The Accidental Smallholder Forum
Livestock => Pigs => Topic started by: Fowgill Farm on November 29, 2011, 12:39:40 pm
-
A big butchers concern local to me is offering a 30kg half pig vac/packed & jointedfor £58!!!! :o
How can they do this?
Am going to telephone them this afternoon to see if it is British pork or imported. If they are making a profit at £58 what is the farmer getting for his pigs?
I'm outraged. >:(They have always been known to be a cheap butcher and although their stuff isn't top quality its eatable for anyone who doesn' know better. I wonder constantly at some of their offers and how they do it.
Mandy :pig:
-
the meat sellers at markets( the ones that sell allsorts not farmers markets) sell meat at the point of being past the sell by date
that is £116 for the whole pig less slaughter less there proffit that pig made the farmer £50
will it not be the foreign pork that was contaminated in germany just coming out of storage :farmer:
-
Just rang and they say its british local pork ??? i asked how it could be at that price when they have to buy the pigs, slaughter , cut & pack, no answers could hear the shrug of shoulders down the phone.
they have to be doing it as a loss leader to get folks in and then hope they buy some deareer cuts of beef, lamb etc. These are the type of firms you suspect of being involved in rustling operations!!
mandy :pig:
-
OK WHO HAS LOST SOME PIGS :o :farmer:
-
If you do think its more likely to be rustling than loss leader then a quiet phone call to trading standards might be in order. I agree, theres no way that they are making a profit at that price without a corner or three being cut or them raking it back elsewhere.
-
It might be HappyHippy's missing pig :o
-
It does make you wonder how many pigs do go missing ??? ??? ??? ???
-
these pigs are only 1/5 the size of karens :farmer:
-
To most folk, it's 30kg of dead pig - they won't know or care if it's half a small pig of a 1/5 of Karen's.
-
It might be HappyHippy's missing pig :o
karen, how did u get on with getting reimbursed. just wondering cos when our sheep went missing, we were newbies and we acceptance the first offer of compensation without thinking, but if a mature tammie got lost would they value that as a rare breed or compare it to a hybrid baconer?
-
Stuart and myself were ranting about this butchers on Friday Mandy, very annoyed >:(
-
I was looking in the farmers weekly prices section and from what i could make out porkers were making around £1.47/kg they will have had to buy a whole eighty odd kilo or larger pig to get that kind of weight back so at £58 after slaughter, cutting & packing they're making nothing. very worrying not only for us selling dearer stuff but what did the farmer get?
Mandy :pig:
-
It does make you wonder how many pigs do go missing ??? ??? ??? ???
It does :o
For the butchers to be offering this, do you think the pork could be local farm bred, never registered with Defra, slaughtered by somebody on the premises, possibly with no license, then butchered on the premises too?
I've heard a few local stories similar to the above >:(
-
If you're buying meat that cheap you can be sure someone has paid dearly (probably the poor old pig) :(
-
I heard of a set up local to me where the farmer was buying a lot of pigs very cheaply at an auction, feeding them bakery waste which he got for nothing and then getting them killed on the farm illegally by a butcher friend of his who went on to sell the meat in his shop. They were knocking out a half pig for 50 quid. As far as I'm aware it has stopped now but it went on for some time.
-
i know someone that sounds identical :o :o
-
Unfortunately it does go on, it just shows how desparate things are getting, my orders are down this Xmas, normally i sell four or five pigs worth of meat no bother, this time its down to 3. and half of one of those was a swop for straw.
Mandy :pig:
-
It might be HappyHippy's missing pig :o
karen, how did u get on with getting reimbursed. just wondering cos when our sheep went missing, we were newbies and we acceptance the first offer of compensation without thinking, but if a mature tammie got lost would they value that as a rare breed or compare it to a hybrid baconer?
Oh, I got my pound of flesh :thumbsup: :D :D :D
Their first offer was £200 (she weighed in excess of 250Kg) I laughed and told them I wanted £1200 :o
Funnilly enough it all went quiet ::) but after a strongly worded letter (I was on crutches, so unable to fight face to face) we settled on a fair amount - well, they didn't think it fair but hopefully it'll have taught them to be more carefull in future. I do think if it had been a few years ago I probably wouldn't have fought so hard, but I know more now than I did then.
The good news that came from it though is that the abattoir I normally use for my porkers have been so appalled by the whole thing that they say they are going to start doing bigger pigs. Every cloud and all that ;)
-
thats gud karen. knowledge makes u stronger!
-
this happens more than it should.
i know of some one in oxon doing the same, free bakery waste, parks a trailer up and swaps it every few days.
pigs grow well on it but not sure of the legalities of it..
rare breed pedigree pork is in a different league, we'd never entertain trying to supply that cheap, we couldn't... so if its cheap rubbish you want...good luck.
if you want free range pedigree then you pay premium for a premium product.
-
windymiller nobody can supply that cheap unless it is stollen :farmer:
-
mmmm there's a lot that goes on, I was offered a 'man to come in the night' :o
No thanks, I'd rather do it right :pig:
-
i know someone that sounds identical :o :o
and its rare breed pork. apparently costs £10 per pig to finish as all bakery stuff is free. not free range tho - barn raised and finished.
personally id rather buy good quality feed, surely a balanced diet would make the meat taste better and make the pigs feel better. who hasnt felt crap after eating too much junk food?
-
windymiller nobody can supply that cheap unless it is stollen :farmer:
well weaners at hereford were apparently making 75£ a pop, so i recon your right. that said where do they get them from, there must be a few pigs missing but not heard owt???
most likely foreign muck rebadged.
