Harley Farms: where Tamworth pigs are raised outdoors for a niche market
Friday, June 7, 2013
Roger Harley and his family believe in humane, sustainable production. So they raise their pigs outside year-round, in small huts, on pasture, and feed them a ration with a high percentage of forage. It's a recipe customers seem to like
by DON STONEMAN
It's the first day of spring at Harley Farms near Keene, southeast of Peterborough, and the pigs are out – out of their huts, that is – and frolicking in the snow. They hunker in their cozy, body-heat-warmed wooden shelters as the sun goes behind clouds, the wind picks up, and that first fleeting hint of spring warmth disappears.
Harley Farms is miles away from where most pork is produced in Ontario – and even further in terms of philosophy. The pigs are Tamworths, raised essentially outdoors year-round in small huts, on pasture, and fed a ration with a high percentage of forage by volume and caloric value.
The Harley family won an award for innovation this year at the Canadian International Farm Equipment show. The farm is widely promoted on the website of Rowe Farms, a Toronto-based chain of stores selling specialty meat products. Rowe's motto is "quality with a conscience," and its website describes family patriarch Roger Harley, who "spent much of his life developing animal-welfare-driven farming practices in the U.K." as "part of the Rowe Farm team."
Roger Harley says many farm tours from around the world have come to view the operation north of Keene and south of Hwy 7, but no one from the provincial government has been to see it. Members of the Ontario Ministry of Agriculture and Food's swine production team, contacted by Better Pork, had not heard of the Harley Farms operation. Swine researchers at the Campbell Centre for the Study of Animal Welfare at the University of Guelph "are familiar with Mr. Harley and what he has been doing to develop more humane animal husbandry systems. However, to date no research has yet been carried out at Harley Farms," according to Lena Levison, interim communications coordinator.
Roger Harley and his family, including 20-year-old son James, will farrow the equivalent of about 120 gilts this year, seven gilts every two weeks. (There are no farrowings in January, February and half of March.) Roger Harley says it takes five and a half to six and a half months to get a pig to market weight, "not a lot different from an industrial barn."
A 240-pound pig brings between $190 and $250, depending on transportation costs. This covers "feed, labour and our land costs," says Harley. He likes to keep shipping in-house for humane reasons.
Harley says he can market everything he raises, selling largely through Rowe Farms, which has seven stores in Toronto and one in Guelph featuring local and humane meat raised without antibiotics. Part of the allure of Harley Farms' pork, from a consumer's point of view, is that the pigs are fed forage.
Harley says he is taking the Tamworth breed back to its original foraging roots. A bale processor is an integral piece of equipment, along with a TMR mixer used to make and spread a forage-based ration on the ground near the huts. Harley says pigs that don't grow well on the ration are culled heavily and sold into the barbecue market.
Only about one third of the gilts are selected for breeding. With this selection process, Harley says he is remaking the breed, culling the animals inadvertently selected for a response to high grain feeding because they were being plumped up for show, the only reasons Tamworths were raised for many generations.
Selection is also based on mothering ability. If a gilt walks away from her babies, the Harleys don't breed her piglets.
Ask Harley about the normal parameters of pig production – pigs/sow/year, litters/year, pigs born alive, pigs weaned/litter/year – and you aren't going to get standard answers, or maybe no answer at all, because these criteria don't apply. "Other producers don't understand what we are doing," he says, noting that raising heritage pigs is almost like raising another species. Other heritage breeders agree that the normal standards of pig breeding don't count here.
Fred de Martines, who raises Tamworths near Sebringville, stresses that minimizing days to market and maximizing growth rate and lean meat production are counterproductive to producing a traceable, premium-priced product. Feed salesmen and swine specialists have a hard time accepting this, he says.
At Harley Farms, each gilt raises about eight or nine piglets. But Harley is shipping females after they raise their first litter. A gilt weighing 250 to 300 pounds "is easy to deal with," he explains. At 500 to 600 pounds, a grown sow "takes a lot of handling," a polite way of describing the dark side of a trait Harley refers to as "notoriously good" mothering ability.
"Tamworths are very ferocious. They will chase coyotes out." Add to that the issue of damage to equipment such as the huts. "They get vicious and destroy everything," he says.
Harley ships pigs to Hilts at nearby Norwood for freezer orders and to Highland Meat Packers at Stoney Creek, which kills for Rowe Farms. "We can sell anything we produce, from a 60-pound pig up to 240 pounds. We aren't keeping up to demand. It's great to have something that people want."
