The Dirty Chef

by Matthew Evans

  The timing was very good. Sadie and I went to Jen Owens, the original breeder of my first two pigs, and asked about her Wessex Saddleback breeding stock. Jen was selling her farmhouse and moving to a smaller block, and we took on her three big pigs as a trial, to see if we could cope with them. Initially we were reluctant. It’s one thing to fatten a couple of porkers for the pot, it’s something else altogether to have to feed three breeders and cope with the births and all the attendant responsibilities. We were hesitant but in the end excited by the prospects of taking on Peter Pan, Tinkerbell and Wendy.

  It took about six hours to load and unload them from the truck, in the pouring rain. It took so long that we went inside to have a cup of tea, only to find Tinkerbell, the most cautious of the trio, finally snuffling around the farmyard. Six hours seemed like an eternity, but it proved to be nothing compared to some pig moves we’ve done.

  And three years later a lot of pigs have been born under our care. We’ve had the vet out, and I’ve had my arm in the back end of a pig past my elbow to ensure nothing untoward was happening when labour went on for an extraordinarily long time. We’ve had our share of joys, heartbreaks and dramas.

  Breeding pigs is easy. And not. A boar, complete with tusks, can weigh over 200 kilos. A big sow isn’t far behind. When they want you to move out of the way, you move. When they come over and sniff your feet, you don’t want to be wearing thongs. You don’t want them to nibble your toes, even if it is out of curiosity. And pigs are omnivores like us, eating both meat and vegetables. So you know that if you fall over in the paddock and don’t move for half an hour, you’ll probably become your sow’s dinner. A big pig needs some healthy respect.

  But a big pig, certainly the ones we inherited from Jen, is also a big sook. They love being rubbed on the back, and around the ears. They lean up against you as you scratch their spine, and roll on the ground like a puppy if you want to rub their tummies. As least these ones did. Big pigs, because they’re for breeding and not for eating, become favoured farm animals complete with names. Big pigs on a small-holding like ours suddenly get a little bit spoilt.

  Most pets, however, don’t eat 3 kilograms of food a day. Most pets aren’t likely to get obese in a short space of time if you overfeed them. And most pets won’t destroy every shelter you build for them, and every paddock you put them in. Keeping big pigs is a joy and a burden.

  When our breeders first arrived, we used the existing pig paddocks to house them. But within a short time, the paddocks were dust, then mud, so we thought we’d use the pigs to clear the undergrowth on the opposite hill. Over the herd went, into three paddocks, the electric wires going in lines roughly hacked through the undergrowth. It was to be the pigs’ summer home, with plenty of trees for shade. But it rained that summer. Quite a bit. And the steep hill quickly became a landslide, and my ambition to use the pigs to clear the land—which worked just fine for a while—turned into another problem.

  Let me tell any wannabe pig farmers this: free-range pigs do a lot of damage. They just do, especially old breeds that are designed to forage. They’ll dig and dig and dig. We call them the black-snouted tractors. Sometimes the tilling they do is good. But when it rains, it’s just hard work. The pigs don’t seem to mind, but you need a lot of land and a lot of options ready for when the ground turns to muck.

  Our ground turned to muck. The soil around here becomes slick when wet, and poor Peter Pan had trouble with his, ahem, purchase when trying it on with his girls. We lost a bit of time with getting the sows pregnant because of it. And every day that you feed a boar and a sow for no piglets is more money the farm doesn’t make. In fact, it’s more money the farm costs you.

  Eventually, with flatter ground and a change in home, our sows did get in pig. We did begin to build our herd. And Ross also began to build his herd at ‘Matthew’s Farm’. While we occasionally still supplemented with pigs from other nearby farms, together he and I provided most of the porkers that we needed for the market.

  It’s not just keeping pigs that’s difficult; moving pigs is no picnic, either.

  Pigs are clever. Really clever. As I’ve said before, some say they’re as intelligent as a three-year-old. They’re certainly as intransigent, and it is just as hard to work out their train of thought. Moving pigs is like herding cats, though pigs have far more built-in strength and stubbornness.

