ABOUT US

Black Dog Farm is a pasture-based pork and poultry farm located in beautiful Livingston, Montana. The farm was established in 2017 and is owned and managed by Tim & Kira, a husband and wife team, along with our dogs, cats, and little girl, Dottie. Tim, a certified welder and welding teacher in his pre-farm life is responsible for the day-to-day animal care and management, vehicle and equipment maintenance, fence construction and fixing, shelter and other infrastructure fabrication, feed hauling, problem solving, and heavy lifting. Kira, a licensed veterinarian, and a practicing veterinarian in her pre-farm life, is responsible for running the business, emails, inventory, farmers markets, payroll & hiring, orders & deliveries, supply purchases, accounting, ALL the various logistics that go into making this work like planning our chick and butchering season, pork processing dates, and scheduling, as well as, of course, any veterinary care for the animals. Dottie is responsible for insisting on gator and tractor rides, feeding the cats, and surveying all of her chickens. Our farm started out of a desire to raise pork and chicken we could feel good about eating; we could not consciously consume meat from animals raised in confinement systems and had trouble finding a source of ethically raised local pork and chicken. We now know that the lack of local chicken in Montana is due to huge processing issues and constraints, but that is a story for another day.

At Black Dog Farm, we work hard every day to raise meat & eggs from animals shown respect and dignity every day of their lives. Our animals live outdoors, rotating around our farm inside portable fencing and helping us rejuvinate our pastures after many decades of neglect. Our pigs, laying hens, and meat chickens eat a corn, soy, and GMO free feed of barley, peas, wheat, camelina, and species-specific organic mineral. Our feed is grown and milled about 60 miles from our farm by another local farmer, and we are really proud to support his feed business with our farm. We employ a team of livestock guardian dogs to keep both our animals, and our resident predators, safe. We believe raising animals outdoors on pasture, where they can express their natural behaviors, produces healthier, tastier food and is better for the animals and better for the environment. We are strong advocates of the local food movement, supporting other hyper-local farmers, ranchers, and producers, both in our own home and via our online store. We are proud of the food we produce and are amazed at the creativity and variety of other local food producers here in SW Montana.

In 2020, we constructed a state inspected on farm poultry processing facility and have been slaughtering and processing all of our chickens since. In 2022, we became Certified Animal Welfare Approved for our meat chickens, a label that guarantees animals are raised outdoors on pasture for their entire lives on an independent farm using truly sustainable high-welfare farming practices. We are particularly proud of this certification as the AWA standards for meat chickens are particularly strict. We are also a farrow-to-finish pork operation, meaning we keep our own breeding stock and all of the pigs we butcher are born and live their whole lives on our farm. We use a very well regarded local butcher shop, Amsterdam Meat Shop, to slaughter our pigs and process our pork. You can read more about how we raise our animals by clicking the links below.