Swine n' Dine

Years ago, while living in Los Angeles, Joey McQuade went shopping for steaks. A butcher recommended pork chops from the heritage Berkshire breed. The meat was red and marbled like beef, which startled him, as it would anyone living in the era of the commercial pork industry’s “other white meat” marketing campaign. The brilliance of that message was in masking one of the essential differences between animals that exercise and those that don’t, like confined factory-farmed pigs: their muscles receive much less of the oxygen-storing protein called myoglobin, which makes meat red. The incredible flavor of that pork chop was equally eye-opening for McQuade. He had dreams of running a farm one day, and from that meal came the idea of including free-roaming heritage-breed pigs. 

It’s a long road from the West Coast to South Carolina, a gap as wide as McQuade’s life traveling the world as an importer of handmade folk art and furniture to running a family farm—Certified Organic and Animal Welfare Approved—in Saluda County. He had promised his wife, Erin, they would bring their children back East near their families, and one day, farm. Meanwhile, they browsed for land for sale, and he read every book he could find on sustainable farming. 

In 2011 their dream took root on 100 rundown acres in Saluda, overgrown with bramble but centered by a century-old farm house surrounded by magnificent oak trees. For Joey especially, the trees sealed the deal. “It would take two or three generations for trees to grow that large, and I am neither patient nor immortal.” Located on Sylvan Road, a word they learned means “spirit of the woods,” Sylvan Farm named itself.  

Changing lifestyles took time, McQuade says.  

“It was so quiet at night, I couldn’t sleep for the first couple weeks.”  

While clearing the farm and shoring up the house, they grew kale, collards, radishes, turnips, carrots and heirloom tomatoes. Selling produce one Saturday at the Lexington market, they met Brian Nelson, chef at Keg Cowboy.  

“I pretty much bought them out of everything they had,” says Nelson, and his restaurant soon became a regular customer. Later, as a buyer of Sylvan Farm pork, and after partnering on a farm-to-table dinner, Nelson would influence McQuade’s decision to crossbreed pigs.   

McQuade started raising Gloucestershire Old Spots, an easygoing pig that thrives on pasture. Its meat is especially good as bacon, sausage and Boston butt, but its small loins don’t produce sizeable hams and chops. So he looked at other breeds to find the mix of size and taste, and decided on Duroc, a muscular, well-developed red meat pig, and Berkshire, known for its tenderness and marbling. Crossing a Duroc boar with Berkshire females, he has produced what he describes as a “beautiful pig that’s extremely active, a great forager and produces incredible meat.”