We’re business partners Graeme and Andy, and together we run Cwm Coch, otherwise known as Red Valley Farm.
We’ve got 76 pigs, all mixed from wild boar, to wild boar crossed with Saddleback and Welsh White. We started with just three pigs, Sal and our two wild boars Minnie and Mouse – before Mouse was gifted to us, he was someone’s pet: he’s the one who really runs this place!
We care deeply about how our pigs are kept. We get satisfaction out of seeing the animals born, raised, growing and just enjoying the environment that we’re providing for them. We keep all our pigs in massive grass and soil plots where they’re allowed to womble as much as they want to, and we’re just trying to create as much of a natural environment as possible for them. Having a small amount of pigs in large pens also allows us to keep a really close eye on the overall welfare of each pig, making sure that we’re producing only top quality meat.
We feed them on grain supplied by the two local brewers and we are also becoming self-sufficient for the first time this year in actually producing our own haylage and hay for our pigs – they eat better than us sometimes!
At the end of the day, these pigs are our future, and that is what is securing us to Cwm Coch farm and making sure that this place is still here for the next generation of our kids, and maybe even their kids.
In this day and age, consumers more and more want to know where their products come from; the best thing about us is that we can tell you which field a pig was born in, which one’s the mother, who’s the father, who’s the brother and we can tell you exactly what it’s fed on. We’re giving you the whole life story because nothing on this farm has been brought in, apart from the original three pigs.
We mainly sell sausages and burgers, and we have a wide range of flavours like apple, cracked black pepper, leek, herb, sage and mustard, just to name a few. Our most popular product, which happens to be an absolutely outrageous seller, is our boar and apple burgers.
We also supply belly porc, bacon, gammons, leg joints, shoulder joints, pretty much anything you can get from a pig. The beauty of what we do as a small-scale producer is that if there’s anything specific a customer would like, we can actually prepare it bespoke for them.
