Deep in her soul, Diana Prichard believes a few things; that a fine-tuned food future is possible without all the in-fighting, that the best bacon comes from pigs who get belly rubs and behind-the-ear scritches, and that the only tomato worth eating is one that was plucked from her own garden beneath the heat of a mid-summer sun. When she was young her mother said she should grow up to marry a hog farmer. She couldn’t find one she liked, so she became one instead.

Today she owns Olive Hill, a small Michigan hog farm, and works as a freelance food and agriculture writer, reporting from the intersections of food policy, farm business, and family life.

At Olive Hill she raises heritage breed pigs — Tamworths, Gloucestershire Old Spots, and Berkshires — on pasture and in deep-bedded pens, taking a few hundred swine from farrow to finish each year and sells the resultant pork to local Michigan families.

Her work has been featured by major media outlets such as CNN, NBC’s iVillage, Huffington Post, and BlogHer Food and she has had the pleasure of speaking to groups ranging in size from a few dozen to several hundred on behalf of organizations such as the American Livestock Breeds Conservancy and MidWest Poultry Federation.