One of my favourite moments each year here on the Home Farm is the moment of exultant liberation when our two little pigs are let out of the pigsty for the first time. 

We rear two pigs in our garden for the table each year.  They arrive here to our one-acre garden in Waterford in March at about eight weeks of age, cute as little puppies, and depart five months later for the local abattoir.  We keep them down the end of the garden in a little plot but when they get here first they are too small to let out, and so we keep them in a walled pigsty until they get used to the place. 

There is something supremely joyous about that moment when they are let out first.  They have never been shown how to root - but within minutes of the gate being opened, following a few inquisitive sniffs in the air (could I, should I, will I?) they are busy rooting to their heart’s content and you can tell they just LOVE it.

The commercial pig industry has more or less ignored the move towards free-range produce.  You can get your hands on free-range chicken, lamb and beef but free range pork or bacon is impossible to source.  More than any other animal, the pig is treated horrifically by the food chain and it is all the crueller given that they are as intelligent as your family dog.  To satisfy our insatiable appetite for pork and bacon, we kill approximately 1.3 million pigs per year in this country with almost 90 per cent of them reared on just 380 pig farms.  These pigs are reared indoors, on concrete floors in cramped sheds, fed high protein feed to get them to killing weight quickly, and so bored that they start to bite each others tails off for something to do.  Given the conditions they are reared in, perhaps their miserably short lives (about sixteen weeks) are not short enough. 

Of course the industry will say that pigs are treated humanely and kept in ultra modern, hygienic facilities.  In my experience pigs are not particularly interested in modern, nor do they put much store in hygiene.  Give them some sun on their backs, a bit of space to root in, scraps from your kitchen and an occasional scratch behind the ears, and they will reward you with gregarious company, the finest manure and the best meat imaginable.  In contrast to the ultra lean/ultra bland pork that your supermarket has on offer, a happy outdoor pig produces a deeply “porky” dark meat lined with a decent layer of fat.  The way pork used to taste. 

The Department of Agriculture reports that one in five of the country’s 2,447 registered pig keepers are “hobbyists”, that is keeping less than three animals for their own consumption.  Thanks to the growing army of back-garden pig-keepers, traditional rare breeds like Gloucester Old Spot and Tamworth are making a comeback, largely because they are better equipped than the commercial hairless breeds to thrive outdoors. 

Are there downsides?  Well, the result of all that rooting is that whatever ground you make available to them will be destroyed and in the rainy season that we euphemistically call summer, things can get pretty mucky.  Ideally then, you will need to allocate three plots to the purpose, each at least 100sq meters and rotate the pigs around to give the ground time to recover.  Pigs are noisy at times particularly if they are hungry, and they pee and pooh a lot - dynamite for the fertility of your land, but the neighbours might not appreciate the pong.  They are also big, strong, determined animals weighing up to 300kg and they treat everything (including your welly) as potential food. 

The biggest downside of all however is that at some point these wonderful animals that you have shared your life and your garden with, have to go to slaughter.  Meat, as it happens, does not grow magically on a plastic tray wrapped in cellophane - the brutal reality is that an animal has to die.  The first year we kept pigs, we called them Charlotte and Wilbur which was a mistake because it is doubly difficult to kill animals that are named after the characters from a children’s novel. 

I have given up struggling against growing fond of them while they are resident in our garden.  We should be fond of them.  We should look after them, feed them, fret about them and fuss over their health.  Afterwards, the project shifts gears from animal husbandry to food production.  We joint and carve and cut.  We make sausages, chorizo, salamis and rashers, we cure bacon and make brawns.  We fill the freezer with almost a year’s worth of food.  And we are thankful for every morsel. 

Nicky Fortune

Nicky Fortune’s son Al with pigs.  Photo credit: Nicky Fortune

Nicky Fortune, who has a one-acre garden in Tullogher, Co Kilkenny, started keeping pigs because of the quality of pork available in supermarkets.  “Every time we ate pork it was giving us cramps so we had just given up eating it.  Four years ago we got two saddlebacks.  We put them in a plot up the back where we were going to grow vegetables, so they worked as rotivators.”

The family’s first pigs were called Parsley and Sprouts.  “We were loading them up in the trailor and I remember my neighbour saying to me, “do you want me take them back out, you look miserable!”.  In the end we held on to Sprouts.  I couldn’t let her go.  Every time we tried to eat pork we would be practically choking on it.” That was then.  His three children have got used to having the pigs around.  “They see the connection between animals and meat now.  Alex, our youngest will probably help me with the butchering this year.”

Though something of an old hand at pig-rearing at this stage, Fortune had a bit of catastrophe on the way to the abattoir last autumn.  “I was going down the main road with the pigs in the trailer and the guy driving behind me flashed and when I stopped he came up and said “you are after losing a pig”.  The pig had climbed out and jumped out on the road.  In the end we found him in someone’s garden eating the flowers.”

Ella McSweeney

Ella with pig in Garden.  Photo credit: Kyera Grant

Keeping pigs in the garden is not necessarily the preserve of country folk.  A couple of minutes walk from Blackrock, Co Dublin, RTE presenter Ella McSweeney is rearing two Gloucester Old Spots in a third of an acre garden.  “When is the last time you saw a pig in a field?,” she replies when I ask her what possessed her.  “In 1840 there were 350,000 pigs in Ireland kept on under an acre.  I was looking at old OS maps of Dublin and kept seeing “piggery” on the map.  There is massive potential to re-introduce pigs to Dublin, particularly in those old council houses that have huge gardens. I wanted to experience meat production and be an honest carnivore.”

Her approach has been to keep things as thrifty as possible.  “I got plans for a simple pig ark and made it for eu100 from sandbags and salvaged wood.  I feed them barley and I go to a local veg shop and fill a bucket with stuff they are throwing out.”

The Department of Agriculture Inspector, she says, thought she was mental.  What do her neighbours think?  “They love them.  Pigs are endlessly entertaining.  I have never had so many friends.  People just come around and want to stare at them, touch them.”

McSweeney’s pigs are being killed soon, and she will do the butchering herself, having done a pig butchery course with Philip Dennhardt at Ballymaloe.  “I will miss them because they are a huge presence but I was very clear from outset that they are not pets.”

5 Traditional Breeds

Saddleback: black pig with a white belt around shoulders
Gloucester Old Spot: hardy white pig with black spots
Tamworth: a hairy, red pig
Berkshire: one of the oldest breeds, black with white legs
Oxford Sandy and Black: excellent temperament and high quality meat

5 Tips

1) Always keep more than one - pigs are incredibly sociable animals and like company.
2) You will need to apply for registration as a pig herd owner under the Department of Agriculture’s National Pig Identification and Tracing System.  You will receive a herd number (and possibly an inspection).  Call 1890 504 604.
3) If you are keeping pigs in an area of your garden and they escape, they will do serious damage to the rest of your garden.  Try a combination of sheep fencing and a battery powered electric fence.
4) Pigs are not fussy about housing but it must be weather proof and sturdy.  A pig ark, outhouse or stable would be ideal. 
5) Typically pigs are fed pig nuts or a mixture of grains including barley.  Keep a pig bucket under your sink and put all leftovers (but absolutely no meat) in it. 

Michael Kelly is author of Tales from the Home Farm and founder of GIY (Grow it Yourself) Ireland. Visit the pig forum at http://www.giyireland.com

Please note that there are pictures contained in this post which might offend the faint-hearted.  And vegetarians.  And animal lovers.  This is the reality of meat eating - warts and all.

