We got our first handful of pigs during lock down 2020 after struggling to source outdoor, free range pork locally for our own family. Being passionate about producing high welfare, grass fed beef and lamb, we wanted to be able to know the provenance and story of the pork that we were eating too. It was really important to us that the pork that we were buying was local, free range, born and raised living naturally outside and farmed without compromising our environment. We are also a family that love a bacon sandwich at the weekend - so we knew that keeping pigs was always on the cards..!
We have always loved pigs, and keeping them for ourselves just cemented our belief that these fantastic, intelligent animals should be out roaming the land and living a truly natural life on farms. It bothered us so much that the majority of our UK pork is imported from European factory farms with such poor welfare standards and we knew that we had to try to keep them on a larger scale, and provide high welfare, woodland pork for our local community, as well as our own freezer.
Fast forward a few years, a few homemade pig arcs, and many a reading of "first time pig keepers" guide books and we now have two breeding sows, Dolly & Rosie, and a young boar on the farm - Winston.
In July 2023 we welcomed our first homebred Saddleback piglets to the farm, and now hope to have a continued supply of our free range woodland pork moving forward. It has been an exciting learning curve for us, becoming pig farmers! Many a break out, our poor garden has suffered the impact of several pig excursions, plenty of late nights awaiting the arrival of our first piglets and sadly, more falls into that pig wallow than I care to remember! But the adventure continues and we are thrilled to be filling our woodland with more of these fabulous pigs.