Step-By-Step Guidance to Take Your Home-Raised Pork from Harvest to Table
The pig has always been the cornerstone of the frugal-yet-bountiful kitchen. For centuries, families relied on the yield of the backyard pig to carry them through winter and to grace the table at feast days.
In this class, you’ll learn how to step back into that tradition – while gaining the practical, hands-on skills to transform your pig into nourishing abundance. Unlike buying pork at the store or handing your animal over to a processor, home butchery means you keep everything. Nothing wasted. Nothing lost.
And here’s what that really means for you: every meal you prepare will taste better, cook easier, and nourish more deeply than anything you’ve known before. The fat will be sweet, the meat tender, and the yield complete – from roasts and chops to bacon, broth, lard, and hams. You’ll no longer depend on a processing plant’s schedule or accept their trimming losses. Instead, you’ll enjoy 100% of your pig’s value in your own kitchen, harvested with your own hands. That’s freedom, thrift, and extravagance all at once.
This class shows you how. You’ll learn the humane and efficient way to harvest your pig with simple tools, no fancy equipment required. Brandon will walk you through clear, traditional butchery methods, and you’ll discover how to render lard, make sausage, cook an offal fry, and roast the head without chemical agents or industrial shortcuts. The skills you gain connect you directly to centuries of human-scale harvesting and will serve your family for years to come.
By the time you are done taking this class, you will be able to harvest your own pigs, with confidence, using simple tools, nose to tail. You will transform your pig into abundance, one cut at a time.
Meet Your Instructor:
Brandon Sheard
Brandon Sheard, The Farmstead Meatsmith, has spent the past 15 years harvesting livestock as a mobile butcher, following simple, pre-modern traditions rooted in the peasant kitchen. Self-taught, Brandon came to butchery from academia, having grown up far from the realities of meat provisioning. His journey began when he and his wife, Lauren, sought solutions to health problems, discovering that raising and harvesting animals according to their nature was key to nourishment (and delicious!).
Brandon’s first experience slaughtering a pig came on a Pacific Northwest farm, where he immediately learned that butchery is not an end in itself: the goal, it turns out, “is cookery.”
By understanding how meat would be prepared in the pan, pot, and oven, Brandon found the rhythm of proper, artful harvesting. From that moment, his practice has focused on aligning the knife with the home kitchen, guided by thrift, taste, and nutrition.
In 2010, Brandon and Lauren founded Farmstead Meatsmith to provide on-farm harvesting and hands-on classes, teaching people nationwide to artfully harvest and prepare their own livestock. Their small-scale classes, as well as an online membership program, focus on husbandry, harvesting, curing, and cooking livestock at home. Brandon’s work preserves ancestral traditions while empowering modern homesteaders, combining practicality, flavor, and sustainability – and sharing the simple, nourishing art of whole-animal cookery.
By the time we’re done, you’ll have the confidence and skills to:
Turn your pig into real abundance. No more handing off your home-raised animals to a processor. You’ll learn how to transform your home-raised pig into nourishing food for your family.
Keep every bit of your yield. From the sweet fat to the tender meat, you’ll discover how to process, render, and preserve every part of the pig so your family enjoys 100% of what you’ve raised.
Harvest with confidence and care. You’ll learn the humane, efficient way to harvest using simple tools without fancy equipment or industrial methods.
Preserve pork the old way. Learn how to render lard, make sausage, cook an offal fry, and more without chemical curing agents or factory shortcuts.
Reconnect with traditional skills. Discover the art of home butchery as it was meant to be: thrifty, beautiful, and deeply satisfying.
Feed your family with pride. Every meal from your harvest, from roasts, hams, or humble soups, will carry the flavor and fulfillment of real craftsmanship, made with your own two hands.
For $199 You'll Get:
- A one-of-its-kind class on butchering your pigs using time-tested, traditional methods. There is nothing like this class anywhere else!
- Expert guidance through every stage, from the compassionate kill to making a variety of kitchen-ready cuts (including sausage), with Brandon’s trademark calm, practical know-how.
- An easy-to-follow, highly-detailed guide packed with instructions and recipes that walks you through every single step of the harvesting process.
- Bonus FAQ videos – with Brandon’s signature humor and clarity, plus an additional recorded Q&A coming soon!
Take a look inside! Here's the class details:
Lesson 1: See the Dream
Lesson 2: Meet the Instructor
Lesson 3: Supplies
Lesson 4: Supplies – Butchering
Lesson 5: Supplies – Sausage
Lesson 6: Introduction to Butchering
Lesson 7: Setting up the Rig
Lesson 8: Preparing for the Kill
Lesson 9: Making the Kill
Lesson 10: Preparing for Scalding
Lesson 11: Scalding
Lesson 12: Scraping and Shaving
Lesson 13: Decapitating
Lesson 14: Eviscerating
Lesson 15: Splitting the Pig
Lesson 16: Removing Leaf Fat and Rendering Lard
Lesson 17: Butchering – Portioning
Lesson 18: Butchering – Shoulder Quarter
Lesson 19: Butchering – Loin Quarter
Lesson 20: Butchering – Leg Quarter
Lesson 21: Butchering – Belly Quarter
Lesson 22: Storing Your Meat
Lesson 23: Prepping the Offal
Lesson 24: Making Slaughter-Day Offal Fry
Lesson 25: Roasting the Head
Lesson 26: Prepping Meat and Fat for Sausage
Lesson 27: Making Sausage
Lesson 28: Stuffing and Finishing Sausage
Lesson 29: Your Next Steps
Bonus FAQ Videos
29 easy-to-follow videos (plus FAQ videos) that break down simple, practical steps to butchering your own pork at home. Want thicker chops? No problem! Enjoy roasts? Brandon shows you how and where to cut them. Prefer to make tons of sausage? The beauty of home butchery is that YOU decide how to cut for your kitchen. And there’s zero waste. Zero!
A printable, step-by-step guide you can bring right into the harvest area. This is your butchering book for real life. It gives you highly detailed, step-by-step instructions that are just like having Brandon in your barn! (Or wherever it is you harvest your pork.) Invaluable information, right at your fingertips.
