The animals at the centre of the farm.
Modern indoor housing, home-grown feed, regular vet visits, and the daily attention that good pig farming requires. The detail behind how we look after the herd, and why we have made the choices we have.
The pigs are why this farm exists in the form it does now. The arable side feeds them, the contracting fleet returns the manure to the land that grew the feed, and the pork they produce ends up on plates through Procter's Sausages and trade customers. Get the welfare right and the whole model works; get it wrong and nothing else matters.
What follows is how we actually look after the herd day to day: the housing, the feed, the vet relationship, the biosecurity, and the standards we are audited against. The page is candid on the choices we have made (including the choice of indoor housing, which deserves more context than it usually gets in food marketing).
Indoor, modern, purpose-built.
Our pigs are housed in modern indoor facilities, purpose-built for the herd we run. The buildings are dry, ventilated, clean, and properly maintained. The animals have appropriate space at each life stage, the lying areas are clean, and the air handling is set up to try and maintain consistent conditions year-round. The housing meets Red Tractor standards as a baseline and is regularly inspected against them.
We have chosen indoor housing as a deliberate welfare position, not as a default. Modern indoor systems give us a closer control over temperature, humidity, ventilation, biosecurity, and protection from predators, weather and disease. The trade-off compared with outdoor systems is that the animals have less freedom to range; in return they have more consistent conditions, lower exposure to disease vectors and parasites, and the routine attention that comes from a team working in the same buildings day after day. For the breed we farm and the climate we farm in, we think indoor is the right system for us and consistently high levels of performance in productivity along with very low levels of antibiotic usage back this up.
The housing is not static. We invest in upgrades when we can. Pig housing continues to develop adding more precision to environment, feeding, wellfare monitoring and hygiene. Anything that materially improves conditions tends to get the budget.
Home-grown grain, milled on-site, fed daily.
The pigs are fed primarily on the grain we grow on the farm, milled on-site through the year as the animals need it. To balance the diet, we bring in other ingredients such as soya meal, soya hulls, cold-pressed rapemeal, midds and minerals, providing the nutritional values that pigs need at different life stages. Not every requirement can be met from home-grown grain alone, and we are honest about what we bring in to fill the gap. The feeding programme also adjusts through the animal's life: starter, grower and finisher stages each have their own recipe, calibrated to growth rate, condition and ingredient quality. We run separate programmes for rearing our breeding stock and for sows during gestation and lactation, since the nutritional demands at each of these stages are quite different again.
- 3 stages
- starter, grower, finisher
- On-site
- milled as needed
The home-grown feed story in full lives on the Farm to Fork page, which covers how the grain becomes the feed and how the manure returns to the land. This page is about the animals at the receiving end.
Regular vet visits, daily biosecurity.
We work with a specialist pig vet who visits the farm regularly as a planned engagement, and on call outside that for anything that comes up. Visits cover routine health checks, herd performance review, vaccination programme planning, and an external eye on anything we might be getting too close to. The vet relationship is one of the relationships we put the most thought into; the right vet is worth more than the visit fee suggests.
Biosecurity is the daily discipline that keeps the herd healthy. Visitor protocols, vehicle disinfection, restricted access to the production buildings, separate clothing and boots for inside and outside the units, and careful management of a closed herd. None of it is dramatic, but consistency matters more than drama: biosecurity works when it is the standard way of doing things rather than a special procedure.
Disease pressure on pig farms in the UK and around the world continues to be a challenge, concern and threat to the industry. Maintaining a closed herd, paying attention to wildlife exposure, and being honest about the risk that visitors and outside equipment carry are all part of the modern picture. It is one of the practical reasons we farm indoors.
Audited against Red Tractor.
The herd is farmed under Red Tractor Assurance, which is the UK's main farm assurance scheme for pork. Red Tractor sets standards for housing, feed, welfare, transport, biosecurity, and traceability. It is audited by independent inspectors who turn up on the farm to verify what we say we do. Trade buyers and retailers use Red Tractor as a baseline trust signal.
- Scheme
- Red Tractor Assurance
- Audit
- Independent on-farm inspection
- Covers
- Housing, welfare, feed, biosecurity, traceability
What looking after the herd looks like.
- Early First feed and check round
- Mid morning Cleaning, bedding, monitoring growth and condition
- Throughout Watching for anything out of the ordinary
- Evening Final check, lock up, biosecurity reset
A working day on the pig side starts early and is structured around the animals: feeding, checking, cleaning, bedding, monitoring growth and condition. Most of the work is routine and quiet; the routine is what keeps the welfare consistent. Anything out of the ordinary (a pig off feed, a behaviour that does not look right, a piece of equipment that needs attention) gets picked up early because the team is in the buildings every day and knows what normal looks like.
What we are working on next.
Welfare standards, like sustainability standards, are not static. We expect the assurance frameworks to continue to develop, the equipment in the housing to keep improving, and the conversation with customers about what good welfare actually looks like to keep evolving. We will keep investing in the herd, the buildings, and the team, and we will update what we say on this page when there is something material to say.