Free-range pigs call prison their home
Heather Chalmers
Piglets at Christchurch Men’s Prison’s large-scale pig farm can run free.
While its 8000 pigs are mainly kept outdoors and are free to move around and wallow in mud as they chose, those tending them are more closely supervised.
The country’s second-largest outdoor piggery, it covers 100 hectares of an 800ha farm surrounding one of New Zealand’s largest prisons.
It’s also probably New Zealand’s most visible pig farm, bordering State Highway 73, west of the city.
While the farm and piggery are run as commercial businesses, its primary role differs from a normal farm operation. Its workers are prisoners and its staff are farm instructors.
Principal instructor Warren Chilton said that, on average, prisoners work on the farm for four to six months.
‘‘They learn practical skills, industry qualifications and a work ethic and when they go to the parole board this is taken into consideration, particularly if they have a job and accommodation to go to,’’ Chilton said.
‘‘Many of the men find they really enjoy working in agriculture, with stock and machinery, and end up with jobs on farms, including other pig farms.’’
While the prison complex was surrounded by high-security wire, the piggery and the prison’s beef, sheep and cropping operations had largely standard fencing.
To be eligible to work ‘‘outside the wire’’ on the farm, prisoners must be assessed as requiring low or minimum security and must be near the end of their sentence.
Some other pig producers regarded the prison farm as unwanted competition when it started, Chilton said.
However, as the industry shrunk, with 60 per cent of pork now imported, this had become less of an issue.
New Zealand Pork chairman Eric Roy said competition for domestic pork producers did not come from the prison farm, but from imported pork.
‘‘Imported pork is produced to a different set of animal health and environmental standards.’’
Country-of-origin labelling, to be implemented in about 18 months, was expected to improve sales of domestically-grown product, Roy said.
Each year the prison farm sells about 17,000 pigs, supplying Freedom Farms which only sells and markets New Zealand pork reared and finished in an outdoors operation with no sow stalls, farrowing crates or concrete fattening pens, Chilton said.
‘‘The proportion of our pork receiving a price premium is increasing over the years as people want to know where their food comes from.’’
Chilton said he always wanted to farm pigs outdoors.
‘‘When I arrived here 20 years ago the farm had farrowing crates and the first thing we did was throw them out.
‘‘We try hard to do the best for the pigs and the environment. If you have happy pigs they will perform for you.’’
The prison had good topography for an outdoor pig farm, being flat with light free-draining soils and no water nearby.
The Canterbury climate suited pigs and the region had a plentiful supply of stock feed, by far the farm’s biggest cost with 80 tonnes required each week.
The piggery has 900 breeding sows, some to provide replacement animals and the remainder to produce piglets for meat production.
Piglets are weaned after 26 days, before spending five weeks in weaner accommodation, then their final 11 weeks in eco-barns or micro barns.
Each eco-barn holds 200 weaner pigs, with plenty of room to run around and show their natural behaviour on a bed of barley straw or sawdust, as well as food and water on demand.
The fattening pigs grow at 450 grams a day on average from farrow to finish, with a feed conversion ratio of 2.4 kilograms of feed to 1kg of protein produced.
The pig farm was one of five finalists in the Canterbury Ballance Farm Environment Awards, with the winner to be announced on March 21.