and friends about the Howling Fresh Farms CSA program and make sure you follow them on social media and sign up for their newsletter so you get updates when their registration opens Howling Fresh Farm www.howlingfreshfarm.com

01/19/2023

Thank you to Everyone! It has been a pleasure serving our community with local, healthy food.

FINAL CLEARANCE EVENT & PICK UP DAYS

While our shop and farm is now closed to the public, we do have some of our AMAZING pork in stock from our last round of processing. We truly believe that our pork is world class and hope that you are able to fill your freezers with the last of our inventory.

How does it work? Visit the link below and purchase any of the items online by the deadlines listed and we will have them ready for pick up for the following days.

Sunday January 22 10am-2pm
Saturday January 28 10am-2pm

FINAL INVENTORY PRE-ORDER

Our Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) is a $50 biweekly delivery program that includes a bag of fresh & local food delivered to your home. We strive to create the cleanest food possible, and never use any chemicals, synthetic fertilizers, antibiotics, herbicides, or hormones.

01/09/2023

Tomorrow we will start our closing sale. We will be here from 10am to 4pm Tuesday to Saturday.

40% off Pork Products
50% off Steak Cuts
Additional Sale Items at Shop

Thank you everyone for your kind words and messages!

12/29/2022

10/17/2022

Hello everyone,

We don't normally take time to brag, but in this case we really wanted to highlight the work done by our herdswoman, Jess, over the last year, and provide you with more information about the pork products you will receive over the next few months in the CSA!

Almost two years ago, Jess dedicated herself to the idea that we should remove corn and soy from our feeds and increase the diversity of native forage available to the pigs. The impact of this on the pork specifically will be found in your newsletter and on our website, but the basics are that when you focus on increasing diverse forage and supplement with a soy and corn-free feed, the fat changes and actually becomes a healthy fat for you. The flavor is also unbelievable! This year we sent our pork to a nutritional analysis lab, and our pork fat is 54% saturated, 48% monounsaturated, and 6% polyunsaturated. The low polyunsaturated fat levels make it more stable when exposed to air and heat, creating less free-radicals while cooking than typical pork. Additionally, the USDA Nutritional Database says a 100g portion of pork chop has 20 IU of vitamin D3. We had our pork chops tested, and a 100g portion of pork chop (smaller than a deck of cards) has 72 IU of vitamin D3. That’s over 3x the amount, and it makes sense since our pigs are raised outside with sun on their skin their entire lives.

We are especially proud of these efforts, and of Jess. We are, here in north Alabama, and for you in your CSA, creating a level of quality in our pork that we don't believe anyone is matching anywhere in the U.S. If you care about the environment, our community, and your health, know that the pork you will be receiving over the next few months checks all of these boxes in a big way. It's sustainably (and regeneratively) grown meaning we could do this forever without ruining the environment or getting lots of external inputs; it's created jobs and opportunities for people living in Huntsville and making a living wage; it's delicious and probably some of the healthiest pork you will encounter!

Also, join us in celebrating Jess, her hard work over the last year in getting us here, and please enjoy the products as you start to receive them! I will be enjoying some of the pork chops on the grill with a little salt and pepper 🙂

Thanks

- The Duncans
www.huntsvillefarm.com

09/25/2022

Fall, for our herdswoman Jess, is time for traditional hog harvest. These next two months will be bittersweet for us and our hogs. Jess has been spending her days with the pigs for just over 5 months tending to them daily. While here, they are free to roam pasture and are treated with respect and given the best life possible in order to thank them for the meat they will provide to us.

Just this last week, we sent out the first round of our pasture raised hogs out to processor. We will continue to process all of our hogs from now until November, and expect to have our world class pork chops, breakfast links and more starting to arrive in mid October. As we get closer to the arrival of more of our pork to go into your CSA, we are excited for Jess to take over our newsletter. Jess' experience and style of regenerative agriculture not only focus' on the management of our land, health and lifestyle of our animals, but also the nutrition and quality of our meat. Her passion for what she does is undeniable, and insightful when it comes to knowing what you are consuming and how it gets to your plate.

