Our home-grown, home-made small goods. Photo: John Krüger

We have an amazing symbiotic relationship going with Pirate Life Brewing.  We’ve taken every bit of waste brewing grain they’ve ever produced, mostly to feed our pigs, but also to help out our neighbours with their cattle and sheep.  Ideally we’d use it all for the pigs, but sometimes there’s more than we can use, and we like to share the love. J This means they don’t have to dump it, we get free feed for the pigs, and there is tonnes and tonnes of material that doesn’t go to land-fill.

From our relationship with the Pirate Life boys, we were introduced to Grant Schooling, the head chef at The Gilbert Street Hotel.  Grant has a strong interest in sustainably farmed and local produce, and this interest is completely aligned with ours when it comes to the care of the animals we use for meat.

Grant’s drive to encourage people to eat produce from sustainably farmed sources like our place leads him into the spotlight sometimes, and in July/August we were dragged along into a spread in Aspire Magazine. 🙂  According to the blurb on their website, they are:

“Aspire South Australia is an independent, glossy magazine distributed free throughout metro-SA. We celebrate all-things South Australian. We care about culture, community and a damn good yarn. We embrace the weird and are more interested in what goes on in local communities, laneways and over the back fence than celebrity. We have a big fat crush on SA’s emerging talent, our creative types, people who make a difference and anything that can be labelled ‘grassroots’. Aspire is in the know, a little bit opinionated, curious about everything and in love with the unusual. We speak from the heart, though sometimes with our tongue in our cheek. Come with us as we celebrate SA!”

They were doing a story on Grant and the hotel, and specifically on people who farm like us.  The spread turned out amazingly well, and can be found here.  EDIT: Actually, not it can’t.  For some reason it’s moved in the couple of months since we wrote this.  There’s a cut down version with a different date here.

John Kruger was the photographer, and kindly allowed us to use his awesome shots.

Grant and I communing with the pigs. Photo: John Krüger

Piglets! Linhda hates those clothes on me, and I didn’t realise why until I saw this picture. 🙂 Photo: John Krüger

Happy pig is happy. Her name was Sparrow, and she’s currently bacon to sell at the market. 🙂 Photo: John Krüger

Beautiful Blue Merle. Photo: John Krüger

Grant and I bonding over my brawn and some duck eggs.

As cool as the story is, and it’s hard to understate the benefit of that kind of exposure for small setups like ours, I think the coolest thing is that they used my brawn recipe! The several pages after the story are recipes based on our pork, and while the professional Chef, Grant, was asked to supply most of those, I was asked for one. I was keen to include the brawn, partly because it’s not something that most people come across, but mostly because it helps promote an approach that uses the entire animal. I was pleasantly surprised that it made it into the magazine, and suspect that Grant had something to do with that. J

My Brawn!!!! Photo: John Krüger