There was a point at about 9 o’clock on the Saturday evening when I was up to my neck in sausage meat, my hands were aching and I was tired as a dog, that I wondered: would it just be easier to buy pork, bacon and sausages in the supermarket and be done it?  But I think it was just the fatigue and hunger setting in - so we took a break, had an impromptu dinner of pork patties (sausage meat moulded in to burger shapes and then fried on the pan) and opened a bottle of red wine. And it was one of the most sublime meals we ever had.  And of course within minutes all seemed right with the world again.  Because that’s what the pig weekend is all about.  The tastiest, freshest grub imaginable.

But that was Saturday night when most of the work was behind us.  Let’s take a step back. 

Wednesday

The pig weekend really started back on Wednesday evening when we loaded up the poor old piggies (no, they don’t have names) to get them ready for their trip to the abattoir on Thursday morning.  Getting the pigs from their plot down the end of our garden in to the trailor is always fraught with stress and this year it was more stressful than ever (really after three years of this you would think we would be more on top of things!).  Jacqui Corcoran was here on the Wednesday afternoon recording my weekly contribution to The Frugal Household on RTE Radio.  For our last show, she brought self-confessed shopaholic and city-slicker Justine Dwyer with her to try her hand at digging spuds etc.  I was telling Justine that the pigs were entering their last 24 hours on earth and it was far too much for the poor girl - I think she actually shed a tear. 

We finished recording and went back up to the house for a cup of coffee.  I looked out the window and saw one of the pigs was out on the lawn.  Eeek!  Battle stations.  Bear in mind that they have been here since March and have never once escaped so it was an ominous portend indeed that one had got out on her last day here. Think the electric fence shorted out.  I let out a roar and Justine and Jacqui nearly spilled their coffee all over themselves.  We all ran out and spent about 20 minutes trying to round up the pig who was enjoying this last dash of freedom.  Poor Justine I think was horrified at the whole thing - if she disliked country life before then, she really hates it now.

Anyway, having had one trauma already that day, Mrs K and I decided we may as well move the pigs in to the trailor that evening, so that they would be relaxed the following morning.  We moved the trailor manually across the garden and had it as close to their pen as we could, then turned off the electric fence, took down the sheep wire fence in one corner and let them out.  We put some feed in to the trailor and after about ten minutes of curious sniffing they both climbed up the ramp and in.  We closed up the door quickly and then pulled the trailor back across the garden and hitched up to the car.  Job done.

They settled down for the evening, completely oblivious to their fate.

Thursday

This video which I took the morning of the slaughter is kind of hard to watch - well, it’s poignant at any rate.

Myself and my mate Bryan headed in to Waterford to the abattoir with the pigs in the trailor behind us.  For the last few years we have used a small abattoir in north Wexford (who would slaughter and butcher the meat for us) because I had this concern about large, commercial abattoirs.  But for the last 12 months I have been a little worried about the bacon that we got from them - not because I don’t trust them but because all commercial butchers use nitrates to cure bacon and I reckoned there was little point in going to all the trouble of rearing pigs and then not knowing what goes in to making the sausages, bacon etc.  And besides, I did a course with Philip Denhart from Ballymaloe on butchering a pig and I wanted to put what I learned in to practice. 

So this year, because we planned to cut up the meat ourselves, I reckoned it didn’t really matter which abattoir we used and so I opted to use a very large local abattoir in Waterford.  I think all in all it was a better option - the pigs only had a 10 mile trip in the trailor rather than a 50 mile one to north Wexford which I think was easier on them.  We met up with another friend, Nicky, outside the abattoir.  Nicky was going to show us how to use the slapmark which we bought between us this year.  A slapmark is a device that you use to imprint your pigs herd number on the skin - that way when you get your carcass back from the abattoir you can see the herd number on the skin and be 100 per cent confident the meat is yours and you haven’t been given back a commercial producer’s pig in error.  The slapmark is basically like a tattoo device - there are hundreds of little needles on the end of a little handle which you dunk in ink and you literally slap the pig with it.  The poor pig.  Nicky climbed in to trailor and slapmarked my two pigs because I had never done in it before.  Much indignant squealing (from the pigs, not Nicky).

Then we went in to the abattoir.  You literally reverse the trailor up to the door of the abattoir and your pigs wander off in to the bowels of the building.  I didn’t even have time to say goodbye, not that I would have anyway… Standing outside we could hear occasional screams from inside which was rather offputting.  I think the scream happens the moment the pig is stunned with the electric tongs which renders them unconscious.  Then they are hung up by the back legs and stuck in the neck to bleed them out.  It is extremely quick, clincial and efficient - over in seconds.  Still though - not nice to watch.

While I was standing in the office waiting to sign them in, I had a look at what you might call the kill list, i.e. all the pigs that were being taken in that day.  There were literally thousands.  Farmer X: 500 pigs.  Farmer Y: 600 pigs.  Farmer Z: 400 pigs.  Michael Kelly: 2 pigs.  I had a little chuckle when I saw that.  I had a word with the guy on duty in the office to see could I keep the heads of the pigs (to make the brawn, more on that later) and he said that would be ok.  The one thing that struck us all was (a) how clinical and clean the whole thing is and (b) what a grim job it must be to work an eight hour shift sticking pigs in the neck, or pulling out their innards.  All to satisfy mankind’s insatiable appetite for pork and bacon.

Myself and Bryan headed in to the city after that to get some provisions.  It felt good to have moved on from the difficult part of the exercise and to be focussed now on foodie stuff.  This was an exhausting trip in itself as we had to go around to about ten different shops to get it all..  Having gone through the weekend and come out the other side, here is a list of things that you will need for a pig weekend:

- sharp knives (have one sharp knife for each person you have involved)
- muslin for hanging and storing hams etc (I had to source in a fabric shop)
- lots of large buckets (with lids) for putting hams, ribs, rashers etc in to brine
- lots of large Tupperware containers for making the sausage meat, storing things etc
- sausage casings (ordered online from Weschenfelder, http://www.weschenfelder.co.uk)
- sausage stuffer (ditto - cost about eu150 when delivered to Ireland, but we shared cost between four people)
- good electric mincer - those hand powered ones are useless, believe me, i tried one and you could spend a month mincing the meat from two pigs
- Sea salt for dry and wet cures - we ordered a 25kg bag from local health store and it cost about eu17.  We will have enough for next year’s pig weekend
- Butchers twine - difficult to get - in the end a local butcher came up trumps at the 11th hour and sold me a roll.  Maybe try and order online from specialist catering supplier in advance
- Freezer bags- you will be amazed how many you will need.  I would say we easily went through 150 of them.  We used about 40 for sausages alone as we wanted to freeze them in small quantities.  Get big and small.  Use small for sausages, rashers etc.  You will need very large ones for big cuts of pork etc
- Marker to write on freezer bags.  Do not use sticky labels, they fall off in freezer
- Ingredients for brines and brawns - capers, gherkins, lemons, parsley, onions, peppercorns, cloves, garlic, chillis or chilliflakes, juniper berries
- Ingredients for sausages - breadcrumbs or pinhead oats, apples, lots of herbs, white pepper
- Ingredients for chorizo and salami - red wine, parika, fennel seeds, acidophilus (got it in healthfood store in capsules, people take them to restore stomach health when they have been on antibiotics etc.  Opened up capsules and took powder out).
- Large stock pot for making brine
- needles for injecting brine in to meat

That’s the crap mincer on the table.  Don’t buy one.  They are useless.

