The vegetarian pig farmer
She may not eat meat, but rare breed pig farmer Michelle Anderson-Carroll is passionate about producing high welfare food, finds Nick Drainey
Avegetarian pig farmer may sound like the title of a play at the Edinburgh Fringe but it is a lifestyle Michelle Anderson-Carroll has no problem embracing. She rears rare breeds for high-quality pork, sausages and bacon on her croft below the Monadhliath Mountains but has not eaten meat herself for more than 30 years.
As humans are naturally omnivores, she says she has no difficulty with the apparent quandary.
Michelle keeps Oxford Sandy and Blacks with four sows and a boar producing around 90 to 100 piglets a year.
But how does that square with Michelle’s vegetarian diet? She says that, for her, not eating meat is to do with simply not liking it, rather than being opposed to eating animals.
‘I haven’t eaten meat since I was 11 and I am in my 40s now,’ she says. ‘Humans are naturally omnivores, we are not naturally vegetarian – that is my choice and what fits with me best; I did go through a phase of trying to reintroduce myself to meat but the whole texture and flavour was not for me.
‘I am not going to attempt to change what people do, my only real issue is animal welfare. After having pigs, the reality of these big commercial units is just horrible – I can’t imagine my pigs being in even triple that space. To be able to offer high welfare food to people as an alternative is really where I’m coming from.’
Michelle admits that the point at which a pig is slaughtered is difficult, and she has been known to shed a tear, but that is the same for all farmers, whether they are vegetarian or not.
She actually gets annoyed with some animal rights activists who are opposed to pigs and other animals being sent to an abattoir. ‘They seem to think the pigs know it is coming but they don’t – animals don’t think of death in the way that we do, they just get on with the here and now,’ she says. ‘It is really quick, they don’t see what has happened to other pigs. There is none of this hysteria and squealing that people talk about. It is a really calm environment.’
But despite any anguish Michelle may feel, she knows there has been a reason for the pigs to have been bred and then killed for meat. ‘The pork that we produce is all born on this croft and reared by us,’ she says. ‘We are with them right up to the end and we accompany them to the abattoir – it is harder on us than the pigs.
‘There is the guilt trip afterwards but the pigs have a purpose and that is to feed people. And, if we can make it better than these big commercial units then it is better not just for the animals but for the countryside and humans.’
Most of Michelle’s piglets are sent to slaughter but some are kept to replace ageing sows or to go to other farms, including one at Lathallan School. ‘I send quite a lot in spring out to crofters and farmers who are starting up themselves. We have also sent some to Lathallan School who are starting a school farm and are ready for livestock, so that is quite nice to see them getting back in touch with food.’
One really important aspect of pig farming for Michelle is proving where a pig has been reared, something she fears labelling on mass-produced pork does not reflect. ‘A pig can be brought up in Australia, shipped to Honk Kong for slaughter, chopped up in Denmark and then cured for bacon in the UK and that is classed as British pork. I don’t think the public are very aware of that.
‘Those were the sort of things that made me vegetarian but now there are alternatives, they don’t all have to be produced in that manner. You can have them outdoors and a happy life.’
Michelle, who lives with her husband at River Croft, ten miles from Inverness, never planned to start farming. ‘I never harboured any thoughts about becoming a crofter or had a love of pigs,’ says the former NHS operating department practitioner. ‘We bought the croft and had a couple of horses but it was really obvious we needed to improve the soil. So, we had aimed to get a couple of pigs and they would plough the soil and fertilise it and end up in the freezer. However, they are fab and are fun to be around and we wanted more, so we got more.’
That was two years ago and now they are proving a remarkable success, in great part, Michelle says, because of the free-range welfare levels the animals enjoy on her 20-acre croft. ‘They are never, ever shut in other than for ill-health. We had a one-day-old piglet outside the other day.’
Michelle says her model of regenerative farming benefits wildlife because sheep follow pigs into a field and then horses are put on to it. This way organic matter goes into the soil and helps improve the ground for plants and flowers which benefit wild animals as well as her own.
Orders come from across the UK. ‘It is all good – without a market and people eating them we would not have any of our farm animals.’
A year ago, Michelle set up the Inverness Food Assembly, one of a growing number of groups of producers who sell their produce online with customers collecting them in person. There are now more than 30 businesses involved, ranging from bakeries to vegetable growers, meat producers to gin makers.
Michelle says that their success is built on a growing desire from the public to know exactly where their food and drink comes from, and a need for producers to find a new way of selling their products.
‘I live in the back of beyond and was doing two weekly deliveries,’ she says. ‘Other producers of different things were doing the same and there wasn’t one place where all the producers could come together. Farmers markets are full up and you can’t get a space at them, so we looked at various different models and the food assembly seemed the fairest.
‘We had people saying they hadn’t eaten meat because the butchers couldn’t tell them where it had come from. I remember one of our customers who had joined – they are not a particularly wealthy family and they have two young children, so it was nice to feed them proper food and none of this stuff from supermarkets. That was their reason for spending extra money on food, which was nice to hear. It is important to people in all walks of life to have high welfare food available to them.’
‘I am not going to attempt to change what people do, my only issue is animal welfare’