Spotted Pigs and Green Tomatoes (3 page)

Electricity: £25

Insurance: £62

Water: £25

Phone: £50

Fertilisers: £100

Vet: £30

Car: £134

Tractor: £5

Jam jars, egg boxes and extras: £50

Total: £2,329

The set-up costs, to date nudging £60,000, have included:

Clearing: £2,018 (although this work went on till autumn)

Rental of digger: £550

Timber for fencing: £815

Sand, cement, props, fixings: £1,140

Rebuilding wall: £641.75

Timber for office: £802

Purchase of small cement mixer: £236

Roofing sheets for shed: £275

Polycarbonate sheets: £457

Tractor and rotavator: £2,100

Tractor shed: £500

Trailer: £50

Polytunnels (3): £2,900

Tractor delivery: £40

Day-old chicks from Piggots: £290

Grass seed: £38.98

Putty and glass for windows: £48

Seeds from Thompson and Morgan: £258

Pigs: £225

Greenhouse: £1,789

Digger rental: £669.75

Heated benches and watering system for potting shed:

£1,693

Water pipe: £106

Tozer seeds: £777.69

Timber for fencing: £2,019

Compost and wheelbarrows: £443

Box plants: £800

Vets' bills: £42

Office furniture: £140

Chickens: £267

Rare-breed chickens: £235

Lavender bantams and Apricot ducks: £50

Electric fencing and installation: £900

Seven Gloucester Old Spots: £450

Fencing for pigs/chickens: £1,509

Timber: £950

Chickens: 200

Rare-breed chickens: £86

Two Berkshire pigs: £140

Timber: £907

NFU insurance: £741

NFU membership: £188.49

Egg boxes: £73.70

Fruit trees: £493

Fruit trees (soft): £195

Roof for new shed: £327

Straw: £35

Egg stamp: £47

When we first embarked on the venture in the early months of the year we approached Wayne Bennett, the manager of Dillington
House adult education centre, and secured his agreement that we could supply his chef with vegetables and, in due course,
with 750 eggs a week. Dillington House runs courses in everything from local history to tracing your ancestry, from art classes
to three-day sessions on looking good. They serve roughly two thousand meals a month. Until we started selling carrots to
them in July, all their carrots had been imported from Spain. Now their food miles are a short walk up the garden path.

The income from Dillington House underpinned all our calculations about how we were going to break even. The initial financial
forecast looked like this:

Dillington House: £1,500 worth of vegetables every month

Eggs: 750 eggs a week will yield £320 a month

Pigs: Selling one pig a week from May 2006 makes £150 a week, £600 a month

Vegetable boxes: 20 a week at £7.50 a box makes £600 a month

Rare breeds: should start breeding in spring 2006. Each pair can produce 20 pairs a year, selling at (average) £50 a pair

Plants: plant stock to build up over the next two years, earning £5,000 a year

This makes it sound very easy; it wasn't. To start to pay back the capital and to increase David's salary to a reasonable
level we had to be making almost an extra £1,000 every month. By July 2005 we had earned virtually nothing and by the end
of October, nine months after the project began, we had earned the following:

June:

Sale of plants at a Garden Open Day at the Dairy House: £120

July:

Sale of vegetables to Dillington House: £70

August:

Sale of vegetables to Dillington House: £202

Sale of vegetables to Mr Rendell (the local greengrocer): £120.00

Sale of vegetables to individual buyers who visit the nursery: £1 8

September:

Dillington: £202.90

Dillington Open Day: £126

Individual veg sales: £26

October:

Dillington: £252.55

The Popp Inn: £229 (a local pub with which David had done a deal)

25 dozen eggs to local households: £37.50

Other vegetables: £28.35

Chickens: £30

Vegetables to Kensington Place restaurant in London: £82.50

Total: £1,544.80

I am continually taken aback by how much hard work goes into making just small amounts of money. Eggs are a good case in point.
We bought our first day-old chicks in May. They cost us £1 a piece and began their lives balanced on their spiky little legs,
huddled together on sawdust under the warmth of a heating lamp. Six weeks later they were ready to go outside into their pen.
Another two months elapsed before they were ready to lay. Even then, and very endearingly, they had to take a few practice
runs, producing eggs that were small, sometimes minus the yolks, sometimes containing two. Every day they need feeding in
both the morning and the evening. The electric fence means they don't need locking up at night to protect them from foxes;
they just go inside of their own accord into a warm huddle. Twice a day, someone has to collect the eggs. They need washing
if they are dirty, they need checking under a sharp light for cracks and they need to be stored in a specially reserved place.
Every chicken needs an inoculation and inspection before we are allowed to sell our eggs commercially. Now we have a certified
number and this must appear, by law, on the side of every box of eggs we sell and on the egg itself, to certify that we have
been inspected for cleanliness and hygiene. Seven hundred and fifty eggs earn us £80.