Friday

Mrs Kelly did most of the work on the Friday, collecting the pigs in her car. She had the back of her car (it’s a hatchback so back seats fold down) lined with black sacks though in the end she didn’t really need to because the carcasses were wrapped in plastic anyway.  It was like she was involved in disposing a body (which in a way I guess she was).  She was able to check the carcasses for the slapmark number (they were incidentally slapped on their hind legs on each side because the carcass is split in half so you want to be able to identify both halves as your own!).  The heads were left on as requested.  Mrs K was none to happy about the fact that pigs were looking at her the whole way home.

Because we weren’t going to butcher them until the morning we had to store them somewhere cool and because we don’t have a walk in cold room (who does?) we decided to put them in our porch which is part of the old cottage and absolutely freezing!  So we put a big beam up across the ceiling and tied the carcasses to that.  Pigs weigh a lot - this point was brought home to me twice in the last few days - once on Wednesday when I had the pig cornered when she escaped and she just brushed past me like I was a feather.  And then again when we were trying to lift the carcass on to the rope hanging from the beam.  Feck me, they are heavy. 

Having got the pigs safely back to the house, I got stuck in to making the brine.  The brine is the wet cure you use to soak hams and anything else you need to baconise. I was really chancing my arm here to be honest, having no idea how much I needed.  I was trying to find recipes - Hugh Fearnley’s basic brine recipe was a bit basic and his other wet cures were abit elaborate (using molasses etc).  So I basically did a mixture of a few brine recipes I found on the net and came up with this:

For every 2l water:

600g sea salt
6 juniper berries
2-3 tbsp peppercorns
A few cloves
Half teaspoon chilliflakes
Bay leaf

The large stock pot I have takes about 15 litres of water so i multiplied up the ingredients.  The idea is that you boil all this up until the salt dissolves and then allow to cool slightly.  Transfer in to a plastic bucket or container (don’t leave it in the pot as the salt and metal react against each other).  I was getting kind of worried at this stage as I had no clue how much I would need.  In the end we had about three large buckets filled with brine and at the end of the day they were all full of different cuts of meat being cured.  So we got it about right.  To get those three buckets of liquid I had to make up about 3 stockpots full so I reckon we ended up making approximately 40l of brine.  It probably took an hour each time to boil up the liquid so in other words this is a job for the day before your pig butchering and not that morning.  You won’t have enough time!

I was very lucky that a neighbour of mine has done all this before (he keeps his own pigs and is also a chef) and I could call him for advice.  He also came along the morning of the butchering (sat) to help out.  Mick is head chef in Waterford Castle and therefore knows all about cooking the meat as well as butchering it.  He’s also a top bloke and hugely generous with his time.  When I called him to ask about the brine, he told me not too worry too much about the recipe - the NB thing is to get the salt/water proportions right and after that you can add any flavour you want, e.g. white wine, garlic, herbs etc.  So I got a little bold on the second and third batches - made up a very herby one with huge handfuls of herbs from the garden and then a garlic one with about five or six cloves and a glass of white wine.

Having made the brines, we went out and got good and drunk.  Every intention of just having one or two glasses, but you know yourself.  We fell home at about 2am.  If I recall correctly, we also persuaded the people who gave us a lift home to have a look in the porch window.  They got the fright of their lives.  It was like a scene from Reservoir Dogs.

Saturday

Terrible idea to go out.  Alarm went off at 7am.  Five hours sleep and bad hangover.  Got up and made another batch of brine just to be on safe side.  The helpers arrived at 9am and we got stuck in after drinking a pot of coffee.  Core team was myself and Mrs K, Bryan, Nicky and Feargal.  Mick Quinn and a friend of his came in for the first hour or so.  Bryan’s wife Orlagh came along in the afternoon when the going got toughest!  You need plenty of bodies because there is so much to do, particularly in the afternoon when you start making sausages etc.  We had a core group of five and we needed every single person!

I can’t really go in to the butchering in too much detail - not because I don’t want to but because it is almost impossible to explain in writing.  You would really need to be there and have an expert involved to show you the ropes.  Or as Nicky does it: buy “Hugh and Ray Pig in a Day” and basically watch it while you are butchering!  It works for him.

Watching Mick Quinn at work was watching a craftsman in action.  So precise and careful.  Brilliant stuff.  Here he is explaining stuff to me - “this is fat and this is lean”.

As he cut, he was giving us the low-down on how to cook the different cuts which was invaluable, e.g. cook belly at 120 for four hours etc.  Mick did one side of one pig for us and then had to leave to go to work.  Nicky (who has done four or five of his own pigs to date) did another one and then Bryan and myself did one side each with Nicky standing over our shoulders.  Basically you are doing a mix of cutting with a sharp boning knife and then using a saw to get through the really big bones.  Here’s a good pic of Mick sawing through the loin.

Basically this is what we did with each of the bits (bear in mind that we had two buckets on the ground beside us, one for offcuts of meat to go in to sausages and one for bones, skin etc for the dogs):

Heads:  the two heads went in to the stock pot to make brawn - will come back to this later.  We didn’t get in to eating the ears, brains or any of that ghoulish stuff.  Making brawn from the head was ghoulish enough. 

Trotters and tail: kept two trotters in freezer where they will no doubt remain indefinitely because I have no interest in eating them!  The other six went in brawn pot.

The tails went in to brawn pot. One hilarious moment came as Bryan and myself were cutting up a half of a pig each, him on one side of the counter and me on the other.  And I was working on cutting off the tail and I looked across at him and asked in all seriousness - “have you cut your tail off already?” Doh!  In my defence, I had a hangover.

Shoulders: we used three of the shoulders for roasting joints (pork) and boned out the other for sausage meat. 

Belly:  the underside of the pig.  We used these for a mixture of bellies of pork (head end) and streaky bacon cuts (thin end).  Mick showed us how to prepare the belly for roasting, scoring the back with a Stanley knife to make that fab crackling.  Slow cooked for hours it is absolutely delicious.  He also showed us how to do the correct butchers knot using the twine when tying up the meat.  Very useful to know. 

The cuts for streaky rashers were put in to a dry cure:

1kg sea salt
100g soft brown sugar
Tablespoon black pepper

We have two large container drawers at the end of our fridge (where we store lettuce etc) and we used one of these for curing the bellies (we stored them in the fridge while they were curing - about five days).  We had four bellies in total.  You put one in to the bottom of the drawer and rub loads of the cure mix in to the flesh side, then put another one on top and cover it in the salt and keep going like that.  After a day the salt has drawn a load of water from the meat and you drain this off, move the bellies around, ie put the top one to the bottom and so on - and top up with more cure if it needs it (in our case it did for the first three or four days but then didn’t).  The amount of liquid leaching off each day decreases until after four days there was almost no liquid left.

We left our bellies in the cure for six or seven days in the end and I think it was too long - five days would prob have been enough.  We have left one in the fridge wrapped in muslin and we hack bits off it as we need it (e.g. delicious in quiches, omelettes, tartiflette etc) - it keeps for about 6 weeks like that.  With the rest of them we sliced them up using a borrowed bacon slicer in to streaky rashers and froze them in small quantities.  They are too salty to eat as streaky breakfast bacon in my opinion (though you could soak them in water before use if you want) but they are wonderful for use in cooking.  We didn’t get in to smoking any of our bacon - maybe next year.

