Small but perfectly formed - 4Food meets the best of Britain's local producers. Peter Gott of Sillfield Farm in the Lake District tells Daniel Etherington how a joke present turned him into a wild boar breeder with a commitment to traditional farming methods
Now is probably the best time in decades for real food in Britain, with increasing enthusiasm for farmers' markets and interest in the provenance of what we eat. But that doesn’t mean it's easy for small producers of meat, as current legislation favours the large-scale farmers who supply intensively reared meats to supermarket chains. The process devalues a traditional product, something veteran farmer Peter Gott of Sillfield Farm is dedicated to fighting.
Peter has been working with sheep and pigs since the 1960s. In 1993 his brother gave him four wild boar gilts as a joke and sparked an interest in rearing unusual livestock using traditional farming methods. Peter's dedication to rare breeds, which he claims produce tastier, leaner meat, takes tenacity. "I rear an outdoor pig from birth to carcass weight of say 70 kilos, in about 28, maybe 32, weeks," he explains. "A farmer who has thousands of piglets in a shed who is completely commercial, in this country, can do the same job in 16 weeks."
Sillfield Farm
The economics are obvious, but if Britain stands any chance of holding onto its farming traditions, it will be because of farmers like Peter.
"My mission isn't to produce wild boar for the world, my mission is to make sure that we hang on to tradition," he says. "We're sliding down a slippery slope of commercial food production, and we are seriously at a point where we could see the extinction of more of our species. The Cumberland's gone, the Lincolnshire Curly Coat's gone, the Chester's gone, there's a number of sheep that's gone."
Sillfield Farm gets royal approval
According to Peter, we consumers have a duty to help preserve our rare breed meats; "I think the way we address this issue is by bit by bit, asking the questions: what are we eating? Where does it come from? When you go in a restaurant, they usually tell you what fish it is. Well, why can't we identify what breed of sheep it is? Why can't we be told? It's not sufficient to say, we get it from the butcher. The butcher knows, all that is now in place."
"There's no doubt that the consumer's beginning to turn," Peter says. "But, for example, if you want to keep wild boar in Wales, forget it, because there isn't a slaughter house to kill it, so some of those parameters have already been eroded. It's that erosion of the infrastructure that's going to make it restrictive in your keeping of rare breeds."
Another significant issue is the general lack of connection between British consumers and the origin of our food. On the Continent, families still shop more in local markets, and children will grow up learning about real produce. "What do you learn in a supermarket?" Peter questions, "buy one get one free?"
Peter also believes European farmers benefit from more sympathetic legislation, or interpretation thereof. In Britain the convolutions of the law hit the small producer particularly hard and the best intentions get lost in translation in the bureaucratic process. "One of the proverbs I use is 'send reinforcements, we're going to advance'," says Peter. "And by the time we've written 10 pages of bullshit, it says 'send three and four pence, we're doing to a dance.'"
Despite the difficulties, Peter's optimistic that the trend toward good meat, reared sympathetically will continue to grow. "I think the Real Food Festival gives small producers a platform to get on and broadcast what they believe," he adds. "It's very difficult to change the last 30 years, and the buy-one-get-one-free culture, but I think it'll come more and more with education."
Can you be a compassionate carnivore? Join the debate in the forum
.jpg)
.jpg)