I am, of course, approaching this with the sensibilities of a Londoner who works in the media and who can earn considerably
more than that just for showing up at a radio station and talking about what I happen to think of something in the arts or
in politics. If I contribute to a lunchtime radio show, talking about an issue of the day, I can earn fifty quid in a few
minutes; a similar item on TV nets much more. So I reckon I'm probably very blase when it comes to evaluating financial worth,
but, whichever way I look at it, it still seems incredibly tough that going through that exhaustive process still nets you
only eighty quid.

Now, as the autumn days turn to winter, we are facing the possibility of bird flu and probably having, at best, to move our
chickens indoors or, at worst, to have them all killed. We don't have a hut that is big enough to contain them and there isn't
land enough to build one. If the order comes to keep all birds indoors, we will have to rent a barn somewhere in the vicinity
for the duration of the outbreak. It is hard to imagine them all being slaughtered: far from being headless, chickens have
personalities and looks. At anyone time of day ours will be busy having dust baths, pecking for grubs in the ground, feeding
from the trough, teetering on the ramp which leads into the duck pond for a drink, sitting in twos by the fence, walking gingerly
between the legs of the geese, or just jumping up into the air for no good reason at all. We've got one black Maran who hops
everywhere, bouncing along on her two feet like a feathery pogo stick. On the odd occasion when I've had to pick them up (usually
because their wing feathers need a clip) their hearts beat very fast under their feathers, as though all they are is heart,
but this calms down in seconds and they are quite content to lie there, firmly held between my two palms, their intense eyes
darting in every direction.

We finish carrying the pigs out of the red van. They are so reluctant to leave their snug temporary home where they've been
sleeping in their bed of straw. Pigs are prone to melodrama and, like an opera singer into whose behind someone has stuck
a pin, they squeal madly when we pick them up to carry them to their gate. Once on the ground, though, the three boys trot
happily into the run. The five resident males, all roughly the same size, come nosing up, sniffing and curious. Within seconds,
they are playing tag, pushing each other, chasing this way and that, their tails alternating between curly and straight out,
ears forward. Pigs don't exactly grin, but they have an expression which seems to say, 'I'm happy.'

'So that's Boris,' I say to David as we lean on the gate watching them. Boris was the name we had already given to the boar
who would become our breeding male. We had been referring to this mythical male pig as Boris for months, long before we met
him, long before this actual Boris had even been born. But there is no doubt now about which pig is going to step into the
role. He's small and pink, with a big bunched mass of very black spots on his rump. David is chuffed because one of Boris's
ancestors had been bred by Princess Anne, who has a reputation in the pig world as an excellent breeder.

'He'll get to be this big' - David holds his hand out, above the level of the fence. That means Boris is going to be almost
three feet six inches tall, and probably very fat with it.

Now it is the turn of the girls, two equally fine little Gloucesters, one with an endearing black splodge over her left ear.
We call her Blossom. Like the boys, they squeal as we carry them through a gate and across the vegetable patch to their run.
But there the similarities end. The older lady pigs - Guinness, Bluebell, Bramble and Babe - immediately freeze them out.
Babe, an Oxford Black and Sandy and my favourite pig, who is now emerging as the unelected queen of the tribe, pushes them
to one side, then bites Blossom on the ear. The two little pigs stand there, legs rigid, ears forward, surprised, distressed
looks on their faces. They turn to try and join the group who are gathered near the gate, hoping that David or I will feed
them the hard little inedible pears that have fallen from the tree growing beside the wall. Babe immediately shoulders them
aside and gives Blossom another nip on the back. The two other most recent arrivals - the Empress of Dillington and her sister,
Hyacinth, two small Berkshires - stand to one side, and I swear a look of relief can be seen in their eyes. They are no longer
the newcomers, the butt of the jokes. Berkshires are black with fabulous white noses, and have an inexhaustible capacity for
stuffing themselves. Both she and Hyacinth have literally made themselves sick by eating too many pears. Their hearty appetites
make me confident that P. G. Wodehouse's great creation, the Empress of Blandings, best beloved pig of the Earl of Emsworth
and three times winner of the Fat Pigs Competition at the South Shropshire Agricultural Show, has a thoroughly worthy namesake.