-
mmmm there's a lot that goes on, I was offered a 'man to come in the night' :o
No thanks, I'd rather do it right :pig:
I'm with you on that :thumbsup: IMHO you can either do it cheap or do it right. Because although you can make savings - it's not cheap keeing pigs properly. By that i mean with good herd health planning & management, feeding, vaccinations, BPA membership etc etc etc !
and its rare breed pork. apparently costs £10 per pig to finish as all bakery stuff is free. not free range tho - barn raised and finished.
personally id rather buy good quality feed, surely a balanced diet would make the meat taste better and make the pigs feel better. who hasnt felt crap after eating too much junk food?
See - rare breed pork says to me cross breed (cos if it was pedigree the breed would be named) so you've maybe got 1/4 tamworth, 3/4 commercial breed getting raised inside and fed on what is effectively junk food :-\ To be honest I'd rather buy proper commercial stuff if that were the case as at least you know the pigs are getting proper feeding for healthy pigs. Also, if the breeder/rearer is scrimping on feed costs - what else are they scrimping on ???
I think when you're raising small numbers of pedigree animals in an outdoor environment - your biggest selling point is YOU. Let people see how you raise your pigs when they come to buy pork, educate them about the way commercial stuff is produced (without downing the commercial guys - it's not their fault they have to do it that way to make a living) and let the quality of the product speak for itself ;)
-
Surely bakery waste is illegal, since it contains animal products, presumably thats why they collect it in laybys in the middle of the night!
-
I'm sure there would be times when bakery waste might be a legal foodstuff (if it was coming from a factory which exclusively made bread or dounuts maybe ?) but it's hardly nutritional & feeding them the best there is ::) Horses for courses, but it wouldn't be my way of doing things.
-
I haven't researched bakery waste but I would have thought it is perfectly possible to get a license to use bakery waste for pigs. You would presumeably need some authorisation that the bakery's processes give no risk of contamination by animal products - if they just make bread products that would be ok, I would have thought.
I had a friend in Exmoor who reared rare breed pork for his local butcher. Yes some of them were crosses, but the boar was a Saddleback and so were some of the sows, and some were OSB or OSB crosses - all the breeds in the crosses were rare breed, just like my own OSB x Saddlebacks. He had an arrangement with his local, very large Sainsburys, whereby he collected unsold food twice a week. The manager was very supportive of the food going to be used rather than going to landfill (and I am sure got a regular supply of top-quality rare breed pork!), so was happy to instruct all his staff about handling any food that had any meat in it differently. They stacked all the unsold bread, cakes (but not sandwiches or pies), fruit, veg, even flowers, in one area of the yard and everything else the other side. The latter went to landfill, my friend picked up a trailer-full twice a week from the other. Often there was so much he couldn't take it all, so then he'd pick through and take the stuff they'd like the most and would be best for them and the supermarket would send the remainder to landfill.
We'd sort the potatoes and parsnips out for boiling, the bread one way, any onions, leeks etc, and some of the citrus fruit if there was a lot, went onto the compost heap (and the Muscovies picked through that), and the rest would be used up as you came to it.
Twice a day every adult pig and each batch of growers got a crate with a portion of boiled spuds and parsnips, a couple of loaves of bread or equivalent, a bunch of bananas and a variety of other fruit & veg. He fed some pellets to lactating sows and their piglets, and to finishers, but other than that all the feed came from the supermarket waste.
He had the process off to a T and had a regular outlet for his Saddleback X rare breed pork.
I can't have the number of pigs he did, we haven't suitable ground, and I haven't managed to find a small supermarket or veg shop who doesn't already have an outlet for their waste (or can't store it so can't hold it for me to collect :() but I live in hope of being able to feed my pigs a more varied and exciting diet!
These pigs were so used to a huge variety in their feed, I once had a couple of them pretty much say, "What, mangoes again? We had mangoes this morning and yesterday - haven't you got anything different?" :D
-
sally you have made a very pertinent point in your contribution
if you read the bpa information on pigs you can only call a saddelback or any breed of pig a saddelback if it has the papers to prove it is what you claim it to be no ifs buts or maybes so unless your friend had them pedigreed registered and in his name they are only classed as a pig the suppermarkets tried this shite with gos and they were beaten THEY MAY LOOK LIKE A SADDELBACK OR WHATEVER BREED THEY CARE TO NAME WITHOUT THE PAPER WORK THEY ARE JUST A PIG AND MOST CERTAINLY NOT RARE BREED :farmer:
-
Bakery wate can be perfectly legal, several hoops to go through, and HACCP to comply with. However as HH says not really a balanced diet, but can be used to maintain sows.
A lot of bread waste from Tesco stores (bread and cakes they don't sell) gets unwarpped instore by night staff, and sent back to Cheshunt in the delivery lorries, where it is then sold on bulk. Tesco bakeries (or more accurately heateries) - in fact I think all instore bakeries- don't handle meat.
-
THEY MAY LOOK LIKE A SADDELBACK OR WHATEVER BREED THEY CARE TO NAME WITHOUT THE PAPER WORK THEY ARE JUST A PIG AND MOST CERTAINLY NOT RARE BREED :farmer:
to sell rarebreed meat as pedigree, is it acceptable to be birthnotified from registered parents - or do meat pigs need to be registered too?
surely bakery products such as lardy cake arent acceptable?
-
to sell rarebreed meat as pedigree, is it acceptable to be birthnotified from registered parents - or do meat pigs need to be registered too?
surely bakery products such as lardy cake arent acceptable?
Birth notified is fine PP - don't register unless it's for breeding ;)
If you've got the on-line BPA membership, you should be able to go in and print off a meat certificate (it's called something like that) for any birth notified piglets that you sell or slaughter.
I've tended to stay away from bakery waste altogether, so don't know much about it at all. But I believe the premises have to be registered/approved by trading standards - a quick phonecall to them should sort out what is/isn't acceptable (maybe ?) ::) ;)