Wow, one of my favorite subjects! My dissatisfaction with commercial pork is exactly why I'm raising my own Tamworth Pigs on our farm when I get back and retire. Pork is not graded and you never know what you get in most distributors. I'm only getting 8 hogs, so it’ll be about a year until I get some bred & fed up and in the freezer.
When you look at small farms, look at two things: Breed and feed. Breed.
Hog breeds fall into basically two classifications, Bacon Type (Long Body) and Lard Type (short Round Body).
There are also domestic and heritage breeds. I prefer the heritage breeds, as they still have the ability to forage and can live off the land with much less grain and they produce a robust taste, unlike factory pork.
Many domestic breeds are contained in a building and feed grain and hog ration all their live with little exercise, they become fatter, resulting in undesirable over fat bellies: kind of like us if we sit on the couch and eat corn chips all of our life. Many producers go this route, as it finishes the hogs faster to get them to market.
Unfortunately, Pigs only have two sides, so you only get about 18-24 pounds of pork belly off of a normal 250 pound animal. Some ‘bacon types’ like the Tamworth have longer bodies and deeper sides and perfectly streaked bacon. Of course, their hams and shoulders are not as big as some other the others.
By the way, I've talked to a lot of breeders who know the business and trends, and the cost of feed has forced many commercial hog businesses to downscale the number of hogs they breed with many sows going to slaughter.
Another thing I’m really considering is Cutting some into Australian bacon. In this fashion, you butcher hogs a smaller weight, and take the pork belly off with the pork loin still attached and cure it all into bacon. I think this would be good, having a rasher of great bacon with a slab of Canadian bacon attached.
Anyway, all I can do is dream of great hog meat, as I’m still in Qatar, a porkless country, until June.