Features

The second batch of piglets born outside in our new system has now been moved into the straw barns.

They’re born out in the fields and stay out with their mothers who live outside all the time until they’re around 5 weeks old and then they’re weaned and moved to the barns.

Piglets are very prone to cold and an unhappy pig isn’t what we’re about. In the barns food and water is available at all times and the deep bed of straw keeps them warm and dry.

They have plenty of space to move about - you can see them on the web cam (look at the 'SEE ALSO' section in the top right hand corner of this page).

Our outdoor piglets do not have their teeth clipped or their tails docked and for more intensively reared pigs clipping teeth and docking tails is more normal practice as the pigs can fight and tail bite, especially if they’re stressed, and one way of stressing a pig is to keep them in crowded conditions.

Under our system the pigs have plenty of space and freedom and therefore do not get as stressed and so don’t tend to turn on each other and so we don’t need to clip teeth or dock tails.

After 10 weeks in our straw barns the piglets have grown from around 5 kilos to 40 kilos, so they are then moved to even lager straw barns to give them more space.

They stay in these ‘finishing’ barns for another 10 weeks and then they’re a whopping 100 kilos and are ready to be sent to the abattoir.

Our outdoor pigs have a pretty stress free happy life but it isn’t easy to communicate this to consumers as there is usually no differentiation between the two products on the supermarket shelves, so when our direct sales are up and running we will only sell pork that has been produced in our happy pig system.

We are going to run a ‘box scheme’ for sales first and are going to convert two stables at the farm into a butchery and a cold store.

Here we can ensure that our pork and beef is ‘hung’ to enhance flavour prior to being sold direct as good beef should be hung for at least 21 days, but most supermarket beef is not hung for any length of time as it costs more to hang a carcass than it does to sell it on immediately - we would like to hang our beef for a minimum of 21 days.

It hasn’t been normal practice to hang pork at all, but research suggests that hanging can also enhance the flavour of pork and so we aim to hang our pork as well.

For our box scheme we will have a number of different sized ‘boxes’ of meat available. Each box will contain a variety of beef, pork and lamb (from our neighbour’s farm), or whatever our customers request.

 The boxes will range in size from enough for a single person to a family box, with all sizes in between.

Animal-wise, we’ve got a new bull.

He’s quite a handsome fella as you can see and he’s only 18 months and so will grow quite a bit more.

We’ve got three at the moment and they’re all out with their ladies right now earning their keep!

 Mike has just sold some cows and we aim to reduce the number of cows further to around 50 for next year.

 This is linked to the new ‘Single Farm Payment’ (SFP) system. Under the old farm support system a support price was paid per cow kept, this naturally enough encouraged farmers to keep as many cows as possible to maximise payment. Under the SFP system payment is made on the basis of land area, with payment also closely linked to maintaining and enhancing environmental standards on the farmland.

So, it will encourage farmers to keep fewer animals and so promote less intensive animal keeping. So we’re reducing our cow numbers from 70 to 50.

Silage is being cut this week, so hopefully the weather will stay good. Silage is made from long grass, which is cut and then baled and wrapped in plastic.

The grass ferments and turns into silage that is stored and fed to the cows in the winter.

 On the other hand too much sun will give the sows sunburn, so we have to make sure there’s plenty of sunshade for them and plenty of water.

They love nothing better than a good wallow in a muddy bath.

Hopefully we won’t get a repeat of last week when some pig huts were set on fire in the field. Luckily no pigs were hurt, but you do wonder at some people….