Large packers need numbers
A drawback with this breed raised outdoors is the hairiness factor. "The kill plants do have a problem with this," he allows.
Harley would like to be able to ship to a federal plant but admits that "we need numbers. You need to be able to supply a lot" of pigs to get a larger packer interested.
Harley refers to his project as an "experiment" and it's not just about raising pigs outdoors. He envisions "franchising" a pig-raising system or perhaps working with a marketing group. Harley cites the need for "third-party research" to establish the costs. He says he needs a government research grant to finance this study.
Prof. Tom Hutchinson at Trent University's sustainable farming program is analyzing Harley Farms with an eye on the environment and the farm's ability to reduce purchased input costs. He works with Prof. Medhi Sharifi, an expert in soil nutrients, who was named a Canada research chair in Sustainable Agriculture at Trent last fall. Hutchinson sees potential for increased profitability because of substantial energy and infrastructure savings with pigs raised outdoors, feed grown and milled on the farm rather than bought in, and improved use of nutrients that come largely from the pigs.
Market returns for commodity pigs are down more than up, Hutchinson says, and the future for commodity pork production in Ontario looks dim. Production costs must be cut and outdoor production that reduces costs is a way to do it. Harley points out this system has lower costs than a conventional pig barn because there is no building and no slurry to take away.
Harley uses a five-component rotation – three years of pigs on pasture; three years of hay, sometimes with oats. After three years of hay, he puts in cattle for a year, sheep for a year, and then plants pasture for a while before fields go back to the hogs. Currently, he brings in supplements from Masterfeeds.
Hutchinson thinks additionally at least one year of non-GMO corn, and perhaps two, could be grown on a field before it is returned to grass pasture for the pigs. "We are trying to take advantage of the hogs," says Hutchinson.
Soil analysis shows there is a substantial bank of nitrogen and phosphorus in the top 12-15 inches of the soil after the pig part of the rotation. Growing corn would close the nutrient cycle on the farm, making it self-sufficient as far as inputs are concerned. And it would reduce the possibility of nutrients, currently brought in with purchased feed, eventually overloading the soil and contaminating the water.
Hutchinson says it is also an antidote to the factors that are wreaking havoc with the pork industry right now – high feed, utility and building costs that seem unlikely to go away with big pig barns.
Intensive farms unsustainable
The Harley family's background is in England. As recently as 15 years ago, Harley says they were farming thousands of acres of land in England and raising thousands of head of livestock. The foot-and-mouth outbreak of 2001 shut off their farm from important markets for its specialty products in North America. Their answer: move to where the markets are.
"My father was a pig expert from the U.K.," Harley says. "He always maintained it was unsustainable working with these intensive farms" because the price of grain, electricity and buildings were rising.
Harley says that in order to develop his line of "forage" pigs, he literally got genetics from all over the world. After initially importing semen, all breeding is now natural. "Animal welfare and ‘natural' is part of the marketing," he says. "We believe we have gone beyond anyone else."
The Harleys currently own 400 acres and rent another 300-400. The fields are stocked at seven females (and their offspring) per acre. Solar panels power the electrified braided wire fence, which withstands damage from snow better than the plastic wiring commonly used to contain pastured livestock. Every six months, spring and fall, pigs are moved to another pasture area. "We can move 100 acres worth of fencing in a day," Harley says.
"I believe in traceability," he says, and not just because it is essential to marketing the high-value product he sells. "If we had traceability in the U.K., foot-and-mouth wouldn't have gotten blown out of proportion the way that it did."
Other heritage breeds make up the rest of the livestock rotation. The double-coated Belted Galloway cattle finish on pasture at 18-20 months of age and the meat grades AAA. Harley describes the cattle as "docile things" and "very easy to look after," but he still must tend them at calving. Similarly, he describes the 200 Wiltshire horned ewes as low-maintenance animals. They are a hair sheep and require no shearing.
The biggest challenge across all species is finding the right livestock, Harley says. He's still looking for "pockets" of the genetics he wants for the pig herd. "People kept them for showing and they lost all of the characteristics they were bred for," he says. "We want livestock that look after themselves … in the climate we are working in and at the end of the day give us a positive cash flow."
He admits that "they haven't been cheaper (than conventional raising) to raise yet," citing the cost of perimeter fencing on the farms and expenditure on research and development. On the pig side, moreover, the Harleys "had to scrap a lot of housing that didn't work" and the investment in developing some of the housing has not yet been recouped.