Charlie has collected a big bunch of the bacon weed which grows so freely all over the nursery and he throws it into the run
as a welcome gift for the newcomers. The pigs fall on it with enthusiasm, chomping up the leaves and stalks, emitting grunts
of pure happiness. 'Think of it this way,' he says, 'we could have bought a Mercedes instead.'

The Mere might be more appropriate for a QC and a journalist, but, as they say, stuff happens, chances come and go, and here
we are with the pigs, the chickens, the newly planted vegetables and a plan but, in truth, very little idea of what we are
doing and what is going to happen next.

2

The Cleverest of Animals

The pigs make their first escape on a Sunday morning in October. The week before, the boys' run had been extended back into
the wood, in the direction of the main house. It's a thickly wooded area, made up mostly of pines and laurels. A heavy-duty
electric fence delineates their area, but not well enough, it turns out. At eight in the morning, before we have even gone
downstairs to let the dogs out and collect the Sunday papers, the phone rings; it's one of the staff at Dillington House,
calling to tell us that there are seven little pigs out on the main lawn having a field day. And they are. Pigs love worms
and grubs, so using their muscular noses they have pushed up the top layer of turf, exposing the new soil underneath for grubbing
and rootling. Seven little tails are curled in pleasure as they zip around the lawn, churning up the soil like a fleet of
small rotavators. By the time we arrive, they have attracted a small crowd of Dillington House course members. Cameras are
out and everyone is laughing, enjoying this laddish bid for freedom.

There's something fascinating about pigs. Churchill memorably remarked that 'cats look down on you, dogs look up to you, but
pigs treat you as an equal'. They do. Perhaps it's because they're smart - smarter than dogs, as tests have shown - perhaps
it's because their faces are so full of expression. Haughty, curious, engaging, surprised, busy: they seem to run the gamut
of emotions. All animals are not equal, whether we like it or not. Some are more equal, more interesting, more able to grab
the imagination. We all know that dogs have that magic ingredient. Sheep don't. Pigs do. It was no accident that George Orwell
cast a pig as the ruler of his farmyard. The task of organising the others 'fell naturally upon the pigs, who were generally
recognised as being the cleverest of animals', while the sheep were content to lie around in the field bleating 'Four legs
good, two legs bad! Four legs good, two legs bad' for hours on end.

Babe and the other six breeding females, or gilts, have organised their pen with military thoroughness. Not for them any confusion
about where they sleep, eat or go to the lavatory. Each area is clearly defined. They have a mud wallow which allows them
to cool off in the summer heat and keep their coats clean through regular mud dips, which, once dry, can be scratched off,
leaving behind clean, hairy skin. They help each other out with the process, reaching a fellow pig's awkward body parts, like
the inside of a back leg, with their snouts. Pigs maintain a definite pecking order: Babe is top pig and capable of horrendous
bullying of the smaller pigs and cavalier behaviour when it comes to scrabbling for food. But I imagine that if the herd was
threatened it would be Babe who'd be out front leading the defence. And they're social too, keeping in touch with each other
through a medley of small, agreeable sounds which rise to squeals if one of the pack feels threatened or if there is the possibility
of an unexpected snack.

On the lawn that Sunday morning, the pigs are making small delighted squeals, their snouts working overtime, churning through
the turf. The strong, flattened tip of a pig's nose is supported by a tough pad of cartilage which lets them shovel through
hard ground. I read a story recently about two wild boar in the Bronx Zoo who took out their boredom on their outdoor concrete
run. Beginning with one tiny crack and using only their snouts, they reduced concrete paving four inches deep to rubble in
just three weeks. Apart from its strength, the snout is also the pig's main organ of external information. Their sense of
smell is acute and the two small nostrils in the middle of the snout close up quickly to prevent dirt getting in. In
the same way as a dog can learn from a lamppost just who was there before, how long before, their sex and, amazingly, their
class, so a pig's snout can sort out details of his environment. That day their snouts are telling them that the best food
is to be found a few inches below the lush green grass of the lawn.

