Breeding

Our first piglets born at Little Chinthurst Farm arrived on September 11th 2010 at 2.30 in the morning! Up until then, all our pigs had been born on other rare breed farms and come to us at about 8 weeks old.

Luckily for us, Big Fat Mama has been a great mother to her piglets!

Sleeping

Our pigs sleep in wooden pig arks (made by our very helpful and handy friends) on a bed of thick straw.

Our first pigs had only ever slept in a barn before they came to us, so they spent their first night curled up in the corner of their field. We had to spend a long time in the pig ark the next day tempting them in, but they haven't looked back!

Eating

Our pigs eat free range rare breed pig nuts twice a day. This is a natural feed, free from artificial additives, drugs and GM food.

It encourages slow growth, rather than the accellerated weight gain required from commercial pig farmers. Our 3 pigs get through 2 sacks a week!

This is supplemented with extra vegetables and fruit, courtesy of our local supermarket.

Foraging

Two or three times a week we let the pigs out into an area of about half an acre enclosed with electric fencing.

This is very overgrown at the moment and keeps the pigs busy for hours as they dig and dig for roots. Pigs are brilliant at clearing land.

Final Day

People often ask us how we can kill our pigs. We love our pigs and believe they have a pretty perfect life. We also believe they have a “good” death.

At between 6 and 9 months we take our pigs to Henfield Abbotior in a spacious livestock lorry (they actually go to sleep on the journey!) and they are then unloaded into a pen with lots of fresh straw where they spend an hour setting themselves after the journey. Then they are quietly moved into an area where they are stunned one at a time and then killed.

We have watched our pigs go through the abattoir so we are sure they dont have any idea what is going to happen, or show any distress, and that the kill is instantaneous.

Henfield

We take our pigs to Henfield Abbatoir, about 45 minutes journey. We have found that Henfield are very kind (to us and the pigs!) (and much more organised than the other abbatoir we have used.