Farmer Focus: Pig performance improves just in time for hog roasts

I’m never one to count my chickens, but given how well things are going on farm at the moment I think it would be rude not to acknowledge our team’s recent achievements.

Perhaps they’re doing slightly too well, given the bonus in their wage packets this month. One of our units is performing particularly well, with pigs weaned a sow a year nearing the 27 mark and our rolling average is on a nice, consistent, gentle incline. Just to note, I am touching wood as I write this.

As our production manager likes to say, this is a result of “nowt flash, nowt fancy, just doin’ jobs right and doin ’em well”. And I have to agree.

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On the free-range fattening site, pigs are coming through thick and fast, which is good as sales are high at the moment, particularly with hog roasts having really taken off.

It’s funny as when I first started with the meat side of things I was told the pork trade was quiet throughout the months without an “r” in them (May through to August), but lately we are quite literally needing pigs to fly out of the field into hog-roast machines.

Fortunately we have been ahead of the game this year when it comes to fly biting rearing its ugly head. Every year up to now we have experienced problems with fly biting and carcasses having to be stripped of their skin as a result. This obviously lowers the value of the product and causes all kinds of problems when it comes to hog roasts, and joints for that matter – pork without crackling is like Yorkshire puddings without gravy – just plain wrong.

So it was fortunate that we were proactive this year and got on with spraying in our tents early and we seem to have kept the problem at bay. We’ve previously had whole batches of carcasses stripped, so it just goes to show how vital it is to think ahead. Let’s just hope I remember this time next year.

Anna Longthorp runs Anna’s Happy Trotters, a pork wholesale business supplying butchers, restaurants and farm shops with free-range pork from her family’s 2,100 breeding sows