A couple of minutes after Charlie and I arrive, David appears, carrying a bucket of pig nuts. 'Pigs!' he shouts, rattling
the bucket, so that the nuts make a satisfactory clanking noise against the sides. Seven heads look up in curiosity. Stuff
the worms, they seem to say, as each one falls into line behind the bucket to trot off in the direction of their run.

The fuss over, we walk back across the park to brew coffee and read the newspapers. They're full of stories about a parrot
that has died in quarantine in Britain from avian flu. The bird had the lethal form of the virus and the prospect of having
to lock up our chickens moves a little closer to reality. At least we have found a suitable place: David's father, Dennis,
has a mechanical repair shed in a run-down set of farm buildings in the neighbouring hamlet of Atherston, and there will be
room in his shed for the birds if the worst comes to the worst. But what will they then be? We can't describe them as free-range
any more, so will we have to take a cut in the price of our eggs? And if that happens will DEFRA, as the old ministry of agriculture
is now known, pick up the difference?

What will happen to very small producers who can't afford to build a shed big enough to house their chickens or who can't
find one? Since the debacle of the foot and mouth crisis, which so affected farmers, no one has any faith in the government
to do the right thing at the right time. Looking back on foot and mouth, it is so clear that the simple act of curtailing
all movement of animals around the country from the moment of the first diagnosed outbreak could well have stopped the disease
in its tracks. Instead, countless animals were slaughtered, ruining farmers both financially and emotionally. Of course for
the beef-buying public, ignorant of the human toll the crisis was creating, life went on as normal. The huge supermarket chains
ensured that we never ran out of a single hamburger, steak, or packet of mince. They simply looked abroad for supplies.

'Did you know that the imports of beef from South America have risen by 70 percent in the last year alone?' I'm
in Bonner's, Ilminster's champion butcher's shop, on a Saturday morning in October and the shop, as ever, is heaving with
life. The queue for the meat counter stretches out into the street, and inside the store people are jostling between the deli
area and the meat counter, picking up food for the weekend. As always, it feels good to be in this shop. The Bonner family
is headed by Clinton Bonner, known to me as Mr B. Thirty years ago, when the elder Bonners arrived from Kingston-on­Thames,
there were five butchers in the town. Now we just have Bonners. The noticeboard to the right of the cash registers lists the
provenance of the meat, game and poultry on sale that morning. Everything is local, everything is sourced. The pork has come
from a farm that Mr B has known all his life, the chickens come from Mr Cracknell's and the lamb from Ashill Farms. I am looking
forward to the day when Mr B chalks up that the Gloucester Old Spot was reared at Dillington Nurseries, as we've decided to
call our smallholding.

As ever, Mr B is in fine form. If you had to paint a picture in your mind of what a classic butcher would look like, an image
of someone looking uncannily like Mr Bwould float into your mind. He's red-faced, with a smile that stretches ear to ear.
On his head he wears a white cap, to go with his white butcher's coat, which is usually speckled with red splodges of blood.
He doesn't so much talk as boom, with laughter, advice and general bonhomie. Mr B makes entering his shop an experience, something
much more than just buying a piece of meat and handing over the money. For a brief moment you sense that you've entered an
essential and wholesome part of the old-fashioned ways of commerce where you, the buyer, are part of a chain that supports
the local farmer, the local feed­producer, the local abattoir, the man who drives the van and the butcher. With the meat in
your basket, that chain extends its way to your family and friends, who feast on the sum total of all those transactions.

Importing beef from South America distorts and destroys that chain. In
a globalised world, supermarkets can buy from countries where labour costs are far lower, meaning that farmers here in Britain
today have increasingly less control over what they can charge for their livestock. The buying power of the big supermarkets
is so great that they can dictate the prices, with little regard as to how much it has actually cost a farmer to rear a chicken
or a cow, and if the farmer can't produce beef (or lamb, or pork or chicken) to meet that price, tough. Until 1990 Brazil
produced only enough beef to feed itself. Since then, its cattle herd has grown by some fifty million and one region is responsible
for 80 percent of the growth in beef production: the Amazon rainforest. In
2004, 26,000 square kilometres of rainforest were burned to clear ground to grow animal feed, primarily destined to feed cows
in North America.

