“We knew we were never going to be the biggest or the most efficient,” said Mr. Eckhouse, 64. “We were going to be small and make something very special.”

Nor was their goal to replicate Italian or Spanish prosciutto. “It would be American prosciutto,” he said. “The flavor is very rich, very sweet, very meaty.”

From the beginning, the couple insisted on humane and healthy practices. They use no pork from pigs fed nontherapeutic antibiotics or raised in confinement pens in huge metal barns. They require that growers provide pigs space to congregate, a place to sleep in deep bedding and access to the outdoors.

The acorn-fed Tamworths are raised by Russell Kremer on 150 acres of woodland in the Ozark Mountains. Each fall, the pigs graze among the trees, consuming five or six varieties of acorns.

The Eckhouses developed their taste for the thinly sliced, richly marbled cured ham during the 3 1/2 years they lived in Parma, Italy, where Mr. Eckhouse was the chief executive of the Italian subsidiary of what was then known as Pioneer Hi-Bred International, a Des Moines seed company. They lived an Italian life, sent their children to Italian preschools and ate prosciutto two or three times a week. “We didn’t learn anything about making it, but we learned about eating it,” he said.

When they returned to Iowa in 1989, they were struck by the beauty of the landscape, with crops “bursting out of the ground and the rich black soil,” he said. “You think: ‘This is amazing. What are we making here that we can be proud of? What are we making that shows that we really appreciate this bounty?’ ”

Maybe, they said, they could make prosciutto. Most of their friends weren’t even sure what it was.

Mr. Eckhouse left Pioneer in mid-2000 and spent the rest of that year preparing what his wife calls “his master’s thesis on prosciutto.” It was a practical, if hopeful, plan for making something new of a 2,000-year-old meat. They were inspired by the American evolution of other European products like cheese, wine and craft beer.