The Coo's News
The Latest News From Geddes
20 February 2010
As you can imagine, January has been a rather trying month – farming in the snow takes much longer than normal, as we had to keep all the animals warm, fed and watered.
The pigs have spent the whole winter outside as normal. Their houses were all kept dry with plenty of straw, and we checked that the pigs were not too cold each day, by feeling their ears. Our Tamworth sow even had a record litter of piglets in the heaviest of the snow! With the ground finally thawing, it is great to see the pigs out rootling once again, and our traditional native rare breeds thrived during this difficult period.
The chickens have also been free ranging outside throughout the winter. The depth of snow prohibited them from going too far afield, but the older birds were still fed outside, and kept a good sized area trampled down. This morning the last of the snow has almost melted and the chickens were once again spread across the entire field, scratching the ground and looking for worms.
All our beef comes from Edinvale farm near Dallas. Most of the beef is Highland cross native Shorthorn. This produces a great carcass, and an animal well suited for life outside. I have been comparing notes with Jock Gibson, as he also trampled through the snow each day. The cows are all grass fed, and slowly matured, before being finished with some bruised barley. Most importantly, the beef is hung on the bone for at least 3 weeks before butchering.
Our lamb comes from Lochgorm farm near Grantown-on-Spey. It has not been easy for sheep in the snow, as they struggle to make tracks through it. It is very important to make paths with the tractor to the feeding points, and they need daily feeding, and watering. However, the sheep survived with no problems, again a testament to our hardy native breeds.
I have spent a lot of time and effort over the last three years focusing on producing the finest chicken and pork that we possibly could. The feedback about the flavour and texture of both has been very reassuring, and Geddes chicken and pork is a now a regular dish on some well renowned restaurants, including the Michelin starred Boath House Hotel.
The breed of chicken has been completely changed – we now use a much slower maturing French strain, which allows us to keep the birds for longer. We have the hatching eggs delivered every fortnight, and these are incubated by our neighbours. The day old chicks are kept under heat until their feathers grow, and then they spend the rest of their lives outside. The design of our chicken sheds has worked very well, with the huts being dragged on skids to clean pasture for every batch. Each hut has approximately 300 birds in it. The feeders are all outside the sheds, so each bird has no option but to go outside. This is a very different system to the large scale “free range” operations. In these, the birds are a much quicker growing American hybrid, the sheds are semi-static, with batch sizes of approximately 6,000 birds, and all the feed and watering are done inside. Although the birds have access to the outdoors, some will never bother! This system is certainly many times better than intensively reared indoor birds, but when buying one of our chickens, you know that the welfare of each animal is much higher and just as importantly the chickens only have a 2 minute journey to the slaughter house, and are dispatched humanely and quickly.
The pigs are all traditional rare breeds, extremely hardy and suited to living outside. The modern breeds or hybrids have been bred to grow much quicker and to have a minimal fat content. Much of the pork purchased today has been injected with glycerine to try and keep it moist during cooking. Many of you will see pork labelled as outdoor reared – which is exactly what it states – the piglets are born outside and “finished” in the sheds on straw. Unfortunately there are no official “free range” standards for pigs, and sometimes farmers are labelling pigs from this system as free range, when they clearly are not. Our pigs are not taken from their mothers early, and spend their entire lives in family groups outside. Our breed and rearing methods result in a dark, well marbled meat – pork as it was in the past. Getting the right balance between a good layer of fat (for flavour and great crackling) and keeping the fat content down is always difficult, but the product is improving all of the time.
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