  A great motivator of pigs is food. If you keep a pig hungry for a few hours, they will go crazy for a bit of tucker. Unless they don’t. As with a three-year-old, once you take them from their usual spot—in this case a paddock, perhaps leading them along with a bit of food to a better, newer paddock—it takes nothing more than a blade of grass, a pine cone, a twig, to distract them.

  ‘I want food,’ you can imagine them thinking. ‘I just want food, food, food, food, food. Oh look, there’s a bit of light, glinting off something shiny. And what’s that? Oh wow, it’s a shadow!’

  When I move pigs, I’m often reminded of my son. What works one day, doesn’t on another. What you expect, based on past experience, to be a great success, for some reason this time simply doesn’t cut it.

  They say women are better at moving pigs than men. They’re more patient, apparently. From my experience of moving a range of farm animals, I have noticed a tendency for women to lead (using something like a bucket of feed, aka the ‘carrot’ technique), and men to push (waving their arms in the case of cattle or sheep, or physically pushing in the case of pigs; I call this the ‘stick’ technique). Both techniques have their place, but with pigs, it’s probably the carrot that’s better than the stick.

  If your relationship is up to it, try moving pigs with your life partner. Apparently, and I’ve spoken to a few pig farmers about this, it’s a good way to have a bit of a shout at each other. Or to hear words not generally used around the house. Pigs, with their ability to defy logic, do not like a slope that’s too steep. Or a trailer that’s too tall, or a path that’s too grassy, or not grassy enough. Pigs, when they don’t want to move, simply won’t. The frustration, especially when it’s bitterly cold and wet, runs deep. Frustration that is easily taken out on the person you’re working with. At least they can understand what you mean.

  So once, when we were moving Peter Pan for a conjugal visit to a few sows nearby, it took the best part of a week. We dug a trailer into the corner of his paddock, put his feed in the back of it. He’d put his front trotters up on the trailer, look around, eat some grain that he could reach but wouldn’t climb all the way in. He just didn’t want to, no matter that his feed ration was limited by his intransigence. If he had been a smaller pig, we could have encouraged him in with a little shove or even wheelbarrowed him in using his back legs. But not this huge boy. Normally a big, loveable, huggable bear of a boar, on half rations he was starting to get a little grumpy and took aim at Sadie’s jeans with a tusk. Inadvertently, I’d like to think. It’s lucky her actual leg wasn’t pierced, even though her jeans were.

  After five full days, I decided our relationship had suffered enough, and Peter Pan had won. I borrowed a different trailer, which had a slightly different back end. And, within minutes, Peter Pan was up in the tray, in his entirety. I hadn’t been expecting him to move so quickly and was desperately trying to keep him there with my shoulder against his ham, while Sadie raced down the hill and closed the tail gate to hold him in. All it took, and we’ll never know why, was a change in trailer.

  However, once in and with the barley eaten, Peter Pan changed his mind about the trailer. He tried to break out through the door and stood on his hind legs like a grizzly as we drove through the streets of Cygnet. He was furious about the whole thing, until I rounded the corner with the trailer and he smelt his new paramours in their paddock. Then, suddenly, his lop ears pricked up and his snout twizzled and he couldn’t wait to get out and check out the new girls.

  While you always need to watch out for the boar, a normally gentle sow can also get feisty, especially around farrowing (
birthing) time. When a pig nests, it’s fascinating to watch. Tinkerbell was due with her second litter and we had been watching her carefully. Her belly was distended. Her teats leaked milk—some say a sign of impending birth. Then, while I was lugging wallaby wire up the opposite hill, I could hear the sound of banging on a pig shed. Tinkerbell, separated from the other pigs for everybody’s safety, was thrashing around in her shelter, smashing the sides and bashing the roof of the half water tank as she went into instinctual mode and built a nest.

  Mouthfuls of pine needles. Lots of the straw we had given her for bedding. Branches, fatter than my arm. And a few metres of long-life high-grade chicken wire that we were using to try to stop the slips (piglets) from wandering off in the wrong direction. It all ended up in her shed. By the mangled look of that wire, you really don’t want to get between a heavily pregnant sow and her nesting materials.