Loin:  the loin is the back of your pig and from two pigs you basically have four loins (each pig is halved).  We used one loin for what Irish people called back rashers.  They are the thick meaty rashers (often called back bacon) and went in to the brine for 24 hours before being sliced. 

The other three were used for chops.  The chops in this pic were cut by Bryan, that’s why they are so insanely neat!

Here’s the man himself in action:

We froze our chops - four chops per bag.  We were delighted with the fat content on this years pigs (Saddleback crosses).  Last year (when we had Tamworths) there was three inches of back fat which meant rashers and chops were overly fatty.  This year it was about an inch of fat - just right.  You can leave three or four chops together for a roasting joint but we didn’t bother - chops are the handiest of all cuts as far as we are concerned.  We cooked up chops for lunch at about 1pm and served with white bread and some apple sauce. Delicious.  We were absolutely ravenous with hunger at that stage.

Hams: the hams are basically the top of the back legs of the pig.  So we had four of then.  We whimped out of the idea of making a dry/air cured proscuitto ham (ie the ones you see hanging up in delicatessans in Spain or Italy).  I thought it would be amazing to have such a thing hanging in the utility room and you could help yourself to a few slices for sandwiches etc as you needed it - would last for months.  But basically it has to be hung and air-dried for months and it can all go horribly wrong if you get the salt mix wrong, or if you leave it hang somewhere too warm and the whole thing can rot.  So reluctantly we decided it was too risky.  In the end we only left one ham whole and it was a whopper - up to 6kg.  This went in to the brine and stayed there for three days (the rule of thumb is 24 hours for the first 2kg and 12 hours per kilo after that).  This pic is of the ham being ‘injected’ with the brine.  Basically you have to get the brine liquid in near the bone of the meat because if you don’t the meat will tend to rot in there.  I got the needles from my GP, I kid you not.  I don’t think he believed me when i said i needed them for injecting meat - I’d say he thinks I’m a junkie! 

Bear in mind the brine needs to be kept cool (4 degrees) so we had to keep the buckets in the porch and put ice packs in to the water twice a day. The other three hams were cut in to more manageable chunks and also put in to the brine (though they wouldn’t need as much time in the brine obviously - most were out after 24 hours and then put in the freezer).

We got finished butchering at about 3pm (we were all absolutely knackered at this stage) and then spent about an hour cleaning up.  Weary minds and bodies.. 

We butchered the pigs on the counter in the kitchen as you can see in the photos.  The dogs got a couple of large bones but there was also a large black sack full of off-cuts and bones that had to go out in the brown bin - we could probably have made a stock but I reckoned I would have enough stock from the brawn (which I did in the end). 

After that we got stuck in to sausage making.  Mick Quinn gave us a big mincer that he uses at work (thank God) and it made light work of the meat.  I shudder to think how long it would have taken us to mince the meat using the handheld mincer I bought in Waterford for eu17....!  Here’s Fearg at the helm with the mincer.

We basically just minced once (we like a coarse sausage but you can mince twice if you like your sausage meat to be finer in texture) and aimed at a roughly 50/50 mix of fat and lean meat.  We had two huge Tupperware containers filled with minced sausage meat from all our off cuts and the shoulders. 

Once you have the sausage meat minced you are ready to start making sausage mixture.  We made three different types using recipes from HFW and Darina Allen. 

Herb Sausage:

For every 450g meat:
About 2 tablespoons of mixed herbs - parsley, thyme, chive, majoram, rosemary - finely chopped
Large garlic clove, crushed
1 egg, whisked
Breadcrumbs (have these made in advance)
Salt (teaspoon) and peppa

Mix all the ingredients well.  Fry off a little of the mix to make sure you like the taste before you commit to sausage casings..! 

We also made a sausage with apple and sage, and HFW’s white pepper sausage (dessertspoon of white pepper per 1kg of meat).  They all taste amazing.  You can experiment as you want with these.  In fact we can not understand why we waited until we had our own pigs to make our own sausages.  It would be well worth while buying the sausage stuffer and casings and getting your hands on some good quality pork mince (again 50/50 lean and fat) and try making a few batches before a pig weekend.  That way you won’t be grappling with complete ignorance of the whole process as we were, as well as having to deal with the enormous quantities of meat and the worsening fatigue!  Here’s Bryan working on the sausage mixture:

The process of making the sausages is at least a bit of fun.  First of all you have to sort out your casings.  We bought organic hog casings from Weschenfelder and they come packed in salt - you have to soak the casings for about 20 mins in warm water first and they are all tangled up together like a big ball of Christmas tree lights.  So we spent a frustrating half hour trying to unravel them - just what you need at 4pm on the Pig Saturday!

Once you have found the beginning and end of the casings you load up on to the stuffer.  Somebody remarked that its rather like putting a condom on.  I couldn’t possibly comment on that - suffice to say the humour was rather juvenile at this point in the day. 

Then fill the stuffer with sausage meat and start turning the handle.  The key is to try and do it smoothly and at a consistent speed so you don’t get air bubbles in your sausages. 

We made ours quite thick - more like a dinner sausage than a breakfast sausage, which is no bad thing in my opinion.  These saussies are basically 100 per cent pork meat with some herbs etc added.  Far too good for breakfast!  You basically have a long tube of sausage on the table in front of you then which you have to tie up to turn in to smaller sausages.  I left this part to Mrs K.  We all felt pretty proud of ourselves at this stage.

While we were at it, we also made chorizo and salami.  It is basically the same process but you add lots of red wine and the acidophilus to the mix.  Really you should have different casings - extra large ones called ox-runners, but we did not have them so we went ahead and made them in the hog casings.  They will probably be pencil thin salamis by the time they have matured (10 weeks) but feck it!  Again recipe from HFW:

Salami:

for every 1kg meat (minced slightly leaner than sausage mix):
20g salt
200ml red wine (I had taken to drinking the red wine at this stage too)
Garlic clove crushed
half teaspoon acidophilus

Chorizo:

For every 1.5 kg meat (regular sausage meat mix):
30g salt
200 ml red wine
3 garlic cloves
Teaspoon fennel seeds
Tablespoon paprika

All the sausages, salamis and chorizo have to be hung for about a day after this.  Basically there is loads of water in them at this stage and this needs to drain out a little before you use them.  We cooked up two sausages that night and they shrivelled to nothing in the pan as the water evaporated.  You can see in this pic the mix of sausages, salami and chorizo hanging on a clothes horse to dry.

We are very pleased with the end result - all the sausages taste great.  Very meaty.  Very complex flavours.  And of course having made them yourself you know exactly what is in them.  I always feel guilty when I eat sausages because I always feel I am not 100 per cent sure what is in them and that they are really bad for me.  But not with our own.  If someone served you up a fillet of pork meat fried in breadcrumbs with herbs you would think that’s a very healthy dinner indeed - and that’s all that these sausages are!  Happy days!

