On average rare breed sows such as ours produce fewer piglets than the ‘factory-bred’ commercial varieties such as the Large White. The average is about 10, which is fine, not least because a pig has only 12 teats and might struggle with a larger brood.
But on December 22nd, this beauty of ours produced 16, and they all survived. She started to farrow during the night and finished at about 2am, attended throughout by Jean. Jean’s careful husbandry ensured that they all survived. She knew that if sows are allowed to pig on their own some will inevitably be lost.
The only problem is- there are now too many piglets for the number of teats, so the piglets have to queue, as this video shows.
An enterprising pig farmer in Yorkshire, after reading that the Chinese produce 40 million tons of pork a year, to our 800,000 tons, went to investigate and he found a variety of Chinese pig with 16 teats. He has now crossed this with an English pig to produce the first breed here with 16 teats and the subsequent increase in productivity has enabled him to expand so fast that he now has the largest pig farm in the country. Good luck to him, but I think we’ll stick to our mammary-challenged British breeds.

Jean has three young children, including one born this year, so you would have thought she would have enough to do, preparing for Santa on Christmas Eve. Yet she spent the early hours of Christmas morning acting as midwife to one of our Saddleback sows. The farrowing bays are in the old stable, so she had the perfect venue for a Christmas birth. Eight piglets were born, all in perfect health, the last at 3am, just in time for Santa if not for the Three Wise Men.

The Slow Life perfect Christmas would include the Christmas Eve service at Cartmel Priory, which can be enjoyed even by a gnarled old non-believer like me. You have to get there early to secure a place, a situation summed up perfectly by Wendy Cope in her lovely new poem:

CATHEDRAL CAROL SERVICE

Those of us who are not important enough
To have places reserved for us
And who turned up too late to get a seat at all,
Stand in the nave aisles, or perch on stone ledges.

We shiver in the draught from the west door.
We cannot see the choir, the altar or the candles.
We can barely see the words on our service sheets.

But we can hear the music. And we can sing
For the baby whose parents were not important enough
To have a place reserved for them,
And who turned up too late to get a room at all.

I’ve received a directive from Defra telling me that the government has decreed that farmers must reduce green house gas emissions, ‘to at least 6% lower than currently predicted by 2020’. As the, ‘currently predicted’ figure isn’t stated the directive is meaningless but they say that agriculture is responsible for 7% of total emissions and that methane (which cows emit) is 25 times more powerful as a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. This coincides with Lord Stern’s call for us all to give up eating meat (and presumably say good bye to wool and leather) to save the planet.
This leaves farmers such as me feeling a grave sense of injustice. My cows and sheep graze on pasture which is unsuitable for growing crops. As Graham Harvey established in his book, ‘The Carbon Fields’ grazing permanent pasture with ruminants is actually an overall carbon ‘sink’ because of the vast root structure below ground which takes up carbon efficiently when they are grazed hard. And if there were no animals on this land it would revert to brambles and bracken and the landscape would be destroyed.

Our Wagyu Bull Paul has died suddenly, unexpectedly and tragically. Paul was one of the first three pure bred Wagyus to be born in this country and as such lived his life under the spotlight. Even the moment of his conception was filmed for TV when a frozen embryo was transferred to one of our pedigree Galloway cows who acted as surrogate mother. When he and two brothers were born they were again on TV and in the National Press and were subsequently the subject of a 25 minute programme for Radio 4. Paul’s brothers were castrated and are due to be slaughtered for beef when they are 31 months old but Paul as the strongest and best looking was left intact as he had been chosen to be the resident bull for the Wagyu herd, which would have ensured him a long a productive life. Paul’s carcass was taken to Carlisle for a full post
mortem to determine the reason for his death but no cause could be found, so his death remains a mystery.

How would you rather spend your Sunday morning? Traipsing around Tescos? Or foraging for free food in a pine forest? This is the mushroom season and we spent this morning picking ceps, otherwise known as porcini and other edible fungi. This is the real slow life food, perfectly in season and what’s more – free. We were taught the art of mushroom picking by Peter Pastucha who couldn’t believe the English indifference to this amazing crop. In his native Poland families will be up at dawn and the woods will be full of foragers. Here we didn’t see a single other soul all morning. The picture is of our daughter sara holding some ceps with the wood in backround and some of our pigs in between.