It's hard work bringing home the bacon

BY TIM CRONSHAW

Spencer and Jacqui Johnstone have learned to be lightfooted when near a protective mother.

If hell hath no fury like a woman scorned, then tuck a threatened brood behind her to find the true definition of rage.

Pigs are no exception to this rule and the couple have both found themselves too close for comfort to an enraged sow when piglets are weaned from their mother.

This has its challenges when a sow is outdoors with plenty of room to move about, as is the case at the Johnstones' "free range" Cressy Farm at Greendale, south of Darfield, near Christchurch. "At 250kg, if they hit you, you know about it, " says Jacqui. "We have both been taken for rides by pigs, with them between our legs."

She gingerly makes her way to the entrance of the small shed, ready to make a bolt for it if necessary. Tiny piglets are revealed squirming in the hay and the sow looks on with suspicion. "These young ones are only a week old. When they have just been farrowed [produced a litter] we have to take it slowly because we don't know if the girls will come up with their hackles up or just lay down. They really show their personality when they are weaning."

Each of the 270 breeding sows has a waterproof hut with straw underfoot on the 16-hectare property with historical grazing rights on 4ha at the neighbouring Waireka River. They can roam freely within a fenced paddock of one hectare, shared with five other sows.

Here the piglets remain until they are weaned, and for five weeks go to a "cosy" kennel with a hut and small run. Then they become grower pigs for bacon production in an open shed. About 50 young pigs share a pen in this north-facing structure, open to the elements aside from a roof and low concrete walls, and filled with sawdust so they can burrow with their snouts.

It would be easier, the Johnstones admit, to run all of them in housed pig crates, and they have to work harder to handle the pigs, but they like the idea of outdoors farming.

As well, a "free range" piggery helps now they market their own pig meat to people who care about where their food comes from.

Pig farming was in the news last year with comedian Mike King exposing crate farming on TVNZ's Sunday programme, riling animal rights groups and offending urban consumers.

The Johnstones favour free-range farming, but will not criticise the contained alternative. They say their own pigs would be frothing at the mouth if a feed bucket was rattled at 2am as in the King "expose".

Crate farming, says Spencer, is a product of imported pork being allowed into the country, which has squeezed margins to an unprofitable level. Pig farmers have responded by getting bigger and bigger operations and leaning on intensive technology to flatten out costs.

"One of the things that annoyed me about the Mike King saga is [the idea] that [pig farming] is all about money. Well, there ain't no money.

"Probably 80 per cent of shoppers will decide on price, but they fail to account for the water content in bacon and hams. Are they really getting their money's worth? I would suggest they are not."

Spencer says buyers should be asking themselves if they are getting a good deal from imported pork and what is in their processed food.

The couple should know. They used to sell hams from a butcher they no longer use, who prepared their meat in a traditional honey-cure process that also used phosphate. The phosphate was added in the pre-mix to hold water.

They say there are pros and cons for each type of farming. Outdoor sows are vulnerable to contracting Post-Weaning Multisystemic Wasting Syndrome (PMWS) from visiting seagulls. And pig farming using sow crates means smaller pigs are protected from more dominant ones.

The Johnstones get around this by using good stockmanship to remove smaller pigs from troublemakers. Breeding sows are otherwise free to roam in their slice of the paddock.

Sows need a lot of food to sustain the 13 litres of milk they produce a day for their young. An advantage of raising them outdoors is they can pick up good roughage from pastures.

Cressy Farm goes through $12,000 of feed a week, which works out to be about 1.3 tonnes of food for each sow a year. An indoors piggery is cheaper as the pigs use less energy moving around and do not have to deal with temperature changes.

With wry humour Spencer describes pig rearing as a high-turnover and low-profit business.

He and Jacqui were close to calling it a day on pig farming not so long ago, but have gone in the opposite direction and are expanding the business. Keeping them in the pig game was their decision to market their own meat.

The Johnstones entered pig farming by an unconventional route. Spencer was an auditor with the Inland Revenue Department and Jacqui a cropping agronomist when they bought their lifestyle block in 1987. Their timing was bad – interest rates rose to 21.75 per cent as they set about stocking the property with a few sheep and pigs.

Tiring of his auditor's job, Spencer decided to start a pig operation seven years later. They thought pigs would be easy to farm. Their first sow had 21 piglets and raised 16 of them. "They were easy," says Jacqui, mockingly. "You just feed them and they grow. In hindsight we knew absolutely nothing. We have spent 16 years learning and we are still learning."

Pig farming is a combination of science and stockmanship because of its intensive nature. University-educated Jacqui rates it as more technical than cropping or sheep and dairy farming. The health issues alone can wreck a farmer and the Johnstones count themselves fortunate that PMWS has not strayed onto Cressy Farm.

When they started there were 6000 registered pig producers nationally. Now there are about 250.

Initially, they sold eight-week-old weaners from their 80 sows to other farmers in the store market; today a 250-sow herd is no longer an economic unit. When the bottom fell out of that market, they grew out the pigs themselves. Another downturn arrived two years ago, and the final straw for Spencer was visiting a supermarket to see pig bones being sold for $7 a kilogram when they were getting $2.80/kg for their pigs. A week ago the meat schedule fell 20c/kg.

He says the only people making money in the industry are the wholesalers and retailers. Again, he points to imported product, accounting for about 48 per cent of product on shelves today, as the main villain. "We are continuously frustrated by particularly the bacon curers, who say New Zealand cannot produce enough pigs for the market," says Spencer.

"It's a load of crap and the farmers have got out of the industry. It's because the bacon curers have brought in cheap imported pork."

Bleeding money, they decided to sell their own pork at the farmers market at Riccarton House, in Christchurch. The customers liked what they tasted and what they saw in photographs at the Johnstones' stall of outdoor-living, low-stress pigs. Free-range pork began to catch on.

Initially, fresh cuts of pork, bacon, ham and sausages were sold, and later salami, cheese kransky and other specialist small goods.

Butchers were discarded until they settled on Brian Nieuwenhuize, who specialises in small goods and refuses to use a pre-mix, handling every ingredient himself.

As well, they took courses in shoestring budgeting, business planning and website design to help them pick up business skills.

By far the most invaluable tool they have found is interacting with the customer. A request for a kassler ham by one lady now sees them supplying this and other products, and has confirmed people want sausages with real meat in them and bacon that doesn't boil in a pan.

Learning is a two-way process and the Johnstones are educating people about how to cook pork. With only 1 per cent of fat, pork dries out quickly and cannot be overcooked.

Each sow produces two to three litters a year, for a total of 20 piglets a sow. A piglet will weigh about 1kg and when weaned four weeks later is 8kg. Their weight increases to 30kg at 10 weeks and to 90kg to 95kg liveweight after 19 weeks, when they leave.

Replacement breeding pigs (gilts) are bought. They are given a "real man", a boar, for their first intimate experience and then are restricted to artificial insemination.

Monday is sales day and about three pens of between 50 and 60 grower pigs for bacon are sold each week. With demand increasing, the couple have four pigs processed in Timaru for their own market ventures. The success of the farmers market has led them to provide more pig meat to butchers around Christchurch.

Within 10 minutes of Mike King's programme being televised a butcher emailed them with orders for free-range pork and others followed. Now they plan to buy a shop in a working partnership with Nieuwenhuize, but will keep their stall.

For once they seem to have landed on their feet, says Spencer. The world is crying out for real food and is beginning to care about how it is produced. "I'm really good at being at the wrong place at the wrong time. This is the only time I have been in the right place at the right time."

- © Fairfax NZ News