Nine sows, four native breeds · Blackmore Vale, Dorset
Tamworths, Old Spots, Large Blacks and British Lops, farrowed outdoors in arks and grown on slowly. Some of it leaves here as pork on the Thursday. The rest goes up into the curing room and you wait.
In the chill and on the rack
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How the pigs are kept
A Tamworth takes about nine and a half months to reach 85 kilos deadweight. A modern hybrid does it in five and a half. That is four extra months of feed on every pig, roughly £68 a head, and it is most of the difference between our price and the counter price.
No crates. It costs us piglets: we lose about one in nine to weather and to a sow rolling over, against one in fourteen for a unit that crates. We have looked at the figures twice and left the arks where they are.
Leaving the piglets on the sow that long means she gives us two litters a year rather than two and a half. Nine sows therefore produce about a fifth fewer pigs than the same nine sows would elsewhere, and that is the whole reason there is a waiting list at all.
A ham goes up in January and comes down the following summer, having lost a third of its weight to the air. Nine at a time is all the loft will hold. When they are spoken for we say so, rather than buying a leg in and calling it ours.
“I ordered a half in the February and collected it in the September, which I thought was a joke until it turned up as forty-one labelled bags and a box of bones. We are still eating the shoulder. The bacon I now buy every month and I have stopped pretending otherwise.”
Come to the barn
Whitmoor Ash Farm, Stourton Lane
Marnhull, Dorset DT10 1JQ
Marnhull · the track is the second on the left after the ford
About this page
The business, the listings and the reviews are invented — this page exists to show what someone could put on pigfarm.co.uk. The domain itself is genuinely for sale.
Or speak to Colin Squire directly — +44 (0)7990 570292 · colinsquire@yachtingmatters.com