Made in the Shade, a Trip to Tatum Ridge Farms
The sun is brightening on Tatum Ridge Farms, and its winged and four-legged populace has begun to raise a chorus to the day. Hundreds of chickens coo in a harmony that buzzes ticklishly in a listener’s chest. A herd of rare Hereford pigs adds bass and tenor notes with their chuckling, snuffling, and occasional shriek.
Farmer Jason Coblentz makes his way down an alley between paddocks canopied by rows upon rows of slender oaks. He adds his voice to the choir with a favorite hymn.
“The pigs don’t see well, so I sing to let them know I’m coming. They seem to like it,” Coblentz says, adding with a smile, “Maybe it’s because I sound like them.”
Nearing two years in operation, Tatum Ridge doesn’t have the look of a farm in infancy. This can be partly explained by the land’s early history as a citrus grove. Signs of that heritage peer out here and there between the oaks: a few surviving orange trees, their branches curving with heavy orbs that glow like little suns in the light filtering down.
By introducing a herd of pigs to the woods, Tatum Ridge Farms approach a form of silvopasture, the integration of livestock and forested land that is one of humanity’s oldest agricultural practices. To someone who’s never encountered forest-raised pork before, it’s striking how perfectly the pigs take to these unique farm environs. It’s hard to be happier than a pig in mud unless, apparently, you’re a pig that’s gorged on foraged acorns and napping blissfully in a soft bed of leaf litter.
Coblentz and his next-door neighbor, Steven Brubacher, have worked on this property as metalworking partners for years. For their wives, Audy Coblentz and Angela Brubacher, it’s been a living classroom in which to homeschool their kids, a total of 15 youngsters ranging from crawling to voting age. Now as a working organic farm, this place is a natural extension of their desire to nourish their families and steward the land, with all Coblentz and Brubacher hands on deck.
On the farm’s front side, where the trees are sparse, farmhand Sergio Rincon checks on coops of broiler chickens. Tatum Ridge Farms added chicken meat to their organically raised offerings of eggs and nose-to-tail pork products this year. Rincon is busy preparing for a butchering party with neighbors interested in gaining knowledge and first-hand experience in where their poultry comes from.
“There’s opportunity here for people to learn a valuable skill that used to be passed down through the generations,” Rincon says, revealing how a local farm not only feeds a community’s people but its knowledge base, too.
Little testaments to working together, including interspecies collaboration, pop up all over the farm. For instance, the chickens have been known to assist the elder Brubacher daughters with mulch-spreading chores. Once pale and sandy, parts of the forest floor have turned dark and dense with nutrients thanks to the animals’ presence. Coblentz has started watching the oaks, hoping they’ll respond over time with a downpour of extra acorns for the pigs to enjoy.
Coblentz and Rincon both speak of great potential to expand the farm’s cooperative network of living things. Rincon came to the farm last year with a passion for fruit trees, while Coblentz is nurturing an idea for growing gourmet mushrooms on oak logs. However, life on the farm has a way of enforcing the ethos of all things in their own time, one day at a time.
“Running at full rip in year-round warmth, you can easily overextend yourself,” Coblentz cautions. “You can’t hold 100 miles per hour forever.” When the pandemic forced local farmers’ markets to shut down for months on end, his family treasured extra togetherness, making contactless deliveries and welcoming customers at a storefront in their carport. The pork chop has quickly established itself as the most popular item from Tatum Ridge Farms.
“Even if one of the kids doesn’t want to finish dinner,” Coblentz says, “they never fail to eat their chop and ask for some of mine.”
Search Tatum Ridge Farms for the key to raising a premium pork chop, and you can quickly point to the pigs’ organic feed, habitat, or care. Look deeper to find additional answers in the farmers’ deeply held values: strong community, cooperation, respect for the earth and its creatures—and heaps of gratitude.
“The farm has taught me to be more thankful, sometimes more often than I realize,” Coblentz says. “When I notice the smell of the dirt as I walk through the woods, it makes me want to take a deep breath.”
And sometimes, he exhales that breath as a hymn. Let’s add “song” to the list of ingredients that make Tatum Ridge Farms thrive and those chops taste ever so good.
Tatum Ridge Farms products are available locally at the Sarasota Farmers Market and for farm stand pickup (300 Tatum Rd. in Sarasota). For information on delivery and shipping, visit tatumridgefarms.com.
Local Snack Finds a Herd of New Fans
One of the trickiest jobs at Tatum Ridge Farms is moving pigs to a new paddock. The trick to it lies in the treat, and Tatum Ridge Farms has discovered a perfect solution in Uncle Phil’s Organic Popcorn. The Coblentzes connected with popper-in-chief Phil Pagano when he served as director of the Sarasota Farmers Market. Shortly after opening his new storefront, Pagano delivered a bag of the good stuff to the farm as a gift for the kids. It turned out to be an even bigger gift on rotation day! “We try hard to have our rotations be as smooth as possible to minimize stress to our herds,” says Audy Coblentz. “Our pigs are normally pretty easygoing and, of course, food is their love language!” Cautious of anything that isn’t their idea in the first place, the hogs readily follow trails of Uncle Phil’s Organic Popcorn into new pens. “Which is not surprising,” Audy says. “It’s delicious!”
