Let me tell you about a Grigio del Casentino pig

Grigio del Casentino® is an extensive breeding that protects animal welfare, the environment, and consumer health. In the Italian—and even international—context, our approach is an exception. The norm involves large sheds from which the animals only leave to go to the slaughterhouse.

Our project does not follow the logic of profit — otherwise, we would do like everyone else — but instead follows the path of tradition, with just a few modernizations and improvements. An old-fashioned approach that perfectly meets all the needs of today. Let’s see how.

An ethical, healthy and sustainable system

Extensive farming is good for the animals, allowing them to live as close as possible to their natural state, but also for the environment and the end consumer.

Our farming is

• ethical: the animals have all the space they need to live well, following their natural instincts. At Grigio del Casentino®, we follow this rule: maximum ten pigs per hectare of land. This pig/land ratio also allows us to protect the soil and keep the nitrogen problem in the effluent under control.
  It is also ethical in terms of time, as we slaughter animals that are at least 14 months old. The pigs spend their time in a natural way in the Casentino forests, without drugs that accelerate their growth. As we also said in our article on conscious meat consumption, the entire project is based on respecting time. We are not interested in shortcuts because speeding up the pace means corrupting something exceptional.
• healthy: our animals eat what nature gives them according to the seasons and a natural, healthy and wholesome supplementation we have developed over the years. Hormones and antibiotics, which are regularly administered on intensive farming where the risk of epidemics and contagion is very high, are banned from our pigs’ diets.
• sustainable: extensive breeding has a limited environmental impact. We do not cut down trees to make room for pigs; rather, we protect our land. We keep this land in its natural state, as we inherited it from our grandparents and as we want to leave it to our children. We rely on a trusted local abattoir, reducing transportation needs.

What has changed – and what has not – compared to traditional farming

Compared to fifty years ago, many things have changed. Today, we can guarantee the highest level of health safety and compliance with all hygiene standards related not only to slaughtering, but also to curing, packaging and shipping.

Our laboratory in Soci is equipped with the latest technology to keep fresh meat at the right temperature. We have cells for meat resting, salting and curing with a state-of-the-art thermal control system.

We follow protocols for meat processing and sanitizing environments with the utmost care. Compared to the way meat was produced thirty years ago, there have been significant advancements in hygienic control.

While many things have changed, many have remained the same. For us, the pig is still a precious asset, just as it was for the farmers in Casentino seventy years ago. “Nothing from the pig goes to waste” is our motto and the foundation of our technique.

For us, slaughtering an animal just to make two hams is inconceivable. When we process an animal, we do it with respect and responsibility. Every cut of meat is valuable and must be enhanced, also because sometimes it is in the “scraps” that the most sincere taste is hidden.

Our project is also deeply rooted in the territory. Grigio del Casentino® would not be the same without Casentino. These animals are closely connected to these forests. The Grigio was only recognized as a fattening hybrid in 2022, but it has characterized our valley for centuries.

Casentino is the natural habitat of our pigs, but it is also our home, the place where we grew up and started our business. Ours is first and foremost a project to recover a tradition, which we have updated to meet all hygienic and sanitary requirements.

Extensive breeding is the basis of conscious meat consumption. We have returned to the methods of the past, without drugs or sheds, because meat, for us, is a precious asset and not an industrial product that can be mass-produced.