KuneKune’s ingest everything…with great relish. Food is greeted with excited grunts, and once they start eating, KuneKune’s vocalize with sounds that range from satisfied groans to humming murmurs. They’ll crunch garden scraps of all sorts, including roots, stems, and fruits. To eat grain, a KuneKune uses its lower jar like a shovel and shifts piles of food down its throat with successive, carefully-calibrated tosses. While grazing, KuneKune’s tear grass and leaves with satisfied ripping sounds. What to do with beer gone flat, sour milk, or an unused bowl of raw eggs? Just dish up for your Kune’s.
The soundtrack of KuneKune eating offers endless entertainment, and their adaptable digestion can bring financial benefit, too. Raising a traditional breed of pig often entails regular trips to the feed store, with the hefty hog hitting butchering weight only after you’ve invested in costly grain produced by the industrial ag system. In contrast, the KuneKune’s ability to turn grass and forage into home-grown, humanely raised pork offers a tangible benefit.
Patch pigs consume all manner of garden detritus, from bolting lettuce and tired kale to wormy radishes and end-of-season tomato vines. Because the soil at the Patch is rocky and forage is at a premium, a twice-a-day ration of soaked and fermented grain provides protection from overgrazing. Cracked eggs, old cheese, and vegetable leftovers from the back of the refrigerator are regular porcine treats.
KuneKune’s don’t fatten at the warp speed of factory pigs, but their value lies in their thrift over time. On a multi-use farmstead, a single KuneKune can provide a freezer full of bacon, ribs, and roasts for minimal feed cost. Their consistent amiability, ease of keeping, and
audible gustatory pleasure are icing on a cake they’d be glad to finish off.
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