Fighting for a place at the top table

With tough competition from the big producers and new EU regulations set to come into force, small pig farmers are fighting for survival, writes CATHERINE CLEARY

ROY GALLIE’S pigs are looking up at us from their enclosure. They were born in June. In six months they have grown from the size of a cat to a weight of 70 kilos (roughly 11st), or the weight of an average human adult. They have led a sedentary indoor life in slatted stalls eating a diet of grain meal, which is grown and milled on the farm. By the time you read this they will have been butchered and their hams (those chunky rear haunches) will be curing for Christmas tables.

Turkeys get all the press at this time of the year but according to a recent Bord Bia survey, more than half of diners don’t feel the festive meal is complete without a ham. The story of the majority of Irish Christmas hams is a tale of industrialised food production and a pig industry on the brink of change. Roughly a quarter of each of these slaughter-ready pigs in Roy Gallie’s piggery, or 18 kilos of their meat, will be turned into hams. Their shoulder meat, bellies and heads may be shipped to China, to feed the pigmeat export market expected to grow to around €500 million this year.

From his family farm on a section of a beautiful walled former estate in Broadford, Co Kildare, Gallie sends 80 pigs a week away in a lorry. Twenty go to other farms for breeding. The other 60 are slaughtered for meat. His is a small piggery in commercial terms, producing roughly 4,000 pigs a year. And like many pig farmers he is struggling to make a living. Feed prices have gone up in the global economic crisis. (Fears about equity stocks have pushed up the prices of commodities like wheat.) Gallie recently pulled a piece of paperwork from a drawer dated 1989. It showed the price of pigmeat per kilo at 94½ pence, or roughly €1.20 a kilo. Despite the 22 years that have passed since then the price to the farmer is now around €1.43 a kilo before VAT. Just to keep pace with inflation it should be around the €2 mark.

In one shed, where the pregnant sows are kept in narrow heavy iron stalls, a Mexican wave of pigs ripples down the stalls, as two rows of huge sows stand up while we walk down the low warm building. The source of heat? The pigs themselves, their body heat keeping the buildings as warm as a centrally-heated sitting room.

“As a pig farmer I’m terribly happy with my Mums here,” Gallie explains when I ask about the intensive methods. The steel stalls allow the sow to stand and lie down but are not wide enough to allow the animal turn around. “I can spot a sick one like that,” he says, clicking his fingers to show how quickly that is. “You can chat to them all.” He has always farmed pigs and he likes them. They are, he insists, contented. At the end of the shed a huge hairy boar comes over to the wall of his enclosure to have his back scratched by the farmer.

But from January 2013 these sow stalls will be banned under EU legislation. Chairman of the IFA’s pig committee Tim Cullinan believes the industry will have to invest €40 million in new buildings to allow for the extra room EU regulations will demand. A pig farmer himself, Cullinan produces 26,000 pigs from his farm in Nenagh, Co Tipperary. Over 40 per cent of Irish pig meat is produced for the home market, he says.

Faced with the new regulations Gallie believes that there is a generation of pig farmer who will simply close their operations. And like many other sectors it will mean big food producers grow bigger, with fewer but larger pig units supplying dinner tables. Piggeries like these are extremely efficient producers of cheap meat protein. On the Gallie farm he gets one kilo of meat for every two and a half kilos of grain feed. Thanks to advances in genetics, breeding fast-growing pigs, farming and computer-controlled feeding systems that produced the meat cheaply pig farmers are the victims of their own success.

There have been lucrative years for pig farmers but 2011 wasn’t one of them. Roy Gallie’s farm made a net loss of €42,000 this year. His area payment from the EU will mean that he will just about break even. Like most farming families they have off-farm income, from his wife’s salary as a teacher.

The main producers believe the consumer is not willing to pay extra for free-range meat or pigs housed in less intensive farm buildings. “It’s becoming a case of survival of the fittest,” Gallie says. Neither he, nor Cullinan believe that a mass-scale free-range pig farm is feasible in Ireland. “Unfortunately we won’t be able to feed the world like that,” he says. It simply wouldn’t produce the quantities of meat needed for the export trade, they argue. And a climate with our quantities of rainfall would mean fields turned into muddy byres by any large-scale outdoor pig farm.

Until the consumer is willing to pay a higher price the elimination of stalls is “non-recoverable compliance costs”, Gallie says. Like many farmers his children are not interested in continuing the family business so he would be investing in a business that he will not be passing on to another generation.

Bref Galligan’s colleagues in his IT job think he is slightly crazy. When he finishes work he drives to the foothills of the Dublin mountains, pulls on mud-spattered rainwear and wellies and tends to his herd of around 40 pigs. The Middlewhites and Gloucester Old Spots are kept on just under two acres of rented farmland, with a variety of straw-filled shelters where they sleep.