The lads departed at about 8pm after a long hard day.  We finished the last bit of sausage making ourselves and I suddenly realised - I hadn’t done the brawn.  The two heads were waiting in the stock pot and needed about 4 hours of cooking - eek!  Now I have to say that cooking brawn was the last thing I needed at that point - boiling pig’s heads produced a smell that you wouldn’t believe and after 14 hours of dirty stinking work I was seriously tempted to lob the heads in the brown bin and forget all about them.  But then you know what, I think the only decent thing to do when you kill animals that you have reared yourself, is to do them the justice of using every last morsel.  So I persevered and I was glad I did - the brawn was delicious.

Brawn Recipe:

Place heads in stock pot (it will need to be a whopper of a pot) and fill with water
Add large bundle of fresh herbs from garden - anything you can find
Put in a muslin bag of spices (2 teaspoons each of cloves, coriander and peppercorns)
2 onions

Cook for four hours.  Cover nose while doing second big clean up of day.  Though we were tired as dogs at this point, we knew we wouldn’t want to face in to clean up the next day so though we were fed up we decided to get it done.  I switched off the stock pot at midnight and went to bed.  I didn’t even sleep well - was having vivid dreams that I was been butchered for meat.

Sunday:

Woke at about 7am and knew that the worst part of making brawn was awaiting me down in the kitchen so decided to get up and get it over with.  Thank God we cleaned up kitchen the night before.  Took heads out of stock pot and started to strip meat from them.  A most unpleasant job - I will never look at my live pigs the same way again having become so intimately familiar with the anatomy of their heads.  The meat comes away from bones very easy and you can see that there is lots of really lovely meat there, particularly around the cheek.  You’re supposed to add the fat to brawn but I was too grossed out to do this, and so our brawn was meat only.  Roughly chop all the meat and put it a bowl.  HFW’s recipe is to add chopped parsley and the juice of half a lemon.  Mick Quinn advised adding in capers and gherkins which I did and they were sensational!  Add a couple of tablespoons of them, roughly chopped.  Mix all ingredients well and put in the fridge.

Strain and then boil the stock water until it reduces down by two thirds - this takes a few hours.  Savour the lovely smell of boiling pig water in the kitchen.  Take bowl of meat mix from fridge and divide in to two loaf tins.  Add about four or five tablespoons of the reduced liquid to each tin - this will set over the meat when you put it back in the fridge.  Put something heavy on top (like a large weight) and put in fridge for about 24 hours. I promise you won’t want to eat it that night anyway.  But seriously it tasted amazing.  Cut off slices and serve with glass of chilled white wine and slice of brown bread.  Delicious.  I was thinking afterwards that you could do the same with the meat you get on the carcass when you make chicken stock.  Here’s a pic of the end results.  Looks rather promising, all things considered…

That Sunday we also drained off the water and changed the salt on our bellies which were curing in the fridge.  Changed ice packs in the brine buckets in the hall.  Some of the smaller hams and ribs etc which were in brine were taken out Sunday night and wrapped in muslin to hang for a further 24 hours before freezing. 

On Sunday night I took the sausages down and froze them in to bags - 4 in each bag and counted up about 30 bags which means about 120 sausages which is a great return.  All bags were labelled, ie. Herb sausages, apple sausage etc. 

By Sunday night it felt like it was more or less all over.  I went to bed at around 7pm and slept for 14 hours solid. 

Later that week the other hams came out of brine and were hung for a day before being frozen.  As I write this it is now weeks later and the salami and chorizo are still hanging in the porch and are by now covered in fuzzy mould - a rather horrendous sight to greet visitors to our house.  We have about 8 weeks or so before we can eat them.

What we’ve tried so far:  sausages, a small roast pork joint (yum, lovely crackling), pork chops (yum yum), rashers (from belly, very salty), back rashers (from loin, quite salty but tasty), ham (boiled, glazed and baked - YUM YUM YUM).  One rather strange thing to note - the baconised meat is not pink as you would expect but more browney in colour. This is because it is saltpetre which gives commercial ham its pink colour and we didn’t use that.  Not sure how they will take that at Christmas dinner!

So was it worth it?  In short yes.  But it is a mammoth job of work.  When we killed our 20 broilers a few months back they were all done and dusted and in the freezer by noon.  It felt like we were at the pigs for a week - and in many ways we were.  Could this be the ultimate slow food?  But we learned a lot and we have a freezer full of meat which we have absolutely no reservations about which means a lot to us.  We also saved ourselves a lot of money by doing the butchering ourselves - last year we paid nearly eu200 to get the pigs killed and butchered - this year it cost eu34 to get them killed.  Big difference.  And of course most importantly we DID IT OUR WAY!

Huge thanks to Bryan, Nicky (official photographer as well as everything else), Feargal, Orlagh, and Mick Quinn. 

You would imagine that it’s never pleasant bringing animals to the slaughter but I’ve been pretty surprised at just how easy it was this year to bring our pigs.  Last year, it being our first time and all, I felt pretty bad about it.  There wasn’t any crying or nashing of teeth but it was a pretty unpleasant experience all in all.  I wanted to see the deed being done so to speak which I suppose made for a more intense experience.  A mere twelve months on and I feel like I’ve had an emotional lobotomy where pig slaughtering is concerned - I didn’t feel a thing.  We loaded up the pigs, transported them to Byrnes in Camolin and drove away without a backward glance. 

I blame the weather - as you will know from previous posts we’ve had a nightmare with our “permanent” pigsty down the end of the garden which has made it a pretty awful couple of months in terms of looking after pigs - and I would imagine it’s not been great for the pigs themselves.  So it has been a happy release from the daily drudgery of climbing in to their pen to clean/feed/water.  In general terms there is also just one less thing to do around the place now that they are gone.  We are also looking forward immensely to re-stocking the freezer with delicious meat.

If you read my book (and if not, FOR SHAME!) you might recall that last year we got a lend of a trailor from the old-man-in-law and let the pigs sleep in it for a few days before they went to slaughter.  This got them used to the trailor and meant that it was a sinch to get them in to the trailor the morning of the slaughter.  We didn’t have that luxury this year - I rang Betty Byrne and asked her when she was killing pigs next and she said “Tomorrow!  And if not tomorrow, not for another three weeks.” The thoughts of keeping them another three weeks was just too much to countenance so I called the father-in-law to see would he be free the following day. 

Now you must understand that the father-in-law is a farmer and pretty much every farmer in the land is pissed off with the summer we’ve had - he also is three weeks away from his next holiday which means he is about 45 weeks away from his last one and therefore a little on the grumpy side.  He also hates pigs with an absolute passion because they used to keep pigs on his farm when he was a young lad - he considers them smelly creatures (and he’s right of course).  So you can imagine that a call from his pain-in-the-ass son-in-law looking for him to drive to Waterford with his trailor, spend X hours trying to convince piggies to walk up ramp to trailor, and then drive to north Wexford with the them in it - well it was just about the worst thing he could have hoped to happen that afternoon.  And worse again, I am his son-in-law rather than just his son, so he can’t even tell me to f**k off with myself.

To his eternal credit he agreed without complaint - the following morning Mrs Kelly and I decided to move the piggies from their pen, across the garden to a makeshift pen near the gate so we could load them up with minimal hassle when he arrived with the trailor.  Having starved them since the previous morning this was freakishly easy - Mrs Kelly rattled the bucket of grub and they set off after her while I walked along behind with a stick so that I could beat myself over the head if they escaped.  We got them in to the makeshift pen and were back in for a cup of tea five minutes later - the father-in-law arrived with the mother-in-law and we then spent about half an hour trying to get them up the ramp of the trailor.  You really don’t understand how strong a pig is until you have them cornered and are trying to get them to do something they don’t want to do!  Anyway, after much huffing and puffing, we got them in the trailor where they settled down in some straw oblivious to their fate.  I felt one pang of guilt in the entire day and it was right at that moment - but it was a fleeting moment and soon passed. 

