Whatever tension exists within the group is built up around one moment: the actual killing of the hog.
“Taking the life of the pig should not be done lightly,” Lane said.
Let them stand still for the bullet, and stare the shooter in the eye, let them die while the sound of the shot is in the air, let them die as they fall, let the jugular blood spring hot to the knife, let its freshet be full, let this day begin again the change of hogs into people, not the other way around, for today we celebrate again our lives’ wedding with the world, for by our hunger, by this provisioning, we renew the bond.A moment of silence follows, then the bourbon is consumed, as one would a sacramental wine. Finally, the hog is dispatched with a single shot, dying, much like the poem states, while the shot still echoes in the still morning air.
While this marks only the beginning of the extremely detailed classes and weekend workshops Hand Hewn Farm performs throughout the year, the recitation of Berry’s poem is of deep importance to both Wharton and Lane.
“People come to these classes from various backgrounds and with differing worldviews,” Wharton said. “The poem is inadvertently unifying. It brings a commonality to the whole experience.”
Lane laughed: “We used to joke, early on, that we’ll know we’ve made it when Wendell Berry recites it at one of our events. After that, we can basically quit.”
Had the two friends abided by their own humor, they would no longer be teaching.
Wendell Berry recited “For the Hog Killing” at the 2022 and 2023 workshops Hand Hewn Farm put on in Berry’s own Henry County, Kentucky.
“That was a special occasion,” Wharton said. “It was striking. We’d met him prior [to January 2022] to give him an understanding of where we were coming from. When he arrived to read, it was clear that he had practiced his own poem. That was an honor. I later asked his daughter, Mary, if there was any time before that Wendell would have read the poem to kick off a hog butchering. She said that there was no time in his life when that would have happened before that first workshop.”
“And he ended the reading with an ‘amen. He really understood how we felt about it.”
It Takes a Village
The poem speaks to Hand Hewn Farm’s larger goal of moving toward togetherness. It’s a theme Wharton and Lane discovered when they began their hog butchering journey in 2014.The two friends, along with their wives, had been homesteading since 2009 but had yet to butcher anything larger than a chicken.
Lane recalls that when they butchered their first hogs, having absolutely no prior experience, the shot of bourbon—now so indicative of their highly polished process—was an excellent coping mechanism for mistakes.
However, the more they read about and practiced techniques and traditions, the more they trusted one another, and the more their knowledge and abilities grew. Both Lane and Wharton credit each other’s support as essential to their eventual success.
Butchering, especially an animal as large and aggressive as a hog, isn’t something anyone should do alone.
“It requires multiple hands,” Wharton said. “Back in the day, butchering was just another thing people did.”
It was part of rural community life. Farmers would come together to butcher each other’s hogs.
Teaching Traditional Knowledge
Granted, Grandma Patterson, whose farm in Tuscarawas County, Ohio, serves as Hand Hewn’s base of operations, wasn’t going into minute detail in order to teach groups of students how to butcher pigs and make the most from their meat.In the generation between Grandma Patterson and her grandson, something was lost. The way Americans live their daily lives changed. Government subsidies for farms meant industrial agriculture on a massive scale. The introduction of chemical fertilizers meant that crops could be grown out of season. Supermarkets cut and packaged meat, severing the connection between man and beast. The knowledge and wisdom of past generations began to fade.
Feeling the need to share this knowledge they would come to learn and love, Lane, a former art teacher, and Wharton, a former construction superintendent, decided to start holding workshops.
“Our first workshops were done locally,” Lane said. “We met others nearby and impacted our local community.”
Wharton said: “It was never pragmatic. Our business was never a means to an end. For us, at the start, we didn’t know anything, but it was exciting new terrain.”
They steadily expanded their sphere of influence, offering a travel option in which they would journey to a farm with hogs ready to be butchered and walk participants through the process from beginning to end.
Their methods—the calm atmosphere, the Wendell Berry poem, and the bourbon—created a truly unique butchering experience. Where chaos was expected, Wharton and Lane brought preparedness and control.
“People saw us doing things differently and would tell us to teach others,” Lane said.
In 2017, on an early stop of his “Great American Farm Tour,” popular homestead content creator Justin Rhodes filmed a Hand Hewn workshop in Georgia, which “expanded our reach for sure,” according to Lane.
But butchering is just one part of the whole-hog experience Hand Hewn creates. The second, far more appetizing half is where they found their niche: charcuterie.
Showing students all that can be made from a pig—prosciutto, bacon, blood sausage, salami—seemed to Wharton and Lane a natural outgrowth of the butchering process, as it was something cultures across the world have been doing for centuries. It also expanded Hand Hewn’s influence beyond just rural homesteaders.
“We’ll get people who are curious about curing meat in their apartment,” Lane said. “They like the culinary usage and the romantic appeal of having meat hanging in your kitchen.”
Wharton said: “We love foodies, too. They seek out and source quality products.”
Curing meat is incredibly scalable, according to Lane. All you need are the raw materials and the desire to attain greater knowledge.
Building Community
Teaching people these skills and traditions creates residential experts, which, in turn, eventually leads to generational change.“But that’s just the tip of the iceberg,” Wharton said. “The real work has been reminding people that we need one another.”
Through their workshops, Wharton and Lane are addressing something that the American homesteading community is embracing more and more: the need for community reliance. The fact is that solitary activity isn’t normal, even for self-reliant homesteaders. The idea that knowledge and wisdom can be accessed—and grown—through community lies at the core of Hand Hewn Farm’s philosophy.
“Years and years ago, we gave a speech, which was unorthodox at the time, about community building,” Wharton said. “We didn’t intend for it to be subversive, but it had that effect. ... We’re witnessing the shift from self-sufficiency to a broader awareness of what this movement can become.”
Lane said: “People are capable. They just need to see it happen and have the confidence to know that they can go home and do it.”
