Meet the farmer – DaSilva Farm

Previously I had written about my experience with a couple of mail order meat services: Walden Meat Co and Crowd Cow.  Both good experiences, customer service was excellent, meat tastes great but the extra charge for shipping makes it even more expensive.  I also thought that the good done supporting a small farm was slightly offset by the wasted resources taken by shipping chicken breasts from Alabama to Massachusetts.

This then lead me to look for local farms in the Massachusetts or New Hampshire area where I could purchase from directly, saving money on shipping and saving the environment by not putting meat on plane.  I quickly found that there are a lot of farms in the area that practice sustainable farming for all types of meat and eggs.  Many are within a couple of hours drive from my house as well.  Even better was that I found that there are some of these farms at some of the local farmers markets close to where I live.

One of the farms that I found was DaSilva Farm located in Portsmouth, Rhode Island – 60 miles from where I live.  Their website states that they pasture-raise their poultry and pigs, chemical and antibiotic free.  Even better they have a stand at the Braintree Farmers market every Saturday – only 5 miles from where I live! Checks all the boxes for feel good meat – responsibly raised, local small family farm that doesn’t have to be shipped – there is also a cute photo of the farmer and his family– how can you not support them!  So one September Saturday morning I took my oldest son to the Braintree Farmers market as we were on our way to soccer.

Sure enough manning the DaSilva stand himself was the farmer Joshua DaSilva (I recognized him from the photos from his website).  He mentioned that he was short on produce right now but would be completely re-stocked in 3 weeks – so I bought a pack of maple pork breakfast sausages, a 4lb pack of bone in pork chops and some ground beef.  I packed them in the cooler I brought (everything was frozen) and went to soccer feeling pretty good that I supported that nice family farm.

When I got home I couldn’t wait to try some of the DaSilva farm meat that I bought.  Something I noticed was that the meat was processed at Northeast Kingdom Processing from St Johnsbury, Vermont.  Not unusual that a small farm wouldn’t process their own meat but it should be noted that this meat did travel from Rhode Island to Vermont and back to Rhode Island (500 miles).  Definitely not the same magnitude as factory farm meat which can me shipped from the midwest or even Australia.  I also noticed from the website that they didn’t mention that they raised cows (only poultry and pigs) but they sold ground beef – makes me wonder did they raise these cows themselves?