09/20/2022

Today’s Fall CSA 🎃

1 Dozen Eggs, 1 Ground Beef, 1 Ground Pork, 1 New York Strip or 1 Chuck Eye, 1 Artisan Lettuce, 1lb Apples and 1 Sweet Cinnamon Pumpkin Lotion Bar

We also have an amazing addition to your CSA this week created by Lauren, our beekeeper. This week, she has made a special lotion bar with a seasonal flair to celebrate fall for our CSA members. These all natural, organic, beeswax lotion bars are amazing for dry cracked skin. Lauren has provided some information about why she chooses to create lotion bars using natural beeswax.

What is Beeswax?
Beeswax is created in the glands of young bees. It is chewed, warmed and manipulated for use in the hive to store pollen, honey and raise young bees. Bees must consume around 6-8lbs of honey to produce 1lb of wax, making beeswax an expensive and valuable resource for both the bees and the beekeeper. After harvesting honey, a beekeeper is left with beeswax capping's that can be rendered and used in personal care items.

Why is Beeswax Good for Skin?
Beeswax is a natural humectant that acts as a barrier to prevent moisture from leaving your skin. It can also protect your skin from toxins in the environment. Beeswax has been used for thousands of years to lubricate, waterproof, condition and polish. Our lotion bars contain no water, and the beeswax seals in all of the moisture provided by the sweet almond oil, jojoba oil, coconut oil, cocoa butter, shea butter, vitamin E and essentials oils.

09/03/2022

5 years ago, the Duncan’s planted some pawpaw trees, and they fruited for the first time this year!

Pawpaws are the largest edible fruit native to the U.S. They belong to a tropical fruit family known as the custard apple or Annonaceae. The pawpaw is the ONLY member of that family (a family with over 2000 species) that is not found in the tropics, but instead lives in our own backyard, from northern Florida up into snowy Canada. The pawpaw wandered away from it’s tropical origins over the course of millenia!

The fruit has a flavor and texture that is like a cross between a banana and mango. With it’s tropical looking leaves and mango-like appearance, it is a unique native forageable when compared to North America’s other native fruits (berries, persimmons, grapes, wild plums, etc.).

Never heard of or tried a pawpaw? You’re not alone. Many people nowadays haven’t. But they used to be a well known and loved part of North American culture. Native peoples had the earliest experiences with this fruit and later early settlers ate it as well. There was never a need to cultivate it as it grows abundantly in the wild. When humans stopped going to the woods for food, most forgot about the pawpaw. So far it hasn’t appeared in grocery stores because of it’s short shelf life, short fruiting season, and it’s inability to ripen off the tree if it’s harvested too soon.

Will pawpaws be available at your local grocer someday? Maybe. But for now, the pawpaw belongs to those who forage it in the wild, the small farmer, and those that plant them in their yards. It ripens very quickly and does not tolerate too much handling, making it difficult for stores to source and stock.

While our small pawpaw harvest is coming to an end, you can still come see the trees when you visit our farm shop! We hope to have more to sell next year. Meanwhile, we encourage you to plant them in your yard and go on a pawpaw hunt next time you go on a hike! Pawpaws remind us that there are still adventures to be had and new native foods to explore in our ecoregion, and encourages the question - what else grows around you?

Please enjoy these videos of our pigs eating (and planting) pawpaws! 5-7 years from now, the seeds that the pigs planted will be fruiting trees that will feed our pigs each August. It is a good example of how with some land management and the use of livestock, we are restoring the ecology of the land that we tend to.

Thanks for reading,

- Jess, herdswoman at Duncan Farms

08/31/2022

To our valuable CSA Members:

Kaitlin and I wanted to let you know about a few changes we are making to our current CSA program and why we are making these changes. We know this will be a long read, but by supporting our farm you have become part of our story and we want to keep you up to date. Please read the full update here:

https://www.huntsvillefarm.com/pages/policy-updates-for-2022

06/29/2022

We have a few more Apiary tours left for 2022! 🐝🍯

Join our beekeeper for a talk on the life of the honey bee and the equipment needed to keep them. Next, suit up and head out to the apiary to open real hives and learn about bee jobs, how honey is made and to spot the queen. Lastly, we’ll head back to the shop to taste and see how different honey products are made and sample honey straight from the hive.

Visit our website to sign up today:
https://www.huntsvillefarm.com/products/apiary-tours

06/24/2022

Our beautiful fresh onions went out this week in our CSA 🧅