  She wasn’t happy about having me anywhere near her birthing centre, I have to say, though I did rescue the wire and the bigger branches, because—despite Tinkerbell’s instinct to build a nest with them—I couldn’t see how they would be good for a newborn pig to get caught in. I also had to tie her shed down with tensioned wire, because she’d lifted it a metre at the back in her frenzy, pushing a pine branch up against the fence behind it.

  At dusk Tinkerbell had gone right to the back of her house and was lying there, very still, doing little except heavy breathing and waiting for the birth. At 11 pm there were three live piglets and a quietly grunting mother still well and truly in labour. The next morning there were nine little ones, fragile and glossy, suckling on their mother. Thankfully, none of them looked to have ventured out. When Tinkerbell had her first litter at Puggle Farm we found two slips wandering around the barnyard and paddock only hours after being born.

  Having breeding sows at home opened up a whole new world. If you think lambs having twins is a bit nerve-racking, try a pig giving birth to potentially more piglets than she has teats for them to suckle on. Our sows usually give birth to between eight and twelve slips, a wonderful miracle of nature, but one with its own responsibilities. Each slip chooses a teat at birth and drinks only from that teat. The early births usually get the big milk-filled teats near their mother’s head and the last-born runts end up with the smaller teats at the end. Piglets are born tiny and weak with virtually no fat. They can get cold very quickly, and so like to snuggle up with Mum. And Mum, even within minutes of giving birth, and particularly in the first two days, can accidentally lie down on her young. It happens in nature all the time and, with the bigger litters that humans have bred pigs to have, it’s a constant worry. Each morning we count the slips, often a challenge as they lie in huge piles and snuggle right up close to their mum.

  Some sows are simply better mothers than others. Some, like Bella, crush a lot of their young. Some, like Tinkerbell, don’t. You can see the difference in the way they move around with their slips, softly snorting to warn them out of the way as they slowly, slowly kneel and lie down. Like a dainty ballerina rather than a clunky pig. Tinkerbell, of the five sows we’ve now had, is by far the best mother.

  Not all Tinkerbell’s births have been easy.

  Once, at the end of a long day of filming, Tinkerbell started frothing at the mouth. She was breathing very shallowly, with a cold feeling in her mouth and all over her head and body. She was due to give birth, but this was nothing like the other farrowing we’d seen. She lay motionless for hours. She seemed in trouble. I covered her with a tarp and hay, because the day was pretty cold, and called the vet. I watched over her for a couple of hours while she seemed to be getting worse, even venturing to put my hand inside her to make sure there were no piglets stuck en route to the outside.

  By the time the vet arrived, just after dark, Tinkerbell had perked up a little, perhaps warmed by the hay and tarp. Enough to start labour. Enough to pop out one piglet an hour later. The vet gave her an injection of glucose, and left, with instructions and a syringe full of oxytocin, in case labour faltered again. Oxytocin is the hormone mammals naturally excrete to go into labour, and an additional shot is often used in humans and on farms to encourage a faster, easier labour. It would see her through most of the danger zone. Another slip followed, right on cue, twenty minutes later. I relaxed. I’d spent five hours by her side. Time to go in for tea.

  When I got back, trouble hadn’t left. No more slips had been born. They should appear every 40 minutes or less. Her whole labour should have been over in about four hours. I stayed by her side, oxytocin in hand, getting up the courage to give it to her when, suddenly, the noises in the shelter changed. Slip number three was born! Then four! Then five, six, seven, eight and nine. Old-breed pigs, and an old girl like Tinkerbell, tend to have smaller litters. We’re happy with about eight to ten slips from most of our girls. So I stayed another hour, presuming labour had stopped. The first slips were already clean and suckling. It was cold. Rainy. And the shelter only had room for the pigs, not me. I felt it safe to go home.