Jeff Linton, who raises outdoor pigs near Blyth, in Huron County, met Roger Harley when he was a procurement officer for Rowe Meats, and has visited Harley Farms. There are similarities and differences between the operations.
Linton raises conventional pig breeds to maximize the litter numbers. He manages for two litters per sow in one season (first farrowing in April) and fattens sows in the fall before he ships them to "a different market" that wants that fatter pig. He agrees that larger sows can be difficult outdoors. He processes the baby pigs inside the hut with the mother. "I feel 100 per cent safe, but you have to know the pigs," Linton says.
Some producers say that loose-housed sows can be aggressive, but Linton disagrees. Outdoor sows, however, are another matter, and their temperament does change. Linton expects that protective nature is even more pronounced with the Tamworths.
Growing demand
On its products page, Rowe Farms says "seasonally, we also offer cuts of Tamworth pork, a unique species that produces a special, more developed flavour."
Jamie Cooney, CEO of Rowe Farms, says demand for unconventionally produced meats such as the outdoor-raised Tamworths is growing. There is "a bigger gap" between conventionally produced meat and specialty products than ever before, he says. Both the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the Ontario Medical Association recently published warnings about eating pork with residues from antibiotic treatments. "I believe that in 10 years (demand) will be drastically larger than it is today," says Cooney.
Fred de Martines, who farms with his wife Ingrid and his son Mark at Sebringville, stresses that traceability is key. He delivers his Perth Pork Products twice a week to butchers and restaurants in Toronto. He says consumers want to talk to him about raising pigs, field work, and about the fact that breeding boars "go into retirement and die of old age" rather than being shipped. "You only have a few of them," de Martines says, about the boars. "It is what our customers like to hear."
They also want to hear that the pigs are fed non-GMO crops. "I know I take a bit of a beating on the yields in the corn and maybe in the soys, but so what. It is what the customer wants to hear. It sells pork."
De Martines' sows farrow in pens in a tarp shed. His son Mark locks the sow out of the pen when he processes piglets. Their pigs eat a barley-based finisher ration, for Fred says no one can expect even these pigs to grow on just forage. "They can't get enough energy" to grow. "All pigs have the same digestive system," he says. He says the de Martines heritage pigs get hay year-round, which he says takes the stink out of the manure. "They really like second cut, mostly alfalfa." They are given access to as much as they will eat.
That said, he aims to slow down the growth on purpose, so that the meat marbles. "If they grow too fast, they turn into commodity pigs, and it's all about the flavour" and the flavour is in the fat.
According to the University of Illinois extension services, 30 years of research shows that alfalfa has the greatest potential for feeding gestating sows, but "under stressful conditions, or when the sow's body maintenance requirements increase, an all-alfalfa diet would not be adequate." Alfalfa "does not contain any magical properties."
The article continues: "In finishing pigs, backfat thickness has been shown to be reduced by feeding alfalfa, but any benefits are more than overcome by the added days to market." So the Illinois extension is still focusing on commodity production.
Niche producers face the twin and yet opposite challenges of being able to find a market and then supplying it "and supplying it well," says Doug Richards, swine grower-finisher specialist with the Ontario Ministry of Agriculture and Food. "Obviously, (Harley) has found his niche," Richards says.
It's not easy to establish these markets, Richards says. Fred de Martines "works very hard at what he does."
Richards accepts that outdoor raised pigs are a niche market and that they won't replace commodity pork in stores. You aren't going to see Harley's bacon priced at $6 a pound at valu-mart, he observes. BP
Pigs can't survive on forage alone
According to Rare Breeds Canada, the Canadian Livestock Records Corporation registers fewer than 100 female breeding Tamworths annually. Commercial operators such as Harley don't bother to register animals that will be sold for meat, and Rare Breeds' office manager Pamela Heath, located in Nesbitt, Man., says that is normal. For every registered female, "there are 10 or 20" that aren't and go to slaughter. She says Harley is likely the largest Tamworth breeder in Canada, with de Martines coming in second.
She emphasizes that no one should ever think that pigs, even the heritage breeds, can be raised on just forage. "Newbies" will try to do this and the pigs will either die or need to be rescued. It is "a disservice to the industry" to say that pigs can survive on forage alone, she says, and it makes everyone look bad. BP