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Red Pig Farm is a 30 hectare agricultural holding located
on the western fringe of the Brecon Beacons National Park, between
the market towns of Llandeilo and Llandovery, in South-West Wales.
Originally farmland, the British Government, through
the Ministry of Agriculture, purchased this land in the 1950s, and
planted it with fast growing exotic conifer species, which was the
fashion at the time. This crop of trees was cleared in the late
1990s and thereafter the land was left to its own devices. We purchased
the farm in April 2004, and since then have been improving access
and developing the various business projects intended for the property.
Red Pig Farm provides an outstanding
opportunity to develop and expand several unique rural
business models, which are based on the most basic agricultural
principle of raising and harvesting crops, and then adding value
to these crops through innovative marketing techniques and detailed
business planning, which is achieved without the addition of agricultural
subsidies.
The nature of Red Pig Farm – large wooded
areas and smaller areas of unimproved grassland – is ideally
suited to facilitate the expansion and development of these businesses
as they are based on the utilisation of wood, in the form of sawdust,
woodchip, logs and living trees.
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Red Pig Farm is managed to international organic principles,
administered in the UK by the Soil Association.
We support and promote the Slow Food movement and
maintain the very highest standards of land management. Staff here
have been directly responsible for changing EC food production regulations,
and have devised systems of forest management which have been adopted
by small communities in many parts of the world.
Established woodland and plantation areas are managed to
the principles of "Excellent Forestry" - which uses nature
as a model and embraces the forest's many values and dynamic processes,
but is always guided by science, place-based experience, and continuous
learning and discovery.
The systems of food production are based on
seasonal patterns and by 2010 we hope that we are able to feed
all our livestock from crops that are grown on the farm. We have
addressed the issue of food miles, sustainability and socially
aware farming practices, which everyone talks about, but few will
ever achieve.
The farm is powered by renewable energy systems
which utilise water, wind and the sun and a back-up generator
that is powered by recycled chip oil, supplied by Sundance
Renewables. We also run our vehicles on the same oil.
We can be confident that the small amount of CO2
that we are responsible for producing is taken up by the actions
of more than 1 million trees, which are growing on the farm.
We use rainwater, which is collected from the
barn roof and then filtered before use; the toilets are all dry-compost-based
and all our own wastewater is filtered through ecologically- engineered
systems that rely on living plants to clean the water before it
is allowed to flow back into the stream. |
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Sustainable management of our woodland areas is key to
the overall success of our businesses. A novel approach to woodland
as a provider of multiple resources, rather than just timber,
allows and encourages us to value the species diversity and varying
age structures of our wooded areas.
This not only ensures a constant supply of materials
for our growing businesses, but also gives impetus to our work
in improving the overall diversity of the farm.
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As we fast approach peak oil, there can be little
doubt in anyone's mind that conventional livestock farming, as we
know it, will decline to levels that will have a dramatic effect
on the landscape of this country.
While the arguments
relating to the high cost of meat, in terms of energy input,
are too strong to deny, the fact remains that a landscape without
animals is a dead landscape, and this forms the basis of our approach
toward raising livestock: there is a need for us to use livestock
to maintain a rich and diverse farm holding, and in raising these
animals we see an opportunity to provide ourselves with meat grown
to organic standards.
There is no intention to
grow more than we need to feed ourselves. |
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