Celebrating 12 months on the farm

It’s been a year since we backed a rent-a-truck up to the garage, unloaded our furniture, and lit the first fire in our woodheater.

And it’s a year since we drove a horse-float of sows up the driveway, and walked our boar Domino down the lane, past a pig-rooting miniature horse we inherited with the property.

(Sandy, 28, had an inbuilt hatred of pigs, apparently common in horses. He now lives with Eliza’s mum, for fear of a heart attack the pigs might provoke).

We thought it would be good to take this chance to look out the window and reflect on what we’ve done over the past 12 months - instead of just looking out and making a list of what we still need to do.

We’ve built our breeding herd from 10 to 20 sows and have been producing pig meat each week for the past seven months. It is amazing to think that with our small herd we are now the largest free range pig farmers in Tasmania, and we believe we have the second largest herd of Wessex Saddleback sows in the world.

With so many pigs breeding, we’re now seeing some of the genetic traits that we thought were lost coming back. Large litters are appearing on a regular basis. Phantom, our star sow, has got 13 piglets at the moment, and last litter she had 12. But while about half of our sows are having these big litters, we’ve still got ones producing only six or seven, so there’s still improvement to be made.

Thousands of metres of wire and hundreds of posts have been set up to keep in the growing number of pigs. The neighbours say we could keep in rhinos.

About 600 native trees have been planted in shelter belts to buffer us and the pigs against the amazing winds that come from the west and to increase the habitat for native birds. Why wasn’t there wind on the day when we came with the real estate agent? It blew constantly for six months after settlement.

Guy squeezed 40 fruit trees into the orchard, with Eliza telling him that if he was going to put them in that close together it’d be interesting to see what his pruning skills were like when they grew a bit.

The veggie garden is providing all our vegetables. Guy has agreed to leave Eliza to it, and not make comment about the ‘artistic’ layout or her extreme water efficiency.

The pigs are still digging up the future berry patch...

We’ve survived our first couple of Business Activity Statements. Just. A good hot meal, beer, and plenty of ham seems to encourage our accountant to wade through our lounge floor filing system.

And we think we’re making a bit of progress on the big goal – bringing back the Wessex Saddleback and teaching people about rare breeds, real food, and ethical meat production.

It’s rare for a weekend to go by without a chef or a family dropping in to watch the piglets run around and scratch a grunting sow.

We’d like to thank everyone who’s helped us on the farm, bought our pork, and heartily promoted what we’re doing. One of the main highlights of the past year has been meeting like-minded, passionate people.

While we’re proud of our first 12 months on the farm, we’re quite aware that this is still just the beginning of the journey.

Tips to warm up: eat chestnuts, shovel pig poo

Evening itinerary:

Arrive home from day job as the sun sets.

Check last night's 13 newborns (when I watched steam rise from their wet, warm bodies).

Shovel out stables where mums and babies are, replace with fresh barley straw.

Pick grass for squeaking guinea pigs and sniffing rabbit.

Pick kale for hungry human (curly and red russian).

Roast chestnuts (from Preolenna, high rainfall area in the far north-west) under hot grill.

Invent kale fritters with chopped, cooked kale, buff sussex eggs, crumbly local cheese, and breadcrumbs.

Autumn is definitely here, there's no doubting it now. Speaking in short sentences also helps conserve energy for warmth.

A morning at funny farm

Feather fascinator

This buff sussex hen was quite put-out this morning when a feather got stuck to her comb. A couple of hours after I took the photo she was still trying to shake it off.

Remember the sow with the funny tail that arrived on the farm in December last year?

We thought she must have had it trod on when she was a piglet, but it appears the shape is heritable. One of her nine piglets is not quite like the others.

We've got a lot of little piggies running round getting in to trouble at the moment. They're just the right size to slide under the electric fence.

So straight to the grain shed they go...

And from her seat on the rock wall outside the stable, Puss observes it all. What a farm to have been dumped at, she thinks.

(More on the cat, and the division she has caused, in a future post).

Taking it slow at Stanley

Six courses, over four hours, with a showery autumn afternoon blowing outside.

We’re at Stanley on a lazy Sunday afternoon celebrating the season’s produce.

We were fortunate enough to have our pork on the menu at The Old Cable Station’s autumn ‘producer’s lunch’ – a slow food event that happens quarterly.

Charlotte Brown and Michael Whatley prepared a feast for almost 50 people, and this was the menu:

- Slow-roasted capsicum with ricotta cheese and vine ripened tomatoes
- Spicy Sassafras parsnip soup
- Mutton bird and duck terrine with a pepperberry and tomato marmalade
- Free-range egg fettuccine pasta ‘al funghi’
- Twice cooked crispy skinned Wessex Saddleback pork belly on parmesan risotto with chilli jam (that was us!)
- ‘Mile high’ apple pie with double cream
- And wines from Tamar vineyard Native Point.