He’s been a part-time pig farmer since 2007 calling his operation Hellfire Pigs after the Hellfire Club which overlooks the smallholding. His farming methods are the polar opposites of those of commercial pig units. His herd lives outdoors, mainly in family groups, and the pigs eat between 400 and 500 kilos of meal a week and 300 kilos of fruit and vegetables. Last week his grocer gave him a pallet of kiwi fruit that were too far gone to sell. The animals wolfed them down from the muddy troughs. “They’re probably using half their feed to keep themselves warm,” he says. They burn off half their calorie intake roaming around their field, breaking into the occasional run and constantly rooting and searching for missed scraps in and around the trough.

The pigs have turned the fields into mud, a thick soupy layer of it. Sometimes they’ll root down and get to the soil again, Galligan explains. A layer of it has dried onto their hairy skins so that only the skin protected by the back of their floppy ears is pink. What are the animals like to work with? “They’re charming and frustrating,” he says. They’ve just recently worked out the electric fence and one had just staged an audacious escape. Galligan finds the work “a great de-stresser” from the day job. He says the heavy snows of the last two winters didn’t bother the pigs. They slept in piles for warmth and once just before a night of severe frost they dug a pit for sleeping. When they got up he could see the steam of their bodies rising from it.

Galligan sells his pigs by the €50 and €100 box or by the half or whole pig. The meat is sold at €9 a kilo. Like his commercial counterpart it’s a struggle to make money from the operation. Last year he decided to increase the herd after lots of inquiries from Eastern European customers. This year the phone hasn’t rung. He doesn’t do hams but his butcher has just cured one as an experiment. He’s been trying to get a farmers’ market pitch but the most popular ones are full, “and you’ll find maybe one or two real farmers there,” he adds drily.

Down in west Cork Fingal Ferguson is gearing up for his busiest time of the year. The Gubbeen herd of 20 sows are somewhere between the free-range and commercial indoor model. They are housed in straw-filled stalls in a large shed. At the smokery the Fergusons take in free-range pigs from smaller farmers in the area so they can also supply free-range and rare-breed hams. Gubbeen ham has become a selling-point on menus like Ballymaloe House.

The Gubbeen ham is brined in wine with herbs and juniper so it needs very little done to it, Ferguson explains. And his own choice for Christmas dinner? “Well it’s really a choice between smoked or unsmoked hams. The smoked ham has more flavour but the unsmoked is probably playing it safer.”

Visit the websites hellfirepigs.net and gubbeen.com for prices and details

Cidona ham with Highbank Orchard Syrup and mustard

THE JOY of a ham is the small amount of labour that can create a really tasty Christmas classic. At a guess I’d say more people enjoy leftover ham than they do turkey. I’ve made Nigella’s ham boiled in cola before so I thought I’d try a different version. I made this with a small Fermanagh black bacon joint but you can do it with a large ham. It was a huge hit in our house. The fussiest eater declared it was “like really, really tasty chicken”.

Allow a litre of Cidona per kilo of meat, depending on the size of your cooking pot. If your ham is very salty soak it first in water and drain it well before starting.

Bring the Cidona to a simmer in a large heavy pot. Add a bay leaf (two if they’re small), six cloves and an onion roughly chopped to the liquid. Put the ham in skin side down and bring it to the boil. Reduce to a simmer and cook for an hour per kilo. Turn off the heat and leave it in the liquid for at least an hour. (I left ours overnight). Slice off the skin and score the fat. Mix two tablespoons of Highbank Orchard Syrup with two teaspoons of fine grain mustard and spread it on the skin. Finish with freshly-ground black pepper. Under a medium grill toast the glaze until it’s nut-brown. You can serve this ham hot or cold.

Irish pigs – a short history

THE PIG HAS long been a favourite animal breed in Ireland, where it has served as an income supplement to poor farm labourers. Pigs were probably domesticated during the Neolithic period from a wild species of European pig. The Irish pig breed was called the Greyhound. It had a leaner, longer body, large floppy ears, thick skin and stiff bristles, but became extinct in the early 20th century when fatter, thinner skinned animals became more popular.

As the expression "the pig in the parlour" denotes, pigs were often given shelter inside the family's cottage, reflecting its value to his owners. Sale of the fattened pig often provided the only source of cash income for cottiers.

Pigs eat similar food to people and can be fed exclusively on scraps left from human consumption. Numbers were often directly proportional to the size of the potato crop. In good years, pig numbers increased dramatically. Before the Famine, there were more than 1.4 million pigs in Ireland, falling afterwards to about 500,000.

In the days before refrigeration, fresh pork had a tendency to spoil much more quickly than beef or mutton. For this reason pigs were seldom slaughtered in summer and pork was usually cured in salt to produce hams and bacons. Irish ham and bacon was considered of high quality, and during the 19th century, as population in British cities exploded, large quantities were exported to Britain. Ireland in turn imported cheap, salty American bacon, – often the only meat available to the poor.

As pigs require little space, they were also raised in cities. As late as 1900, Dublin still had at least 4,000 pigs within the city limits, many in backyards or parlours, until bylaws established a minimum distance (50ft) which pigs had to be kept from human habitations. Piggeries persisted well into the 20th century – footballer John Giles recalls getting a few coins for selling food scraps to a neighbour who raised pigs.  – Juliana Adelman

Juliana Adelman is a historian at Trinity College Dublin