Eat Ethically Getting to the know the Giggly Pig

Date Published:

17/04/2008

Small but perfectly formed - 4Food meets the best of Britain's local producers. Pork farmer Tracy Mackness tells Daniel Etherington how rearing pigs got her giggling again

It's not often you come across a story like that of Tracy Mackness. Tracy was sent to prison for in 2002 and served six years. Her final two and half years were spent in an open prison in Kent where the facilities included a farm specialising in Saddlebacks, an English breed of pig bred from two older varieties, the Wessex and the Essex.

Falling in love with pigs

"I arrived at the prison and they said to me: we can't force people to work with animals, but what we can do is we can encourage you," Tracy explains. "So I had a look round and that was it really – fell in love with a Saddleback sow." Although Tracy had worked with horses in her youth, pigs were entirely new to her. Taking pig husbandry qualifications as far as she could in prison, she then learned butchery in the prison's cutting area and did a sausage-making course. "When I first started working for the butchery department in the prison, it was an eye-opener obviously. It's not for the faint-hearted. I had to get it in my head that it is a food chain, that's really what pigs are bred for. We have to detach ourselves from the petty-patting bit of it."

Tracy's next step was decided when she visited a farmers' market, where the prison was selling its pork produce. "It was there that I saw there was a niche in the market for this type of thing," she says. "When I went to prison I'd never even heard of a farmers' market. So I went, and I'd never seen anything like it. From that minute onwards I knew, that this is what I wanted to do. I went back to my prison cell, then that was all I could think of."

Tracy Mackness with some of her quality fare

A larger litter

On her release she set up The Giggly Pig Co, buying 30 pigs from the prison that she'd bred herself. Since then, she's built up a 200-plus herd and opened a shop and office in Romford. Tracy focuses exclusively on farmers' markets, in London and the southeast, with sausages her main product. "I'd always been a bit fussy with sausages, and the things you put in them," she says. Her sausages are made to avoid gristly bits and the like: "We tend to use shoulder and the leg as well, I don't put any fat in mine, I try to keep the fat back so when you cook your sausage, no fat comes out."

Tracy faces several challenges in making her business a success – the time it takes an outdoor-reared pig to achieve its optimum weight, rocketing feed costs, even the very matter of getting into farmers' markets in the first place, where other pork producers may already be established.

One positive note, however, is the fact that new farmers' markets are opening all the time. The very business of real meat, from local producers dealing in traditional breeds, is growing at a terrific rate meaning more choice for the consumer and more tasty pork for our plates.