Why Mangalista?
The Mangalista is a heritage breed of pig that hails from Hungary. It is known for its thick, Wooley coat making them look like a big teddy bear.
Our mangalista live on our family farm in the Minnesota woods where they are free to run and roam. They love digging up roots, greenery, and grubs from the dirt. They even make nests by digging very large holes in the earth and several will snuggle up at night in these holes. The Minnesota winters don’t bother them a bit, in fact it’s one of their favorite times because they play in the snow and can build even bigger nests, or maybe we should call them igloos?
It is very important to us, as we have six children, that our animals are tame and docile in temperament as this makes daily care and also transferring them new homes much easier. Since it takes 16-18 months to grow a mangalista to maturity its important we have happy pigs.
Our purebred Mangalistas are an intricate part of our farm and a lot of fun to raise. Pigs are a very intelligent animal and they each have their own unique personalities. We plan to continue to breed and expand our lines to be able to pedigree and register our Manglista herd, breeding only the best in look and temperament.
Check out our Pigs in the Woods
We are looking into registering our pigs into MBOAR; the mangalista registry for purebred mangalista. They have some very interesting history on the breed.
While they very much enjoy the roots, grubs, and greenery our herd is also fed a custom mix of GMO free oats, wheat, barley, and field peas. Field peas has been our favorite secret recipe for helping our pigs grow optimally and put on a good amount of meat while still retaining the flavorful fat. During the summer they also enjoy scraps from our garden and table. Several pigs even have their favorite snacks. For example, curley loves banana peels. Shirley and Nellie eat eggshells like chips . All of our pigs love melon rines, pumpkins, raspberry canes, acorns, and pigweed.
Curley and piglets eating Pumpkins
Our goal for our family is: if it’s not good for us, than why would we feed it to our animals? None of our animals have any GMO feed and we aim for organic as much as we can. We have started spreadsheets to track the percentages of different types of feed to be able to customize for our animals not only the best mix of feeds on paper, but we also put into practice and track which feeds help our animals to grow optimal and healthy. It is important to us not only to have healthy happy animals, but to extend those benefits to our family and friends.
The mangalista meat is highly sought after and only served in the finest restaurants as the fat contains high amounts of omega 3 fats (the healthy kind). The meat of the mangalista is unique in its rich, complex flavor due to the marbling of fat throughout; similar kobe beef. Even firm pork haters have loved our juicy, flavorful mangalista. The breed nearly went extinct when the push for commercially bred lean, low fat pork was popular. Recently, as we are learning fat has many health benefits, folks are turning back to the lard pig. Mangalista is still a rare breed in the United States, but gaining in popularity.
if you are curious to learn more about Mangalista fat and lard, click here.
if you want to see our herd, click here
