SOUTH WALES: PORK
We continue our series championing regional specialities from artisan food producers working to the highest ethical standards. This month:
We continue our series championing regional specialities from artisan producers
“She talks with her ears; they jiggle away when we have a conversation.” Martha runs The Decent Company, supplying customers across the country with free-range, rare-breed pork from her farm in the Brecon Beacons. Unlike most pigs kept for meat in the UK, Martha’s live outside all year round, roaming the rough, grassy paddocks near Sugar Loaf mountain and rooting among the old oak and beech woodland.
For Martha, it is the only way to keep pigs. “From a day old, piglets will stand next to their mother and put their snouts to the soil,” she says. “Being a pig is about rootling, sniffing and digging in the ground. They can’t do that if they’re kept indoors on straw or concrete. If I’m going to eat meat, I want the animals to have lived the best possible life.” While a free-range life is good for pig wellbeing, Martha believes it also improves the quality of the product. A life spent outdoors, especially climbing the slopes of a hillside farm, enables pigs to build muscle over time, which adds flavour and texture to the meat. It is darker and pinker than the pork you would find in a supermarket. “You don’t get any greying, cardboard pork chops in our meat boxes,” Martha says. The pigs are fed on locally milled cereal pellets, but their foraging instincts lead them to snaffle extra roots, grubs and – most prized – acorns and beech masts: “Last autumn was a mast year [when trees produced a bumper crop of seeds] in the woodland. The pigs were in heaven. They had eaten so many I swear I could hear some of them rattling! It produced a real depth of flavour to the meat.”
AN ACCIDENTAL EMPIRE
Martha shakes a bucket of feed and six piglets scamper over and nibble at her wellies. She is so at ease that it seems she has been farming her whole life rather than a mere eight years. Martha used to live in the suburbs of Sheffield. It wasn’t until 2013 that she “went rogue”, swapping her Mini Cooper for a pick-up truck and moving here. Even then, breeding pigs was never the plan. “My mid-life crisis turned into an accidental pig empire!” she says. The combination of nudging 40, the end of a long-term relationship and a feeling that she wanted to “produce something tangible” led Martha to rent a few acres of her grandparents’ farm just outside Abergavenny. “The farm has been in the family for generations. I spent all my childhood holidays here and loved it. The space and the animals… it was so different from my life in Sheffield. It’s the only place I’ve ever felt connected to.”
Martha intended to keep her communications and peoplesupport role at the Royal Mail (a job she still does), working remotely and spending downtime growing vegetables and keeping a few hens. But after attending a couple of one-day smallholding courses nearby, she thought she would grow weaners (eight-weekold piglets kept for seven months before being sent for dispatch).
“My first three weaners were so easy to look after, I thought I must be a natural, but the next three were a different story,” she says. “As soon as I unloaded them from the car, they darted under the fence and disappeared.” It was almost two weeks before Martha got a call to say a local farmer had found them: “They’d eaten three of his ducklings and fallen asleep in his hay barn. I was so embarrassed. Worse still, I took the call while I was heading back from a pig breeder with three replacement piglets in the back of the car.”
PIGLETS ON TWITTER
As six pigs provided more meat than she could eat, Martha started selling cuts to family and friends. The next year, she bred a litter,
“Flo is very chatty,” says pig-farmer Martha Roberts as she gives the Gloucestershire Old Spot sow an affectionate scratch on the head.
posting the piglets’ exploits on Twitter. By 2016, followers were asking if they, too, could buy her pork, and Martha decided to “get more organised about it”. She arranged to work with a local abattoir and butcher, who would cut, pack and label the meat, and launched a website.
“I’m fortunate to have an excellent small abattoir 15 minutes away,” she says. “There are very few left, which threatens the survival of small meat producers like me because larger ones don’t want to process animals in such low numbers. They also stun the pigs, which makes it less stressful for the animals.” Despite having taken hundreds to dispatch, every trip is tinged with sadness: “I used to think it meant I wasn’t tough enough to be a farmer, but now I realise that it should weigh heavy. If everyone who ate meat thought more about how an animal lived and died, we might waste less and be prepared to pay more.”
There is now a waiting list for Martha’s meat boxes, with people keen to cook Sunday roasts with perfectly crunchy crackling – almost guaranteed with her pork: “Commercial breeds are fastgrowing and much leaner, but fat gives meat flavour. Traditional breeds, like my Old Spots and Berkshires, have a thick layer of fat, so all you need for great crackling is a really hot oven.”
EMBRACING SMALL-SCALE
This time of year, the hills are lush, the valleys are in blossom and the pigs come out of their arks to sleep in heaps on top of each other. Martha’s day starts at 7am, when she feeds and checks on them before heading to her home office to do the ‘day job’ for Royal Mail. Her role has involved managing the impact of Brexit and the pandemic, so the past year has been stressful. Yet being on the farm has helped. “Many people have had such a torrid time recently, so I feel very fortunate,” she says. “However bad my day might be, it is bookended with fresh air and pigs. It’s hard to feel anything but joyous when you’re mobbed by piglets.”
Although demand for her meat is growing and requests for her weaners have rocketed in line with a rise in pig-keeping (a lockdown hobby), Martha has limited her stock to 70. “I was conditioned to think the ambition of any business is to get bigger,” she says, “but I learned in the winter of 2019-20 that it isn’t always the best path. I had around 120 animals in the worst winter for a generation. The ground was too wet for my Suzuki, so twice a day I was hauling three 20kg bags of feed up slopes in the driving rain. It almost broke me physically, mentally and emotionally.”
Instead, Martha embraces small-scale farming. “I’ve realised you can be a small operation and be good at what you do – although there’s always more to learn.” Keeping one step ahead of the pigs is also an ongoing challenge. “They are always outsmarting me. They can tell when an electric fence has stopped working and the first thing I know about it is when a pig meets me at the gate.”
Fortunately, they rarely stray far. “The piglets might get up to a bit of mischief, but the sows tend to say ‘hello’ to a few pigs, then take themselves back to their arks,” Martha laughs. With promise of dinner and a scratch behind the ears, who can blame them?
ORDER free-range rare-breed pork from The Decent Company at thedecentcompany.co.uk. See overleaf for more on how to use it.
“If I’m going to eat meat, I want the animals to have lived the best possible life”