  But, by the next morning, there were six more piglets. A total of fifteen had been born, though the extended labour (at least nine hours) had taken its toll and three hadn’t been born alive. Tinkerbell lay exhausted, piles of slips tumbling over each other to get to her teats. Usually she rested for twelve hours after farrowing before getting up to feed. This time she barely moved for two days. We watched anxiously as she lay in her shelter, ignoring the milk, barley and pellets we piled in her trough. She rolled over, dutifully, every few hours, making sure all her litter had access to her teats, but otherwise did not move. Finally she staggered to her feet, snuffled her slips out of the way, and ate and drank enough for three sows. Remarkably, miraculously, she recovered quickly and had a trouble-free litter six months later. As I write we are waiting for the signs of yet another birth.

  There’s something magical about this birthing caper. Watching the young slips scamper about in the low afternoon light is a joy I barely have words to describe. I always love seeing the young of our animals play, but watching those piglets of Tinkerbell’s explore the world at the feet of their mother was particularly sweet.

  In the wild, pigs build a big nest using lots of grass and leaves. We’ve seen it happen at our place too. On one occasion Mrs Buvelot, a young sow, decided to leave her insulated hay-filled shelter to farrow. Up near the fence, using mountains of dried grass and hay, she created a circular mound right on the edge of the electric fence line. She gave birth out there in the open, when it was very, very hot. And yet, at times you couldn’t find her slips, hidden as they were underneath a cool blanket of straw. And at times you couldn’t see her either, buried as she was alongside them in her humpy of grass. We’ve taken animals a long way from their natural state through centuries of breeding, but some instincts, some habits, are still hardwired in their souls.

  That’s why we enjoy raising animals this way. Allowing them to express their natural desires and instincts. A pig needs to express itself as a pig, not be trapped in a steel pen on a concrete floor for its whole life. They need to experience the world through their snout, just like a chicken needs to be able to scratch in the earth. As farmers, we act on behalf of society. I think it’s incumbent on us to create the conditions where an animal can do things that nature urges it to do.

  Sometimes, this kind of farming has an added cost. If you don’t pay the price, things can suffer. Either the farmer, the land or the animal. Sometimes all three. It shouldn’t simply be left to free-market economics to decide what is good and right about animal husbandry. We’ve seen where that road can lead us. At the supermarket shelf, despite all the goodwill in the world, customers tend to choose on price. We are never the people we aspire to be, despite our belief in our moral compass, when we are faced with a choice that will affect our wallet. Decisions such as whether we should have cage eggs or feedlotted cattle or sow stalls or pesticide-sprayed crops have to be made as a society, long before cheap meat and veg reaches the shops. By that stage, all
thoughts of the rights and wrongs have evaporated under the fluorescent lights. It’s simply too late.

  Carrots

  Because of our market business, and because of the way Gourmet Farmer was edited, most people think Ross and I just eat meat. The image couldn’t be further from the truth. As both Nick and Ross have vegetarian wives, most of the time they’re eating plenty of chickpeas and lentils. Plenty of carrots, tomato and cheese. My diet also has a healthy proportion of vegetables, and many of our meals don’t include much, if any, meat. But the enforced vegetarianism at home for the other two means that when they catch up with me, especially because none of us minds a bit of meat on the plate, then of course it’s time to indulge.

  The telly show, too, tends to favour our meaty exploits over our vegetably ones. Growing carrots makes for fairly dull television, apparently, especially compared to plucking ducks and geese. Rearing pigs is more exciting, visually, for some reason, than growing Brussels sprouts. Raising lambs has more going on than harvesting kale.

  I see the reasons why, but I guess we all feel our public profile sometimes belies our private eating.

  Ross and I are as much to blame as anyone. Our initial business, Rare Food, was set up on the basis of a supply of good pork, lamb and some free-range rabbits. That makes it hard to suddenly become known for our felafel, despite our best attempts. And there’s something about meat that lends itself to theatrical cooking, so when Ross and I decided to host another feast, a more legal winter lunch at his farm on Bruny Island, the menu inevitably showcased what we grew, and what we could source.

  So, there was lamb, grilled over coals. And some pig, of course, because that’s what we were known for. In fact, quite a bit of lamb and pig. But there was also a big range of veg, not least some locally sourced organic carrots. Here’s what we served: