Peter Davies is a dealer in world textiles and kilim rugs, particularly those from Turkey, a destination he knows well and for which he also is a travel consultant. His partner, Mark Scherzer, has his own law firm, specializing in health law. For most of the past decade, the pair also have farmed on 39 acres in Germantown, NY. At Turkana Farms, Davies and Scherzer raise heritage-breed livestock—pigs, sheep, cattle, and poultry of every stripe, most famously their heritage-breed turkeys, and grow vegetables and berries, all of which they sell from their farm kitchen and from their New York City loft. This blog is adapted from the weekly e-mail they send to their customers. Much of the information here comes from an entertaining and informative book, Peter Kaminsky’s, "Pig Perfect: Encounters with Remarkable Swine and the Best Ways to Cook Them," (Hyperion, New York). Kaminsky, a self-described “Hamthropologist”, was the speaker two years ago at a Mardi Gras dinner at the Savoy Restaurant in Soho, where one of Turkana Farm's Ossabaw/Tamworth crossbreeds was served at a thirteen-course feast, each course featuring a different part of the pig.
Pictured here is Patty, one of our purebred Ossabaw sows, the mother of Carmen (below) and Miranda, which are crossbred, half Ossabaw/half Tamworth. But that's a topic for another day. Today our subject is Ossabaws. Actually, the formal name Patty and her bloodline go by is “Ossabaw Island Hogs”. They are considered a heritage breed and are listed by The American Livestock Breeds Conservancy on the Critical List, which means there are only 200 registered in the United States, and an estimated global population of only around 500. Actually their story begins in Galicia, the northeast province of Spain, where pork reigns supreme. It is here that the Iberico breed has been raised for centuries in oak forests especially planted and cared for as “pasture” for the Iberico, ensuring them a diet that heavily consists of acorns. The Iberico ham that results is probably the best and most expensive ham in the world, and, until the recent economic downturn, was beginning to find its way into the diet of affluent American foodies. Iberico were the first breed of European pig to find their way to the New World. It was the practice of Spanish Conquistadores in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries to drop off breeding pairs of pigs at ports of call they intended to return to, so that they would find awaiting them on their return, a tasty source of protein. Thus from the time of Columbus on, the Iberico were introduced to the islands of the Caribbean as well as along the coasts of North and South America. They were apparently a common breed of pig in colonial times. In most places with settled populations, however, the breed has not come down to the present, having either been consumed, displaced by other breeds, or absorbed by interbreeding into other breeds of pigs. With one notable exception: The uninhabited island of Ossabaw off the coast of Georgia, which has been home to the descendants of the Spanish Iberico for hundreds of years. In this isolation, the purity of the breed survived. But while the Iberico survived, they also evolved over the centuries to adapt to the island conditions, eventually becoming the breed we now call the Ossabaw. Their evolution would have been a perfect case study for Darwin. On the island, with limited forage, particularly in winter, the breed miniaturized (the technical term is “insular dwarfism”) and developed unusual “efficiency”—the ability to thrive on a very sparse, limited diet. This efficiency means they lay on proportionately more fat than any other breed of pig, a fat richer than most in Omega 3 fatty acids (especially once an acorn-heavy diet like that of the Ibericos is restored).
The first known owner of the island of Ossabaw was a princess of the Creek Nation, born in 1700 of a native American mother and an English father. In appreciation for various trade services, Chief Tomo-chi-chi, her cousin, gave her massive acreage on the Georgia coast—the site of what would eventually become Savannah, as well as three islands, including Ossabaw. She married three English husbands in succession and ended up with the interesting name of Mary Bosomworth. Eventually, Mary sold off Ossabaw, and it passed through a series of hands, but was never settled, until it was purchased in 1924 by Dr. Henry Norton Torrey, a successful businessman from Grosse Pointe, Michigan, who erected a pink stucco Spanish Colonial villa there. Fortunately, his daughter, Sandy White, who lived alone on the island into her 90’s, turned out to be an avid preservationist, who zealously kept the island unspoiled and undeveloped. She left the Ossabaws free to roam in the woods and swamps, fencing them off from her estate grounds, except for her three Ossabaw pets: Vidal Sassoon (so-called because of his striking coiffure), Paul Mitchell (who had a somewhat less unruly mane), and Venus (because of her availability?). Even though she faced financial difficulties toward the end of her life, Ms. White resisted offers from developers to whom she could probably have sold the island for hundreds of millions of dollars. Finally, reluctantly, she sold it to the State of Georgia for four million dollars with the proviso that it would remain a nature preserve in perpetuity. And thus, after surviving in a laissez-faire environment for five hundred years, the Ossabaw seemed sure of a protected future in the new State of Georgia preserve.. But fifteen or so years ago, the splendid isolation of the Ossabaws ended as the State, concerned about protecting the nesting grounds of the loggerhead turtles from the depredations of the Ossabaw, ordered their extermination. Twelve hundred pigs were shot and left to rot before a group emerged to fight for the preservation of the breed. The American Livestock Breed Conservancy now places the Ossabaw on its Critical List, and small farms like ours are adopting breeding pairs to ensure the breed's survival. Our Ossabaw sows come to us by way of a breeder in North Carolina, our boar from George Washington’s Mount Vernon. It is our intent to sell Ossabaws as breeders as well as feeders. Helping to establish Ossabaws as breeders at other farms will, of course, help to assure the survival of this, the oldest pig breed in America. Raising a certain number as feeders, (i.e. to be raised for food, which is where you come in), will also help to perpetuate the breed by creating a taste for this delicious pork and establishing market demand. For reasons to be explained in a future column, we are endeavoring not only to breed purebred Ossabaws, but also to cross them with another heritage breed, Tamworths. We hope to have piglets of both varieties this spring, with 13 crosses already having joined us. And that is much of the story behind our Carmen and Miranda, Patty and Laverne (nee Andrews), and Vernon, the boar. As you can see we at Turkana Farms are continuing the long and illustrious Ossabaw tradition, which is replete with outrageous names.
