I f there’s one good thing to come out of the recent horsemeat scandal, and the exposure of the labyrinthine supermarket supply chains, it’s a new appreciation of good, old-fashioned, naturally reared meat. It’s the difference in taste that you notice first: there is simply no comparison between an insipid mass-market rasher, and the depth of flavour you get from a home-smoked slice of organic bacon.
There’s often a difference in appearance, too, which tells a story about the way the animal has been raised. Compare a pristine, pale-pink chunk of pork fillet, sitting in its polystyrene box on the supermarket shelf, and the darker, ruby-red meat of a rare breed fillet. One pig has spent its short life in close confinement with hundreds of others, routinely dosed with antibiotics and disproportionately bulked out with high-protein food for an early slaughter. The other has spent its days doing what pigs are supposed to do: foraging in the fields, rootling and rolling in muck, charging around with the rest of the herd. And it will be humanely slaughtered, not when it’s an artificially-inflated youngster, but when it is a full-grown adult (about 50 weeks). For taste, for tradition, for animal welfare, I know which one I’d rather eat.
Alan and Janis Bailey, who own Pheasants’ Hill Farm, near Downpatrick, Co Down, fell into artisan meat-farming by accident. Or perhaps it’s more accurate to say that it was a hobby that (fortuitously) grew out of hand. Alan, who was reared on a farm in Co Fermanagh, decided to have a go at keeping a few rare-breed pigs.
“I chose three old breeds: Tamworth, Berkshire and Saddleback,” says Alan. “It was an experiment, really; I wanted them to live totally naturally, without the use of antibiotics. It worked: I, and they, took to it like a duck to water. They were amazingly resilient, amazingly healthy.”
Soon, though, the couple were knee-deep in pigs and piglets, and looking for a way to keep the increasingly costly experiment going. “I’m an idealist,” says Alan. “But Jan kept saying to me, you have to do something with those creatures.”
So, with support from the Rare Breeds Survival Trust, Alan gave up his job in medical electronics, and the Bailey family took the plunge into full-time organic, free-range meat farming. Now they have 150 pigs, as well as a few hens and sheep. It isn’t easy: pigs are hungry creatures, and the price of grain-based protein, which they love to scoff, has doubled in the last three years. But with a combination of passion, principle, business acumen and sheer effort, the couple, together with their daughter Julia, have made it work. And the meat they produce is a revelation: rich, satisfying, and with an extraordinary complexity of flavour.
“We see it as a way of doing our ecological bit,” says Janis. “It’s vital that these old breeds are kept going; they mustn’t be lost. Because if they go, you can’t ever make them again.”
It’s a critical situation, and some breeds are extremely endangered. For instance, there are only a few hundred Tamworth sows left in the world, and even fewer Golden Rose sows. In the 1970s, the ancient Irish Moiled, the native cattle of Ulster, were down to just two herds with 10 cows in each, although the numbers are higher now, thanks largely to the work of a few committed individuals.
“If you only get down to one type, the breed is so vulnerable,” says Janis. “Within the breed, you have different genetic bloodlines, and you want to keep them all, so you can’t breed too closely. You have to keep the diversity in the species, because variety is strength.”
“These animals don’t survive unless you eat them,” says Alan. “That’s the moral balance you have to strike. When I was doing this as a hobby, and I was on a good salary, I earned just about enough to feed three sows. That’s how expensive it is. So the way we work it is that 70 per cent of the animals go for meat, and 30 per cent go for breeding to preserve the species.”
But the industrialised system is frequently pitted against them. “If you go along to a meat factory with a rare-breed animal, they’re not interested, because the animal is small and expensive to butcher,” says Janis.
“Yes, it’s all down to economics,” says Alan. “Modern animals are faster-growing, larger and leaner, they’re super-machines really, inbred and overfed to the edge of genetic modification. But you get three times the volume of steaks from them, and that’s what the supermarkets want. So the big Continental animal comes out top grade in this system, while the tiny but delicious native Irish animal, such as the Dexter cow, comes out low.” As a result, the rare-breed farmer is automatically penalised, and offered a poor price.
Alan Bailey sees an incredible irony in all of this. "The poor man's cow, the old, primitive, scraggy, grass-fed thing, turns out to be of the highest quality, with supreme texture and flavour. These are the connoisseur meats, the ones that all the chefs want. Technology has not been able to create something better than the old ways."
And there was a simplicity to the process that is almost entirely absent today. “Two hundred years ago, there was no great vision for farming in Ireland,” says Alan. “You would have had just one or two cows and a calf, for meat for the house, and they had to be sustained on virtually no ground. It was a matter of poor people surviving.”
One of the characteristics of traditional breeds is often a higher proportion of fat, which can come as an unwelcome surprise to consumers accustomed to extremely lean meat. But the Baileys say that what matters is the nature of that fat. “Our grandfathers seemed to eat lots of fat, whereas our generation just have to look at it and they’re falling over,” says Alan. “The fact is that unnaturally-reared animals produce more unsafe fat; locking them up and feeding them soya-based protein concentrates means that the fat structures actually change. But when animals range about on natural grasses, you get yellow fat, rich with Omega 3. This stuff is like olive oil, it’s actively good for you.”
Many farmers across the country are benefiting from the renewed interest in simple, old-fashioned meat. Brothers Brendan and Derek Allen, of Castlemine Farm in Co Roscommon, say that demand has now outstripped supply for their award-winning “real meat”, which includes dry-aged beef, grass-fed lamb and free-range pork. “We decided to shorten the supply chain, making it as simple as we could, so the product goes straight to the consumer,” says Brendan. “ Price was never our driver – it was always about quality. And the recent food scares have only served to validate what we’re doing. People are more astute about food chains now, they see that there’s a reason why things are so cheap.”
Brendan also points out that while artisan meat has a reputation for being expensive, it’s often more a matter of perception than reality. With handmade sausages from their own outdoor-reared “happy pigs” going for only €3.30 per pack, you can see what he means.
TJ Crowe, who farms organic meat with his three brothers, Ned, John Paul and Patrick, in Co Tipperary, has also found that people are keener than ever to know where their meat comes from. “We explain to the consumer that with organic, outdoor-raised animals, the muscles get used more, so the meat might be that little bit tougher, and there’s a little bit more fat, but there’s much, much more flavour.”
Back at the Baileys’ farm, in Co Down, Alan stands in the middle of a field as his pigs contentedly snuffle and root around him. “People think I’m a lunatic,” he says, “but I know this is the healthiest way to rear animals. Natural is good. Grass and sunshine, that’s the answer.”
See pheasantshillfarm.com;
castleminefarm.ie; crowefarm.ie