But, more sinisterly, no one quite knows where in the UK the beef is being sold or how hygienic it is. The big super-markets
profess not to stock it, or only in minuscule quantities. George Monbiot wrote recently in the
Guardian
that the high levels of corruption in Brazil, where he reckons some 25,000 workers are employed on the beef-producing ranches,
mean that farm hygiene standards are lax. Foot and mouth is now endemic in the Brazilian Amazon, yet certificates can be easily
bought from officials caught up in the gravy train. When the disease hit Britain in February 200I, the government blamed it
on meat imported by Chinese restaurants. But Monbiot's investigation revealed that the farm where the outbreak started, Heddon-on-the-Wall
in Northumberland, had been taking slops for its pigs from the Whitburn army training camp near Sunderland. And some of their
beef had come from Brazil and Uruguay.

I can't really understand just why we became so fixated on meat. I know how and when we did, but the why still puzzles me.
When I was a child, we ate meat on Sundays and at celebrations. The leftovers were recycled into meals on Monday, Tuesday
and, in the case of a good fat chicken, through to the back end of the week, when chicken stock would form the basis for soups
and my mother's version of risotto. Nowadays, in the UK, we expect to eat meat every day, and our consumption has increased
five-fold in fifty years. In
the last forty years America has increased its per capita consumption of meat from 80 kilos to 184 a year. European consumption
has risen from 56 to 89 kilos. If we go on increasing our consumption at the same rate, in the next fifty years we'll have
to produce five times as much again.

Our increased consumption of red meat has led to an increase in heart disease, certain cancers and obesity: our bodies just
weren't built to absorb such huge amounts of saturated fat. The consumer desire for skinless chicken and non-fatty cuts of
red meat means that the inevitable waste products are used for mass-produced food like turkey twiz­zlers, burgers and chicken
nuggets, which, as Jamie Oliver revealed in
Jamie's School Dinners,
are being dished up daily to our children. Some nuggets contain as little as 16 percent meat and much of that is waste skin.
The single, most astonishing fact for me in Oliver's series was that hospitals in Durham have had to set up special clinics
to deal with chronic constipation among children who sometimes don't go to the lavatory for up to six weeks. An excess of
sugar and salt in these products promotes behavioural disorders. Chicken flu, salmonella and e-coli all result from the dirty
and overcrowded conditions in which factory-farmed chickens are raised. A factory-farmed bird is allotted the space of an
A4 piece of paper in which to spend its entire, sorry little life. Force-fed from the day it hatches to slaughter in just
six weeks, its body weight increases faster than its bone strength, with the result that the chicken's legs give out and it
spends its brief life sitting in muck and dirty feathers.

As a nation we have a very strange relationship with meat: we make a big fuss about additives and the importance of good,
clear labelling on food products, but we never want to know how an animal has lived and died in order to get to our plates.
We are a nation of supposed animal lovers which has recently spent over fifteen parliamentary hours discussing whether or
not we should hunt foxes. I read a 2004 report from Churchill insurers which calculated that we spend an average of £5,000
on our dogs in the course of their lifetimes. Our two dogs, Bingo and Dylan, are very spoilt and overindulged, but I doubt
that we will spend a quarter of that on the two of them together; even so, if at all true, it is a startling statistic. As
a society we feel abhorrence when we hear of needless cruelty to animals and we stock the coffers of the RSPCA accordingly.
Yet we conveniently glaze over the details when it comes to the animals we eat.

When I'm standing next to our pigs, watching them go about their business, rooting and snuffling in the grass, I'm often reminded
of a story my aunt Val told me when I was a child. Val had a friend who kept pigs in her orchard in Buckinghamshire. Every
year, in the autumn, she'd take the three pigs, which she'd reared over the summer on her apples, kitchen leftovers, rejected
vegetables and generous helpings of full cream milk, to the local abattoir. They'd travel in a straw­filled trailer, towed
behind her car. It was a short, four-mile journey to the abattoir in Thame and, provided that she threw in a final bucket
of food, it always passed peacefully. But one year, just as she was rounding a bend, a car roared out of a side turning. She
skidded into the verge and the trailer ended up on its back in the ditch. Trapped inside, the pigs were in an uproar of fear
and confusion. It took a few more hours to get the show back on the road and the pigs to their final destination. When Val's
friend came to eat the pork, she found it had a slightly bitter taste. The vet explained that animals in fear release adrenalin
into their bloodstream which affects the meat and its subsequent flavour.