Where do you get your pork from?

[Lewis]

This year most of my pork will be from the back of the in-laws farm. They have a decent pens (2 acres in total) and will be getting about 9 pigs in total (all going for the one way trip by Sept).

Has anyone else here raised their own meat? If so what breed / age were they? Any tips?

[PatriotsBob]

More power to you if you can raise your own meat. I am a coward and a hypocrite when it comes to meat. If I had to off it myself, I would be vegetarian. 100%. I just get mine from the local butcher who only sells British outdoor reared stuff. Got to go with the higher welfare stuff.

[noxskuses]

I kept Gloucester old spot and tamworth pigs for several years on my smallholding, and they produced the best pork I have ever eaten.

We always bought weaners in the early spring and slaughtered them in the winter.

Make sure you have a good solid trailer for transporting to abbatoir as pigs are VERY strong and will totally destroy anything lightweight or flimsy.

We ended up slaughtering our pigs onsite using a local knackerman, as we wanted less stress on the pigs and to collect the blood for black pudding (Can't do this if you go to abbatoir as it's illegal!!).

Be prepared for 'sausage making' day. Get all your tools/supplies/ingredients ready well in advance and make sure there is plenty of room in the freezer. When the split carcass arrives on the kitchen table, you better be ready to start! (Obviously a lot easier if you are using a butchery service, but nowhere near as much fun!).

Same rules apply for keeping any animal: Keep them dry, fed and watered and you won't go far wrong. Pigs get sunburnt like us, which is why they like wallowing in mud. Keep them cool in summer by starting a mud hole for them and fill with water. They'll do the rest! They love being sprayed with water when it's hot.

They like wallowing in mud, but hate wet bedding. Keep their sty dry, free from draughts and regularly change the straw (We built wooden floors into our pig huts and that helped keep it clean and dry a lot.). We used arched metal sheeting bolted together and screwed to a base of fence posts for their huts. Then we cut a piece of thick marine ply to fit one end and screwed that in. Make everything really solid, or they will just destroy it.

We added things like old tyres and big logs to their area as they love to play. Just be ready to remove the tyres if they start eating them, but our's never did.

We used electric fencing, which they need to be trained on initially so make sure you are ready for a few escapees to start with (Use a pig board to ferry them back).

We fed them on pig pellets and any vegetable/fruit/bread scraps. We used to pick up out of date stuff from local shops and practically fed them on nothing but apples in the autumn as everyone in the village used to give us all their windfalls.

Fresh water changed twice a day. The water container needs to be made of or encased in concrete or they will just flip it all day long. Pigs are as smart as dogs, and quickly learn new tricks and routines. They love nothing more than being scratched on the tummy or behind the ears (Seriously).

We kept pigs, chickens, ducks, geese etc., but pigs were my favourite. You can watch them all day long and were a joy to keep.

And they taste good

You'll have to do all the DEFRA triplicate forms and crap every time you move them and register your smallholding if not done already. Just check the DEFRA website for more info.

Best of luck

Pete

[keith157]

What an abosolutely brilliant post Pete if we weren't living in a 20x20 yd concrete nightmare I might even consider it. Shame the local authority wouldn't let me, not to mention the Food-Taster

We are seriously looking at a co-op venture as a couple of the local farms have this sort of arrangement.

[noxskuses]

I never owned any land. I just went to the local 'pick-your-own' and said 'how about giving me half an acre of waste ground and I'll create an extra attraction for your customers?' He jumped at the chance. People used to come to just see the pigs and chickens, and then also buy a few punnets of strawberries. It was a win win situation. We ended up leaving a container of pig nuts and an honesty box by the pigs, so people would pay 20p for a cup of feed and throw it to the pigs. It was a big success and paid for all of our feed. I basically had free free-range pork for years!

There's unused or overgrown land and woods all over the place, and I can guarantee the owners would love nothing more than getting it cleared (and everyone loves pigs). Pigs can clear land better than a tractor. No need for back-breaking digging when you got a pig around. Just chuck some food around and they're off!

Offer the land owner half a pig every year as a sweetener, and I can almost guarantee they will say yes.

[Lewis]

Wow thanks for the reply Pete! I know what you mean about the paperwork for moving, I had to do it last year.

We had Tamworth last year as well which were lovely (great personality). Not sure what we have this year, I'll find out.

Did you have any problem with fat? (The pork belly was mostly belly and less pork)

Also sausage making is a fine art I do not possess!

[noxskuses]

You'll always get more fat on rare breed pigs, but that's what makes them taste so good. There was always one or two fingers width of fat. We butchered a four year old sow once that had four fingers of fat on each pork chop. That was probably a bit excessive, but I didn't need any hard pork fat for sausage/salami recipes for the rest of the year.

We pretty much stuck with Tamworths in the end. The farm in Cornwall where we got them from had a boar, which was the size of a cow! No exaggeration. It had tusks and was the size of a Jersey cow. It was the most formidable creature I have ever seen.

But he was a real softy and loved having his tummy tickled

'Sausage making' day was just the day we called it when the meat came back. It was more like a weekend with all hands to the pump. We used to make sausages, salami, chorizo, black pudding, brawn, ham (air-dried & cured), bacon, braised trotters (really delicious), dried ears & tails...we used everything but the 'oink' as they say.

Bacon and ham are easy to make, and don't need any specialist equipment (I still make my own streaky bacon now using bought pork belly, and keep it in the garage, but it never tastes the same), but you really do need to invest in a machine for sausages. I've tried making them with a funnel and wooden spoon handle, but gave up in frustration.

I bought my mincer/sausage maker from Lidls many years ago for about £40, and it's still going strong. If you have a Kenwood type food mixer, you can normally get a mincer/sausage maker attachment for them I think. Making sausages is a lot of fun and the possibilities are endless.

[Lewis]

Glad to hear you have fat too. It's not all bad.. I mean it's not going to dry out when cooking for sure!

We send ours to a local butcher who prepares everything for us (all the cuts and we help make the sausages with his equipment.)

We didn't make any bacon though. I feel we missed out there and hopefully we can make some this year. We made some ham which took ages but was well worth it when it came to eating.

Thinking of investing in a chest freezer as you get 200 sausages + cuts on the same day. Even I can't handle that!

[Pecker]

More power to you if you can raise your own meat. I am a coward and a hypocrite when it comes to meat. If I had to off it myself, I would be vegetarian. 100%.

Youy're not a hypocrite.

Would you perform open heart sugery? Are you a hypocrite if you wouldn't, but still believe it's a good thing?

Sorry, just a brief philosophical point there.



BTW, back when 95% of the population lived in the countryside, almost everyone killed or was involved in the killing of animals from a very young age, and as far as we're aware almost no one was a vegetarian.

Food for thought. Pardon the pun.

Steve W

[keith157]

More power to you if you can raise your own meat. I am a coward and a hypocrite when it comes to meat. If I had to off it myself, I would be vegetarian. 100%.

Youy're not a hypocrite.

Would you perform open heart sugery? Are you a hypocrite if you wouldn't, but still believe it's a good thing?

Sorry, just a brief philosophical point there.



BTW, back when 95% of the population lived in the countryside, almost everyone killed or was involved in the killing of animals from a very young age, and as far as we're aware almost no one was a vegetarian.

Food for thought. Pardon the pun.

Steve W

Then when they moved into towns for work, a select group of people (guildsmen) decided that
a) they could do a better job
b) they could make more money from it
c) laws, regulations & Govt departments were created to "oversee" fair trading & Health & Safety so the relevant skills were lost