Shoreham story. While we are growing, harvesting, barreling, and bottling our favorite grain, the animals are also being fruitful and multiplying: Mangalitza and Kune Kune pigs, sheep, goats, and horses, to be specific. We raise them, herd them, and sometimes play in the mud with them (more about that later). We also cultivate oats, barley, alfalfa, honey, maple syrup, and an array of vegetables in a rambling garden outside the office. A flock of ducks occasionally calls the farm home, and each spring and fall we are serenaded by the chorus of migrating songbirds and waterfowl.

Rye makes it easy for WhistlePig to stand at the forefront of sustainable agriculture. It grows densely enough to exclude weeds, keeping the need for herbicides to a minimum. It’s also an excellent scavenger of soil-bound nitrogen, rendering heavy fertilization unnecessary. A winter crop, our main grain is planted in the fall, germinates the summer following the winter freeze, and is harvested midsummer. It’s as hardy as the early Vermont patriots who ‘“ in an audacious raid launched from the very town we call home ‘“ seized British cannon from Fort Ticonderoga, and hauled them across the frozen wilds of 18th century New England, over the great Green and White Mountains ‘“ directly through our Farm, and on to the heights of Dorchester in Boston. There, the British woke white-faced one St. Patrick’s Day morning to see their own guns trained on Her Majestey’s ships anchored below in Boston Harbor. The redcoats fled, and Boston was an American city ever thereafter.