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

July saw us change our business model a bit and include a local market!  Up to then we’d been selling exclusively in bulk – whole/half pigs, and quarter/half/whole cows.  The constraint we face is that we legally can’t add value to the meat, not to even repackage it, as we don’t have an accredited facility.  We came up with the idea of using the butcher/abattoir facility, which is accredited, and pre-packing meat there.  We also checked out their ham and bacon to see if it’s good (it really is!), so we could have them make those products.

That all means that we can’t go to a market and sell stuff on demand.  For example, I can’t sell somebody x number of chops or y kilograms of mince.  We can pre-pack the meat though and sell those packages.  The trick is packing them in weights or lots that people will want.  That’s less of a problem with bacon, as people want that no matter how much there is.  🙂

Our butcher was super, super supportive, and had no problem with us taking up a corner of one of their rooms for a couple of hours a week.  It’s probably worth noting here that building that kind of relationship with the butcher/abattoir has been key to what we do, be it bulk-sales or market-sales.  Those guys are an absolute font of knowledge on all things meat, and just their input to our packaging and the kinds of cuts we can offer has been invaluable.  They’ve also proven to be an amazing Quality Control for us, as they’ve processed every sheep, goat, cow, and pig we’ve ever eaten or sold, and so give us great feedback on things like carcass quality and fat content.  Hell, they’ve even helped me refine my brawn recipe! 🙂

While the facility and subsequent ability to pre-package meat was our biggest hurdle, it was by no means our last.  We had to work out how we package things – Styrofoam vs. PET (for the record, we can’t get PET just yet), do we or don’t we vac-seal meat (it apparently causes an odour in raw pork), how do we organise stickers (the professionally printed stickers we wanted were $1 each and we’d want two per pack!!!!)?  We also had to work out price lists, signage, portable display fridge, tables, flyers – even the ability to laminate our weekly price list had to be taken into account.  Seriously, this market stuff is a full-time job!

What we’ve ended up doing is only vac-sealing the bacon and ham, as it really does add to the longevity of it outside the freezer.  We use Styrofoam trays and cling wrap for the fresh cuts, but are sourcing PET (recyclable) options.  Right now it doesn’t look like we can get them anywhere, but have found two places that have them coming soon.  We use brown paper bags as carry bags.  I found a way to buy blank stickers and print our own – one with our logo on it, and one with the weight/cut/price/date of the meat.  We give everybody a flyer that explains why we do what we do, and with the details of our large social-media presence.  We bought a market-style gazebo and portable fridge, and though expensive, they’re really our only big capital outlays for this.  Dad made a blackboard for signage.  Oh, and we bought a laminator. 🙂

After this was all sorted, and we could get the pigs booked in so we had meat to sell, our first market was on August 1^st.  It’s part of the Farm Direct markets, and the one we attend is at The Old Spot Hotel in Salisbury, starting at 8 and finishing at 1, though those times do seem a bit fluid. 🙂

Who is that good looking couple?!

The weather for that first market was awful, with almost constant rain.  The ladies next to us, who normally sell out of their delicious bread by 11am every Saturday, finally threw in the towel at midday with half of their wares unsold.  However, we sold an entire pig, sold out of bacon, and probably sold a third of our ham.  It was a huge success, and better than we’d ever dreamed of!

The lessons we’ve learned are:

• People like bacon.  Who knew?
• Don’t bother with much ham – concentrate on bacon.
• We need better signage, and have a sign that attaches to our gazebo on back-order.
• Get more bacon.
• Not everybody likes/wants pork, but those same people will still stop for a chat and tell us the meat they do like.  Often, that includes bacon.
• Lastly, bring more bacon.

As a result, the week following the first market saw us taking a pig to the abattoir to be entirely baconed (yes, bacon can be used as a verb).  We’re actually having one loin done as kassler chops and the belly as speck, but the rest will be bacon and they’re all really just variations on a theme.

We’re also going to start rotating lamb and beef into our offerings.  The market has pretty much everything that people need for their weekly shopping, minus cleaning goods, and if we’re able to offer a rotating pork/lamb/beef option, along with lots of bacon of course, then they can see us as their source of weekly meat.  The problem there will be selling fresh vs. frozen.  Up to now, we sell almost an entire pig as fresh pork on the Saturday, and we may be able to do the same with a couple of lambs; however, I doubt we’ll do it with an entire cow.  Our only option will be to bring it back as a frozen offering, which is clearly less appealing, and not something we can really display to good effect.  That’s something we’re thinking through right now, and might be a great opportunity to combine the bulk and market sides of the business (e.g. sell half as bulk beef and half at the market).  Either way, I suspect we’ll be selling frozen beef at some time, and sometime soon too as we have a cow booked at the abattoir for next week. 🙂

Another thing we’ve learned is that we need our own accredited facility.  While the butcher has been amazing to us, we have no commercial arrangement with him, and so no absolute guarantee that we can keep doing what we’re doing.  With that in mind, the best way to mitigate that risk is to build and accredit our own boning room (I can’t even write “boning room” without sniggering to myself).  We have scoped that out, and actually have a great area in the middle of our big shed that is fully lined with insulated panelling, and has the required drain etc.  We’re going to start looking at converting that as soon as we can.  Once we have that set up, it should be a relatively short step to being able to make our own bacon and sausages.  Fingers crossed…

The final result of this is that the market is going to become a basic part of our business model.  It wasn’t ever anything we thought about initially, but neither was selling to restaurants and we have two of them regularly buying from us now!  We’ll continue to sell in bulk, and the market actually gives us a good pick-up point for that.  The split between bulk and market sales really spreads our risk, and helps ensure the longevity of the business.  The only change we might make is to branch out to a second market, again to spread the risk, and see if we can’t hit two a week.  Our problem now will be growing enough pigs.  I mean that quite literally too – the biggest risk we’re facing is running out of pigs.