A funny thing happened on the way to the abattoir in the car.  I got a call from Mrs Kelly back at the Home Farm telling me that a department inspector had just arrived at the house.  I kid you not - a Department of Agriculture inspector had taken a few hours out of his day to come and inspect our two pigs.  See in order to bring pigs to an abattoir (which is the only way you can kill them - well you could hit them over the head with a mallet, but that wouldn’t be very nice would it?) you must have a herd number.  The abattoir will literally send you off packing if you don’t have tags on your pig’s ears with your herd number on them.  So to get the herd number you have to contact the Department of Agriculture who in their infinite wisdom then consider you a “herd owner”.  Now I know that the Dep Ag has to control swine fever, blue tongue and all those other nasty diseases that affect livestock but seriously - a bloody herd number for two pigs???  Are you kidding me?

Well, no actually.  They’re not.  Once you get your herd number you are on a Dep Ag computer somewhere in the bowels of Kildare St which every now and then spits out some useless mail to you ("Dear Herdowner....") and occasionally (once a year) your name pops out for inspection.  An intrepid Dep Ag man from Waterford is dispatched from the cosy confines of his office to seek you out.  Now I know the guy is just doing his job ok, so I won’t be too hard on him because it’s the system that’s screwed up (and not him).  But let me tell you a few things which he did (as told by Mrs Kelly) - first of all he drove up and down our road looking for a commercial pig house and was bemused when he couldn’t find it.  Perhaps this is understandable given that we have a herd number and all, so he is quite reasonably expecting an actual herd.  When he eventually did find our house he was no doubt quite dissappointed to discover that not only was there no herd worth speaking of to inspect, but our TWO pigs were already on their way to meet their maker.  So he had some choices - he could head back to the office and do some real work or he could stay and poke around our house for a while - of course he chose the latter.

First off, he asked Mrs Kelly to show him where we kept our feed - she brought him to our garage and showed him bags of rolled barley and organic pignuts which he surveyed grimly and then informed her that he was deducting points from us for keeping our pig feed in the same area as our dog food.  This begs the question - does he want us to build a separate garage for the pig food?  Would the Dep Ag give us a grant to do so I wonder (you know what, it’s scary but they probably would). Mrs Kelly politely informed him that since we go to the trouble of feeding our pigs organic pig nuts (at considerable expense), we are hardly likely to make the mistake of feeding the dog food to the pigs and the pigfeed to the dogs.  But he wasn’t impressed by this. 

Then he asked to see the dockets for our pigs feed.  “The what now?” asked Mrs Kelly, looking around her to see was there a camera filming this for some type of Candid Camera type TV show.  The dockets he said with an impressive straight face - you are buying pig feed so for traceability you need purchase dockets.  “You mean receipts,” asked Mrs Kelly?  No, we don’t keep the receipts she said - why would we?  Would you keep receipts when buying food for your dog or cat or pet hamster?

Next up the inspector asked to see where the pigs were kept, so with admirable patience (I can’t imagine what madness would have come over me, had i been there) Mrs Kelly brought him over to see the (now empty) pig pen.  He tutted a little when he saw all that muck - “It’s very mucky,” he said with considerable understatement.  Well it has been raining for two months solid, Mrs Kelly said.  And anyway, the Department allows commercial producers to keep pigs in concrete stalls where they can’t root or get access to sunlight or fresh air.  Are you really saying that this outdoor pen is worse for pigs than that?  I see what you mean, says the inspector, but still I would be deducting points from you for that too.  Mrs Kelly bristled - deducting points from what, she asked?  Well says the inspector - if you were receiving payments from the Department then we would be deducting from your payments because of the twin horrors of mucky living environment (is it just me or is there a saying about being as happy as a pig in shit?) and pig food kept in close proximity to dog food.  But we are not receiving payments, says Mrs Kelly - we are keeping these animals for our own consumption.

The inspector didn’t seem too bothered by this fundamental flaw in his argument.  Still, he was still giving out about lack of tracability with our feed so Mrs Kelly managed to find one docket in the boot of the car and (proud as punch) he took it off with him to find out more about the organic pig feed we were feeding the pigs (he clearly had never seen organic pigfeed before which I think says a lot about the state of the pork industry in this country). 

That night, with our pigs safely dispatched in the abattoir (bedded down for the night before their dawn rendevous with the slaughterman), we laughed a lot about the whole inspector incident.  “It could only happen in Ireland,” was the general consensus.  It is pretty funny you must admit, but it is also very, very sad.  There are people like you and me and thousands of others out there who are trying to do the right thing - trying to live slowly, disengage from the commercial food production universe; trying to produce as much of our own food as we can and live healthier, more outdoorsy lives.  So why is our government making it so bloody hard for us?  Why are they wasting resources and money, sending inspectors out to the homes of people who keep a few pigs for the table?  Why can’t they use that great computer they have in Kildare St to differentiate between commercial producers and home-farmers who are keeping animals for food?  “I’ll bring that up at the next management meeting,” the inspector promised me when I asked him that very question a few days later over the phone.  We can but hope that he will.

I had a funny kind of a day yesterday.  It has been raining really hard for a few days (like that movie Seven with Brad and Morgan where it rains in every scene) and when I went to feed the piggies yesterday morning I noticed that there run was a complete and utter mess with all the rainwater congealing with the soil and manure and urine and grass clippings and all manner of other mean and nasty stuff that’s in there.  They were knee deep in this soupy mess looking at me forlornly so I made the difficult decision to lock them up in their pigsty for a few days until the worst of the weather passes. 

They don’t seem too unhappy in there especially when it’s wet.  Just outside their house there is a small concreted run which is about 40sq ft I guess.  It’s not huge, neither is it ideal (they can’t root on concrete), but atleast they are dry and they have a bit of space and fresh air.  Anyway it’s only temperary until the summer returns (please God let it return). 

Unfortunately my rather clever permanent pigsty design is turning out to be not so clever after all - it’s sort of hidden away in the corner of their paddock and as a result you still have to get in through the mucky run to get to it.  I have a lenght of timber stretching from the fencing to the pigsty which in theory keeps you out of the worst of the muck when you are going in to feed them or clean out their house - yesterday morning when i was trying to cajole them in to the pigsty to lock them in I was walking across it delicately (like you would across a tightrope I suppose) and trying to carry their food trough while they butted me from either side with their snouts - and of course the inevitable happened and I fell over. 

Not completely, but my legs spread out and one welly sank in to the mud about a foot and i nearly did myself an injury in the groin department.  I was covered in muck and crap and it took a good hour of scrubbing to get the smell of pig off me.  Incidentally I forgot to recall that last week i was at a meeting in Waterford when i suddenly got a distinct smell of pig in the air - i looked around at the other people at the meeting wondering who was responsible when it suddently dawned on me that it was probably me!  I looked down at my boots and sure enough i could see some dirt on them.  I won’t be invited back to meet that crowd in a hurry.  “Did you smell the shite of that journalist?  Jeez would he ever wash himself?”

