We are farmers first and last, and that drives everything we do. We are very proud of the selection of traditional breeds that live on our land: the Longhorns and Tamworths, the Swaledales, and Texels and Dorsets, but nobody should misunderstand why the Ginger Pig raises these animals. We farm them not as museum pieces, but in a straightforward commercial manner and we believe this is the best means by which to secure their future.


We keep them outdoors wherever possible, rather than cooped up indoors, and we insist upon traceability with all our stock. That means we no longer buy animals for breeding, because we are entirely self-sufficient. We also refuse to use bought in and bagged artificial feeds, packed full of unnecessary proteins. Because of that they grow more slowly than animals raised by more industrial farming methods, which means we have to leave them for longer and we are happy to do so. Our lamb is slaughtered more than a month later than on the industrial farms, and our pigs three months later.

Most of the pork we sell comes from a careful cross between our 300 Tamworths - the original ginger pig - and the Yorkshire or large white.

This produces an animal with sustainable litter sizes, of around eight piglets (as against the 12 or more favoured in industrial farming) and a very good fat to meat ratio. We also have Berkshires, English Lops, Gloucester Old Spots and Welsh pigs. We like our pigs a lot.

We are proud to have raised the largest herd of Longhorns in this country.

We have 140 cows and roughly 220 calves at any one time which are left to grow to 29 months. England's oldest breed is also one of its most beautiful, not just because of the fine curling horns, but because of its mahogany brown coat and the streak of white down the middle.

As Tim Wilson always says, "If you are going to raise animals you might as well get ones that are nice to look at."

At Blansby Park we raise Dorsets, which breed all year round. They provide our first lamb of the season for the Easter market.

At Grange Farm, we have a flock of 1500 Swaledale ewes, which are hardy animals perfectly suited to life up on the moors. But they tend to be small and light on meat, so we cross those with Blue Face Leicesters and again with Texels, to produce an animal which is both right for the market and, more importantly, for the moorland on which it must live out its life.

Most of our birds come from a 500 acre farm on the Belvoir Estate in Lincolnshire where our friends Anne and Gerald Botterill raise a full range of free range poultry.

There are Bronze turkeys for thanksgiving and Christmas, proper fat geese for Michelmas and Christmas and then there are our chickens. Most are Mastergris, a French breed with a little game bird in its lineage.

To produce the very best poultry the Botterills use traditional farming methods. Slow growing strains of poultry are allowed to roam freely over fresh pastures and fed on a cereal based diet produced locally and on the farm. Once the birds are fully mature they are prepared on farm in the traditional manner. This involves dry plucking and hanging for a minimum of 10 days in chilled conditions to develop a fuller flavour. All of the above go to ensure that full traceability and the highest welfare standards are maintained throughout.

For us butchery begins with hanging, but only where appropriate.

We always hang our beef, hogget and mutton, to develop flavour and begin the natural tenderising process. We never hang our lamb or pork. After that most British butchers would simply hack through muscle when preparing a carcass, forgetting that what they are dealing with is an animal with a structure all of its own. We think this leads to tough meat as the muscles pull against each other during the butchery process. Instead we follow the continental method of 'seaming-out': taking out individual muscsles one by one and following the natural seams in the carcass. We also refuse to get vast amounts of meat ready for sale because if we do that we won't have what you the customer actually wants. We'd prefer to do it to order. Yes, it takes longer but the result is always better.