Dear Reader:
There is no book in print less than a century old that treats pork, ruminant or poultry husbandry, slaughter and preservation in one volume. These have become divided fields, resulting in a disjointed narrative.
Even with this fragmentation and our increasing estrangement from our sustenance, people still believe that once meat growing was a simple delight of human scale. It has been my joy, passion and full employment for 8 years to dress this hope in knowledge and capability through my classes and online education. The purpose of Farmstead Meatsmith is to unlock the peasant art of porcine abundance from field to plate.
For the past decade, I have been the farmer, slaughterman, butcher, charcutier and cook simultaneously. I have learned that though these are separate disciplines, each worth a lifetime of pursuit, they all fit in the peasant kitchen. This is not because peasants are primitive, limited to the artless struggle to fill the stomach. To this day, the best ham in the world is made using peasant methods. No, the home-cook could raise, slaughter, butcher, cure and cook the family pig because the peasant kitchen is magnanimous. The cures that hold winter’s famine at bay also taste very well. Thrift and extravagance kiss in the peasant kitchen.
To share the fruit of this kind of kitchen, I want to offer a community to you. This community will include resources for an earnest and winsome approach to domestic livestock raising, harvesting and eating…the only one of its kind in the country.
If the thoughts and mission stated here on our website interest you, I invite you to consider all the tools and inspirations we can bring your home table. As you work to grow your domestic altar around Harvest we look forward to hearing of all the fruits that come your way through the little yet hopeful message of your servant,
Brandon Sheard
What’s included:
Exclusive Videos
Here we introduce our Harvest Journal Films: Demonstrative sessions with Brandon on a wide variety of topics. We filmed in both our butcher shop & on the fields of local small Pacific Northwest farms.
*Our response to the need for immediate homestead food security in 2020 resulted in a making available a small handful of our older videos here, for free, which were edited and listed on our YouTube channel. This vault contains the vast majority of films exclusively for our members, 5 years long now in its curation (nearly 50 films).
Meatsmith Community
- Access to our killer private Facebook Group, Meatsmith Table. Includes live access to podcast recordings. Send us your comments and questions pertaining to the topic at hand.
- Monthly Facebook Live Chats with Brandon, our primary way of providing fresh, real-time, and consistent engagement with our members. Brandon hops on the private Meatsmith Table FB group for Live Q&A with our members. You receive more unfiltered ‘Brandon’ time, without podcast ‘filler’.
Resource Library
- All 10 The Butcher’s Salt e-chapters
- To Kill a Pig Nicely slaughter film (unedited version); free edited version available on YouTube here)
- Archived Live Chats: 55 (and counting) past chats (over an hour of conversation time each).
Exclusive Articles
Written by Brandon, our 20+ Harvest Journal entries will supply not a little inspiration, philosophy and know-how on the multi-dimensional topics of slaughter, butchery, cookery, charcuterie, wrappery, cutlery, roastery, etc.
Additional Information:
→Meatsmith Membership is a subscription that renews automatically monthly or annually.
→Membership Terms and Conditions
- We offer monthly memberships for $17.49 with a one-time signup fee of $29.99. The fee covers all the additional membership content we’ve added since 2017. With an annual membership of $189.49/year we waive the sign up fee.
- Meatsmith Membership is an auto-renewing subscription. You can cancel your membership at any time by going to My Account < Subscriptions < Actions < Cancel.
- We do not offer membership refunds. If you don’t want to be charged, please take note of your renewal date and cancel your membership a full 24 hours before it’s set to renew. You can find your renewal date under My Account < Subscriptions.
→Want to gift a Membership?
Our system can only make one Membership purchase at a time. If you intend to purchase multiple Memberships, please process them individually.
1) Enter your giftee’s name in the Billing Details. The username for the account you make will be auto-generated based on the name you enter and cannot be changed. In the address field, enter the address connected to your credit card.
2) The password you set at checkout can be reset later at My Account < Account Details.
3) If you don’t want your giftee to know about the gift just yet, use your email address and we’ll change it manually later.
4) Leave us a note in your order saying the Membership is a gift. Please provide us with your giftee’s name and email address and when you want us to notify them.
If you have any questions about this, please email us at Community@farmsteadmeatsmith.com.