We at Emily's Farm are a boutique style farm of 20 acres, we are not mass producers of food. You may from time to time find that items are out of stock until current offspring reach Abbatoir weight. This is unfortunately a constraint of a small producer.
We think we pay great attention to detail on how our animals live with us, and take great pride in converting them into products ready for the table.
We purchased our land in 2002, at that time it was just a "set aside" and not being used, with the owner being paid by the government for not using the land.
We added fencing around the outside of the field and built some pens for the livestock. We ploughed, cultivated and reseeded the field with grass.
At the moment we have one male Breeding Boar and five female Gloucester Old Spot Sows. We let our pigs live out all year round, with shelter available at all times and plenty of straw and all of our recycled shredded office paper for bedding. They are free to wallow in mud, or laze around on the dry hard standing areas. We often let the pigs out to follow us around to see what we're up to whilst we're repairing fences or building new pens. We do not use birthing pens or restrict the movement in any way, of the farrowing mothers. They and their newborn babes are free to roar around all the time. Our free ranging style has not resulted in any squashed or injured piglets!!! Both litters of piglets born in January jump through the pen gates and run round the farm chasing the feeding van!, only to return to mum for more milk and a "cuddle"
We start 2008 with 25 Wiltshire Horn sheep, three of which are off to the Abbatoir at the end of January, and a ram called 'VAT Man'
We took delivery of 5 Jacob sheep in July, and after shearing them we sent our Mohair and the sheep wool off to the Natural Fibre Company for processing. Sue recommended that we dye some of the wool, and arranged the design, weaving and finishing. We are expecting our first batch of throws back shortly. The next batch will be cushions - all from our own Mohair and Wool.
2007 was a bad year for my foray into Bee Keeping with many harsh lessions learnt - including no matter how thick your gloves - if the're dirty you'll get stung! The worst week was in August when I was carted off to Hospital with more than 60 stings in the back of my hands. Lets hope 2008 will be a tad less painfull. It was amazing to see the differences in colour and texture of the honey comb as the months went bye and the different Pollens came and went.
The Chicken project for Waitrose is still meandering on, we've had two planning refusals now, on various grounds, the latest being no waterbutts to collect rainwater from the roof of the chicken shed. Beaurocracy is sometimes crazy - a simple phonecall could have overcome the issue, but instead we've had to re-submit the whole application again. This time we hope to win and look forward to the arrival of 2000 Organic Columbian Blacktail chickens before the year is out.
We gained our Organic Certificate on December 21st 2007, and are awaiting our first inspection at the end of February. Post inspection we hope to be able to market all our pork products as Organic.
My middle name must be disaster, the Poly Tunnel failed miserably. we replaced the poly cover and planted 120 organic tomato plants, 12 Organic Courgette plants and 6 Organic Cucumber plants. Keeping up with the watering was a nightmare, and a couple of missed days did not help things. Strong winds ripped the cover off for a second time, leaving it in shreds after the pigs had had a play. We ended the season with about 40kg of Green Tomato Chutney. The cucumbers failed to yield even a single Cucumber. The best crop came from the Courgette plants - yielding about 15kg of yellow and green Courgettes for our Grilled Vegetable dishes.
Not sure what to try this year yet........................
Robert