You can already see it was about slow food…even the capsicum was slow-roasted and our pork was twice-cooked!

The slow food movement is all about food that is good, clean and fair. It’s about getting people to care about what they eat and where it comes from, and to realise that their food choices do affect other people and the environment.

Slow Food Australia has more than 40 branches, and across the world there are 100,000 members in 132 countries. At the moment they’re campaigning for cheese to be legally made from raw milk, and against urban sprawl on productive farmland.

We think our pigs fit the slow food philosophy pretty well. They’re slow growers to start with – they take almost double the time of an intensively raised pig!

But we also think we’re doing the right thing by them ethically. They can root around in the dirt, get in a mud bath, play with their piggy friends, and they’ve got sea and mountain views from their paddocks.

The slow food movement is also about preserving biodiversity, and thus our food supply. The varieties of fruit, vegetables and meat we eat have been boiled down to the ones that look good, travel well, and can sit in a supermarket cool store for months. Unfortunately taste wasn’t on the checklist during the reduction.

And it’s also about valuing the food we have, and the people who produce it. A farmer needs to be fairly rewarded for what he grows. If he’s not, animal welfare and the environment will be compromised as he tries to produce more to pay the bills.

We had a lovely lunch at Stanley, meeting people who truly value what they eat and who want to know the story behind it.

(Thank you to Kevin O'Daly for the photos ... scrumptious.)

In the cradle of change

I grew up “going out for tea” at places where menus were dominated by five dollar parmies and roasts-of-the-day.

And frankly, on the north-west coast, there wasn’t much else for a family looking to celebrate a birthday or anniversary.

Guy’s family didn’t even go out for tea – it was never going to be as good as what came out of the garden.

It’s a region of contradictions here: from our office window I can see fertile paddocks running from here to the sea that have all produced high-quality, intense-flavoured food this season.

Our neighbours have boer goats that taste better than lamb, and our other neighbour has the healthiest murray grey cattle I’ve seen.

On our road alone there are two walnut orchards, a farmer who exports onions, and even a pheasant grower.

We’re surrounded by great food, but even at the bottom of our road, where country meets town, is one of those parmy places.

It’s a strange food culture here. The meals are about quantity, not quality. Chips and salad means a mountain of chips and one slice of hard-as-rock mainland-grown tomato.

Fortunately, the choice of good restaurants on the coast is growing, especially in Burnie and Penguin.

There are a number of places going out of their way to source fine local produce to do interesting things with. We'll bring you more information about them on the blog.

A night on a mountain

Over Easter we went to Cradle Mountain Lodge to try our pork at the Highland Restaurant – where the executive chef is Simon Cordwell.

Simon has been a great supporter of us in the start-up of our business. He’s passionate about sourcing local food, and knowing the full story behind it.

The first thing he wanted to do when he found out we had pigs was to come and see the farm so he knew they were genuine free-range and being ethically farmed.

It was so heartening to know that he would actually go out of his way – all the way down from the mountain - to check us out.

So, to our meal at the Highland Restaurant: as an entree Simon braises the pork belly and serves with shitake mushrooms and Asian greens. The recipe is on Simon’s blog and involves garlic, ginger, shallots, soy sauces, star anise, and cinnamon.

We also ordered the salmon plate, which has three pieces of salmon each treated differently, including cured with citrus. They were served with a dob of freshly-grated wasabi, and it was great knowing this came from our close friend Melina Parker from Shima Wasabi.

It’s always difficult sharing a plate of food with Guy. He comes from a family of five children so has a survival-of-the-fittest mentality, and I’m from a family of one, which may have influenced my sharing habits.

Never-the-less I’ve found that dividing shared meals in half from the start, and then protecting my half with raised knife and fork seems to work. Just don’t let your guard down for a slurp of wine.

For main we had our pork loin with maple roasted pear, sweet potato batons and grain mustard jus. Just beautiful.

We had been so excited sitting down in the restaurant and hearing other people order our pork, and Guy just had to tell our waitress straight away we were the pig farmers.

The fellow sitting closest to us was eating the pork belly entree and Guy whispered, “should I ask him what he thinks?”.

I said he should at least wait till the poor bloke had finished eating.

Two seconds later: “should I ask him now?”.

I thought he should wait till the plate had been collected, then we might hear him make a comment to the waitress.

Guy couldn’t control himself.

Turns out the fellow’s a chef in Launceston, and really liked the pork. Guess where a box got sent out this week?

Guy and Eliza walk off the pork belly on the Marion's Lookout track.

It's amazing how these plants survive through the incredible extremes of the highlands.

The leaves of the nothofagus gunnii (Tasmania's only deciduous plant) are just starting to turn.