The Lincoln Creek Ranch in Galvin recently earned a $1,200 grant from the Chicago-based nonprofit Food Animal Concerns Trust to fund two new farrowing huts for the farm’s pigs.
“The grant helps farmers who are farming humanly to take the next step in improving the welfare of their animals,” FACT Executive Director Richard Wood said.
Wood said about 60 farms around the country applied for the Fund-a-Farm grants, and nine farms, including Lincoln Creek Ranch, were awarded $1,200 to $1,500.
“I thought it was a long shot,” Lincoln Creek Farm owner Nate Lewis said. “But they seemed to like our idea.”
Lewis said the farm’s pigs, heirloom Tamworth sows, already gave birth this year so the portable farrowing huts will be constructed and put to use by next spring.
The farrowing huts will give the pigs a more comfortable place to give birth, Lewis said, rather than in a barn. The huts will also reduce the impact on the land around the barn and be more durable, Lewis said.
“We know anything we build they will destroy,” Lewis said. “But these are made out of steel so it is not something a pig can readily destroy.”
Lewis, who works full time in Olympia for the Washington State Department of Agriculture Organic Program, runs the farm with Melissa Barker, a farm manager at The Evergreen State College.
Lewis and Barker, who started their 15-acre, organic-certified farm in April 2010, raise cows, sheep, pigs, chickens and hens.
FACT collected over $13,000 to fund the first-annual Fund-a-Farm Project.
The other farms to earn grants include, Deck Family Farm in Junction City, Ore.; East Fork Farm in Marshall, N.C.; Fifth Crow Farm in Pescadero, Calif.; High Points Farms in Trumansburg, N.Y.; Kingbird Farm in Berkshire, N.Y.; Misty Brook Farm in Hardwick, Mass.; Triangle Beef in Fennville, Mich.; YKers Acres in Wrenshall, Minn.
