♪♪ I just always wanted to farm.

I love working outside, just being in the great outdoors.

♪♪ [Eric Boor] When I was younger, I tagged along with my dad and grandpa riding around on the tractor and pickup and I just always knew that was what I wanted to do and how I wanted to live.

♪♪ [Nebbe] When Eric and Mikala Boor took over Eric's great-grandfather's nine-acre farm in Southern Iowa, they decided to implement sustainable and humane hog raising methods.

Despite initial skepticism from family and friends, their efforts are beginning to show positive results.

♪♪ [Eric Boor] I'm proud to be farming the same land that generations before me have farmed and raising livestock on it.

(nature sounds) (nature sounds) [Eric Boor] I've always thought pigs are a unique animal.

(whistles) ♪♪ (whistles) ♪♪ [Chris Boor] Eric would be a fourth-generation farmer for our family.

He had been farming and working with me and he decided that he wanted to raise hogs.

So, I told him I knew a lot about hogs and I would help him out.

I was glad that he wanted to start and branch out doing something on his own like that.

[Eric Boor] There was a lot of the unknown.

I knew some about raising pigs from prior experience working in the confinement, but I'm doing it a different way.

♪♪ [Eric Boor] I didn't want to raise pigs in a confinement.

I wanted them to be outside in the environment that they're meant to be in.

♪♪ [Eric Boor] I raise the pigs outside on dirt lots and fresh air.

♪♪ [Nebbe] The Boor's farm is one of few in Clarke County that is compliant with California's new animal welfare reform law, Proposition 12, which bans the confinement of breeding pigs and restricts the sale of non-compliant pork.

In fact, their hog operation is one of few in the state of Iowa that meets the new California regulations.

(hogs snorting) [Eric Boor] We farrow to finish 22 head of sows and sell them to Niman Ranch.

Farrow is when they're born and finish is feeding them out clear to market weight.

They spend their whole life on the farm.

And about at three we don't use farrowing crates, they're spend a hundred percent vegetarian diet.

[Chris Boor] Farming seems to be getting tougher all the time.

It's a lot harder to work with the modern economy and the cost of everything.

A lot of the farming has changed.

Just like in the hog production, you used to be able to drive down the road and every half a mile there would be a hog farm or somebody raising livestock.

But any more you've got to drive miles down the road.

♪♪ [Chris Boor] If I was to start out now, I'd have to start out the way he's doing it.

People want antibiotic free meat and worry about the humane way of raising animals.

♪♪ [Chris Boor] Raising hogs this way being antibiotic free type animals isn't an easy thing to do.

He's wanting to try new things all the time and keep up with the times.

[Eric Boor] It has been a learning process all along.

[Mikala Boor] We've got a lot of support from local farmers.

We know a lot of the farmers that live around here.

And a lot of them have come up to us if they see us in town or we run into them and they tell you how proud they are of you, how you've done a lot of work with what we have.

♪♪ [Chris Boor] I'm glad that that was the profession that he chose because that's what I've done for my life.

[Eric Boor] I believe farming like this has paid off.

It's important to work hard and have passion in what you do.

It is all right to do something that is different than a lot of operations and it's not conventional.

♪♪ [Eric Boor] It brings joy to me raising animals like this and farming this way.

♪♪