30 September, 2010
I am having a grumpy day on the pig side of things.
The post has just arrived, including a letter from our abattoir Scotch Premier in Inverurie.
The letter says they are finding private pigs take too long to process compared with regular pigs due to difficulties removing their hair, the rare breed characteristics, their size, and contamination issues due to them not being clean.
Now, I understand the size issue. Ours come in at 60kg deadweight and the abattoir can handle 50-80kg, but some grossly fat pigs have been well in excess of 100kg dead. Some people have no idea and the abattoir should, rightly, reject the ones it can’t handle.
As for the rest of the issues, well, I’ve not noticed a difference between scraping the hair off a Tamworth, a Berkshire or a commercial hybrid.
I’ve not noticed much practical difference in dressing out different breeds—size and amount of fat makes a difference but not breed.
As for dirty pigs, I suspect that’s down to the commercial pigs coming from indoor units while most private slaughters would be of outdoor pigs.
I bring ours in from the field the day before slaughter, hose or brush them down (depending on how cold it is) and bed them on fresh straw.
They look fairly clean until I get them to the abattoir and they’re in a pen next to squeaky clean pigs from an indoor unit.
Without shampooing ours, scraping off every last bit of ingrained dirt and picking their trotters clean, I don’t see how we can get ours any cleaner.
My suspicion is that the letter is part of a build up towards ending private slaughter.
The abattoir has already cut their pig kill days back to one morning a week.
And the sales rep I usually deal with has been mouthing off a lot lately about the cost and inefficiencies involved with private slaughter.
He says it’s much easier to deal with one farmer bringing 100 uniform commercial pigs than 50-70 smallholders/crofters bringing in 1-3 non-standard rare breed pigs each.
The problem is that there’s almost nowhere else within a reasonable distance that will take pigs for private slaughter, so if Scotch Premier continues to discourage private slaughter or even stops doing it altogether we may be stuffed.
If the meats for home use then you could home kill? Could get someone in……possibly?
We are 50 plus miles to the slaughter house – not that we have pigs.
It’s all getting that the small crofter can’t really get a straight run at things.
We sell the pork, so we’re legally obliged to use a licensed abattoir and butcher. And even if it was for our own consumption we’d be stuck because you have to kill the animal yourself and I can’t even get a shotgun certificate. As I’m an immigrant, I don’t have the checkable history the police want—even though I held firearms certificates elsewhere for many years. We are checking to see if the OH, as a respectable Scottish professional, can get a certificate and allow me to use a firearm under her supervision.
Yes – if you are selling then it has to be killed & cut up by those with the certificates.
Your OH could home kill for your own consumption. I don’t think you will be able to without your own certificate.
I can’t see her shooting the pigs. Not only has she never used a firearm in her life, but she’s also a vegetarian and squeamish. She finds it extremely difficult helping me hold a sow still so the vet can stitch it up or dealing with injuries to any of us. Dealing with blood and guts is just not her thing, although she will pitch in if I really need the help.
That’s a no no then. I don’t think I could either. There will be some one in your locality that would do the deed for you bit if you did then again you wouldn’t be able to sell it.
We need to get some old ewes away later on & are wondering if we can get away without taking them all the way through to Dingwall. The mutton will be for our own consumption.
I have a farmer and a farm manager who’ll put injured stock down for me, but they work away a lot so I can’t always get them when I need them. It happened with Graham, our old boar, last year.
We need to sell produce from the croft to cover its overheads.The OH’s salary covers the mortgage but that’s it. Everything else on the crofting side has to come from croft income.
I know what you mean & it is getting harder & harder.
I used to work for a farmer & previously he’d kept a massive amount of the pink hairless pigs on an old airfield – very intensive system before legislation changed. He got out of pigs & always said that it’s cyclical – like anything I suppose. The trick is knowing when to get out of a certain line of income before it cripples you!
Sorry.
I have reduced my flock as it’s getting too expensive for me with the rare breeds. Unless you can charge a premium, & you should be able to as it is premium meat, but the reality is different often.
I don’t know why the format went all odd & I don’t why I commented on an entry from September – must have lead from reading your recent blog! Sorry.
The formatting goes funny because the layout I use can only handle four levels of comments before the column spacing becomes too narrow. I’ll change it to three levels and see how that looks.
As for commenting on a September post, I linked back to it from the current post as it gives background. I leave commenting open on old posts as new readers like to have their say, while long-term readers sometimes go back to old posts.
As for charging a premium because of the pork being rare breed or birth-notified, I do cost in the use of pedigree breeding stock but we don’t charge extra for the rarity value. In fact, it’s actually one of things that people like to accuse us of: “profiteering” by “jumping on the rare breed bandwagon”. My usual response to that is, if we are profiteering why are we the ones with an old Defender while they’re the ones in a new Range Rover, Discovery, Land Cruiser, BMW, etc?
The fact is that, at current costings and prices, we make a loss on weaner sales and a small profit on pork sales. The two just balance but I’m not sure for how much longer, especially with the number of cancelled orders we’re experiencing.
Fresh produce and eggs sold at the croft gate doesn’t work here. Most of the people around us who’d like free range eggs from rare breed hens keep their own hens. Everyone else seems to prefer the cheapest eggs possible—yes, battery. Similarly with fresh vegetables. If it’s not cheaper than the supermarket, people don’t want it.
The OH does sell some eggs and produce to her work colleagues, particularly the more suburban ones who like the idea of buying organic and/or local produce. However, we’d need to have a property much closer to Aberdeen to pick up more of that market and we can’t afford to pay near-city prices.
I know exactly how you feel.
I went to a terrific conference on marketing meat from the croft & one of th visits out was to the slaughter house at Spean Bridge – what a busy set up. They are very keen to buy in, but again I would’nt think that wuld pay you – you could check. The conference was goo & the main points were that you have to add value – ie smoke, make bacon, sausages etc, but again the legislation is possibly crippling – don’t mean to sound off putting – just it is getting very tricky.
I’m in the Crofting federation & there are good talks & people who do inspire you to keep going – just as well.
To go back about the conference – all the food was produced locally – at the hotel & because they had made that area a new crofting area – they ahd created crofts there – they were very, very keen to pump the locality of meat/produce etc – the hotels had sort of clubbed together & were using it as a marketing tool. Don’t know if you could approach the local hostelieries?
I got some skins back & they were professionally tanned on Skye – really lovely as they were lovely dark & light markings – pure Shetlands. Someone asked how much I would charge & I mentioned what they’d cost – didn’t include me going to Skye to actually take them & see the set up. They said ‘I couldn’t possibly pay that I’ll give you such & such – less than they’d cost me. What can you do when people have such an attitude? You have to walk away & shrug.
Thought this was relevant http://www.pigbusiness.co.uk/issues/destroying_small_farmers/