Anyway, it’s days like that when you wonder why the hell you bother with the whole malarkey - it’s just such bloody hard, smelly, dirty work.  Thankfully I’ve found over the years that whenever I have a really bad day or a bad morning or just a bad incident, there’s usually something pretty special just around the corner to help you get over it.  It’s simliar with golf - you spend 17 holes hacking around the course, tearing lumps out of the greens and fairways, vowing never to play the stupid “sport” again and then all of a sudden, for no particular reason, you hit a Harrington-esque screamer right down the middle.  You know you haven’t quite cracked it, but it’s enough to make you want to come again. 

Rummaging in the freezer for something interesting to eat yesterday we came across packets of frozen ribs from last years pigs.  Most of the decent meat from last year’s animals is well and truly gone at this stage (it’s now August 08 and our first pigs were killed in July 07).  The sausages were gone in weeks, followed by the rashers, decent cuts of ham etc.  Now all we are left with are some dubious cuts - fatty looking cuts of pork, the trotters and the pigs head, which I take out every now and then to scare visiting children.  They say that you really should use up frozen pork within 6 months but any of the stuff we’ve used lately (which is nearly a year in the freezer) has been fine.  Some people are horrified that we would keep such ghoulish items as the head around the house (well in the freezer at any rate) but I am hoping i will pluck up the courage to eat them at some point.  And yes I am aware that (vegetarians look away now) pig cheek is a delicacy and that trotters are a Waterford speciality but it’s just so well you know, gross!

Anyway, in that context the spare ribs (geddit?!) were quite a find.  We defrosted them and prepared a marinade and ate them this evening with some home fries (our own spuds too) and a few beers (not our own lamentably) - absolutely gorgeous.  They were just what i needed to remind me what this whole project is about - self-sufficiency and great grub!  After dinner I went off down to feed the pigs with a renewed pep in my step.  They were standing up on their back legs with their front legs up on the wall of the pigsty looking out at me, waiting impatiently for their supper.  I climbed in through the mucky run again - surer of foot this time around.

I’m not blind to the immense ironies in all this - eating ribs from last year’s animals and then going off down the garden to fatten up this year’s - and I do wonder about how mercenary I have become and how comfortable I am with killing animals for meat, especially when compared with the relentless introspection of last year.  It’s not like I was thinking “oh i’ve just had lovely ribs and look at the lovely ribs on you - i shall eat you shortly!” I guess i wasn’t even thinking about it at all, which is just as it should be.  At the moment our pigs are being minded, looked after, given shelter and food.  I’m falling in to holes filled with pigshit for the feckers.  But soon the whole project will move up a notch and turn from animal maintenance to food production and then JOY TO THE WORLD food scoffing.

As I headed back up the garden to the house, the sun was shining momentarily and when I looked back at the pig run there was a rainbow off in the distance which seemed to be arching right over their house.  Not sure what that means, if anything at all, but it made me smile anyway.

It is now coming towards the end of July and this year’s pigs have about a month left before they meet their maker.  It has been a more difficult experience this year.  I guess the novelty of having pigs around the place has worn off somewhat and on top of that we have had some problems with the area we keep them in down the end of the garden....

When we got our first batch of pigs last year we decided we would give them some ground (approx 50m sq) in our garden to roam on.  The reason we decided to get in to keeping pigs ourselves in the first place, was that we didn’t like the fact that almost all (as in almost 100 per cent) Irish pigs are reared on concrete.  Having kept pigs for a little while and knowing that they basically root around in the ground all day long, it seemed to us that keeping them on concrete was cruel and depriving them of their favourite pasttime.  And, we are pretty confident that the meat we got from last years pigs was infinitely better because they were out and about on soil and grass.

As with most things in life, we have since discovered that things aren’t quite that black and white.  When you are blessed with alot of land you can afford to keep pigs out on that land and move them around before they have too much impact on the soil.  Most smallholders that i have spoken to about it, suggest an acre divided in to three - you then move your pigs across the acre over time, allowing them to root but moving them on to the next 1/3 of an acre before they make complete shit of the land.  The ideal is to have pigs on a bit of land, then grow veg on it, then move the pigs on to it again.  Pre-veg the pigs manure and rotivate the soil. Post-veg the pigs will clear the ground and get it ready for sowing again.

Sounds ideal?  Yep.  But when you are doing the rearing in your garden, chances are you don’t have that luxury.  We have an acre of land in total but there are all sorts of other things going on that acre as well as pig rearing - you know, like our house for example which takes up quite a bit of space.  And our garden.  And our driveway, garage, veg patch, polytunnel, deck etc etc.  So when we got pigs first we found a nice little area down the end of the garden for them and fenced it off and thought to ourselves - aren’t we marvellous?  We have found the ideal patch for pigs forever! 

Problem is that pigs are really tough on the ground you put them on - within a few weeks last year they had stripped the little paddock we had for them completely clear of grass.  Their only option then really in terms of rooting is to keep going DOWN.  That means that the level of the soil in the paddock starts to lower too.  They dig little craters for themselves in the ground and the longer you leave them in there, the deeper they go.  One day one of our pigs rooted so deep, she pushed her snout out and found she came up in Bondai Beach in Sydney.

As you will know if you read the chapter on the pigs in the book, by the end of the summer the place was a quagmire.  We had terrible weather last summer (it was a deluge of biblical proportions, raining for 40 days and 40 nights) and the ground basically turned in to soup.  Add to that the fact that the pigs housing last year was an old converted oil tank which was too small for them by the end of the summer and you have a less than ideal situation.

Feeling suitably chastened by the situation we put them in and resolving to try harder this year, over the winter I decided to build a concrete platform and brick house (with corrugated iron roof) for the new piggies in the corner of the paddock.  At least if it was wet again this year, i reasoned, the pigs would have somewhere dry to go.  We also moved the electric fence out abit, giving them even more land to roam on.  The ground had recovered somewhat from last year and it was covered in weeds and grass again - but once again, within a few weeks of their arrival this spring, the new pigs had the place completely clear of grass and were busy digging their way to Bondai Beach again. 

In June and early July this year it rained again.  Alot.  And once again the ground turned to soup.  This makes it very difficult on the pigs themselves and very difficult for the people keeping the pigs too.  Even when it is raining and the place is mucked up to the eyeballs, you still have to get in there to give them water and clean out their house.  One time i climbed in and the soil was so mucky it was like quick-sand.  I almost lost a welly to it but after a struggle on one leg I managed to get it back. 

At least this year i had the option of locking them in on the concrete platform for a few days during the worst of the rain to allow the ground to recover a little.  Wet weather+muck+shit+pig urine+heavy animal is not good for soil consistency.  They seemed happy enough to be enclosed in such a small space (the platform is about 6ft sq) and we tried to keep things interesting for them - throwing in some grass cuttings, scraps, bits of branches etc in.  Thankfully the weather improved somewhat.  It has been fairly dry since and the ground isn’t long drying out with some sunshine so i was able to let them out again.

Anyway, long story short I am starting to understand why generations ago, when people kept a pig or two for the table it was always kept in a concrete pig sty. I am not saying it is the ideal situation, but i am saying i understand why it was done.  If you have a small amount of space, you don’t have the option of giving pigs free reign over the place.  They are simply too heavy and too fond of rooting for that.

Obviously i would love to get my hands on some land for rearing (and even breeding) pigs.  But in the meantime if we are going to continue rearing two pigs each year for the table in our garden i am going to have to consider putting a bigger concrete platform in and keeping them on that permamently.  Or perhaps letting them out on to the ground when it is dry.  I will also have to look at getting some top soil in this year after the pigs are gone to raise the level of the soil back up to its pre-pig levels… not ideal to be buying in top soil - we are trying to save money with this enterprise after all!

There is a great episode of The Simpsons where Lisa tells her father that she is becoming a vegetarian and will never eat meat again.  Aghast, Homer asks:

What about bacon?
Lisa: No.
Homer: Ham?
Lisa: No.
Homer: Pork chops?
Lisa: DAD!  Those all come from the same animal.
Homer: Ooh, yeah, right, Lisa. A wonderful, magical animal.

In Ireland we consume approximately 40Kg of pork each per annum.  Ham, pork chops, roast pork, pork steak, salami, pepperoni and of course the most venerable of all dishes: the jumbo breakfast roll with sausages, bacon and pudding.  Yum Yum. Pork accounts for 41% of our total national meat intake (source CSO), more than any other meat.  A wonderful, magical animal indeed.

Recent years have seen massive interest in free range and organic meat, but oddly, not with pork.  When is the last time you saw free range pork in your supermarket?  The answer most probably is that you have not.  To understand this anomaly we firstly need to understand how the industry is set up.  At a time when our output of pigmeat has soared to 0.207 million tonnes (3.16 million pigs were slaughtered here in 2005, according to Bord Bia), the number of pig farmers has fallen from over 60,000 in 1970 to approximately 500 today.  3 million pigs from 500 farmers?  That represents one hell of a herd at each farm. 

So there are fewer, bigger farms producing.  There are also fewer, bigger abattoirs.  The small, local abattoir has been all but eliminated by Government policy, EU directives and economic realities.  The Irish Times recently reported that the Government announced a new 50m euro grant scheme for large processors which the Associated Craft Butchers of Ireland called an attack on small and local processors. 

With the small farmer and the local abattoir squeezed from the market, what we are left with is industrial scale pork production.  Bad news for the poor old pig.  Almost all commercial pigs are kept indoors in cramped conditions with no access to the outdoors.  An intensively reared pig will never eat a blade of grass or a vegetable or feel the sun on its back.  Because they are kept indoors they will never get to indulge in their favourite pastime: rooting. 

Approximately half of breeding sows are kept in stalls which are so narrow they can not even turn around.  These unfortunate creatures produce six or seven litters and then are slaughtered.  They are probably better off.  Their offspring do not fare any better.  Everything about their short lives is about fattening them up quickly. 

It is not right to treat an animal this way but most of us do not warm to the animal welfare issue when there is a pig involved.  Unfortunately the pig has something that makes its misery even more complete: intelligence.  Pigs have lots of it (at least as much as your dog).  We get all misty eyed at the mere mention of someone harming a dog.  We buy our dogs special treats for Christmas while the pig ends up as the Christmas ham.

If the animal welfare aspect does not bother you, then think about food quality.  These days pork is an insipid, average affair.  When you cook a rasher on the grill you can see the grill through the rasher and that is a bad sign.  It looks meaty enough in the packet but shrivels to nothing when you cook it.  And it seems to be covered in a white froth.  What is that about? 

Thankfully there are some free range pork producers popping up at farmers markets and where they appear, you really should support them.  The only other way to be certain of a daycent rasher is to rear your own.  This is something I have thought about a lot but the decision to get in to porcine husbandry is not to be taken lightly.  Growing some veg or keeping a few hens is easy but keeping pigs is a whole new ball game.  You are not likely to be in any way alarmed by a hen running at you.  You are likely to be very alarmed indeed if a fully grown pig runs at you.  Pigs are livestock.  Keeping pigs is, dare I say it, farming.

We got two little piglets a few months ago and it has been a revelation.  When you get to know an animal, its habits, personality, temperament it is very hard to ignore the plight of its intensively reared cousins.  Our pigs are a breed called Tamworth, generally considered to be quite an old, unusual breed.  The Tamworth is a rusty colour and known for its long snout (which it uses for vigorous rooting) and gregarious nature.

Pigs really do not need as much space as you would think.  We keep them in an area down the end of our garden where we used to have the compost bin and throw the grass cuttings.  It was a complete no-go area overgrown with ivy and weeds.  I bought a small battery-powered electric fencer for 90 euro and some fencing posts and cordoned off an area about 20m long and maybe 8m wide.  It is not quite piggie heaven but they seem happy enough.  There are two trees in the middle of the plot and they seem to enjoy running around them as if doing laps.  All that exercise will probably mean it will take longer to fatten them but maybe that’s not such a bad thing.  The trees also provide them with shade which is important for pigs as they burn easily.

You can buy specially designed pig arks for housing but pigs are not really fussy so long as they have somewhere warm and dry.  My neighbour got me an old plastic oil tank which we cleaned out and then cut out one end for the door.  It worked a treat.  When they come towards you they cock their head up just like Babe which is really quite endearing.  They are quiet enough animals for the most part.  They will do a bit of squealing if they are hungry or if they see you coming with the bucket and they are fairly noisy eaters, slurping greedily in the trough.  The rest of time they just grunt - a low sort of a snort that for some reason reminds me of Winston Churchill.  We feed them a mixture of rolled barley and organic pig feed.  They also get (and love) scraps: leftover bread, sour milk, fruit and veg skins and peelings, pasta etc but no meat of any kind.  Family and friends are providing their scraps too on the promise of the odd chop.  Incidentally it is illegal to feed pigs scraps from the kitchen so do not tell the Department.

They are playful.  The phrase piggy back apparently does not come from what our pigs spend a lot of time doing (putting their front legs up on the other ones back and riding around for a while) but it should do.  It seems to me the sole reason for this strange activity is that it is FUN.  I also suspect that they have a streak of what I can only call divilment.  They like tipping their water trough over just after I have refilled it.  Like some of our European neighbours, they take regular siestas.  On cold days they will stay indoors covered in straw. 

Pigs root and eat soil because it gives them vitamins and minerals.  They also eat small insects, grubs and worms that they find while rooting.  They root all day long.  I can not imagine what this countrys 3 million other pigs do with their time.  We had to revisit the fencing arrangements because they escaped through the electric fence once too often.  A pair of pigs can do serious damage to your lawn or vegetable plot so secure fencing is vital.  We got some sheep wire as a second line of defence. 

It is easy to get attached to them but you have to keep your eye on the ultimate prize.  They seem happy to see you any time you come near them, probably because you are the guy who brings the grub.  They seem to like a rub behind the ears or a scratch on the belly.  You can get in to the pen with them but you should not hang around in there especially if they are hungry.  To a pig everything is potentially food so they bite at things to size them up.  A welly, a bucket, a leg.  They are strong creatures so you do not mess around.  I have seen one of them get their snout in under their house and turn it over with one flick of the neck.

There is one myth I can dispel here and now.  They are not particularly dirty and there is no discernible smell.  They keep their house completely clean and tend to reserve an area at the other end of the patch as their toilet.  I go in there every other day and take it all out because it is dynamite for compost. 

The job of naming them fell to our nieces and nephews and they came up with ridiculously cute names, Charlotte and Wilbur.  How can you bring Charlotte and Wilbur to the slaughter?  I still think we should have called them Rasher and Sausage to keep us focused.