Lauriston pork producer seeks seemless paddock-to-plate transition

They run pigs and chickens at Glenaleece Farm, Lauriston, just outside Kyneton.

Pork is sold at Malmsbury and Creswick Farmers Markets and direct to customers in three, seven and seven-kilogram packs.

Pastured, free-range eggs are sold through a community-supported agriculture (CSA) program.

"I am working towards what I call a one hand product," Mr Glenwright said.

"Customers can come and buy a shoulder roast off me, knowing the pig was born here, raised here and was butchered by us."

To close the loop entirely, Mr Glenwright said the eventual aim was to set up a micro-abattoir in the region, with like-minded producers, and build his own boning room at Lauriston.

He's currently studying to be a meat inspector to gain a licence to sell the pork on site.

"The way the legislation is, if we have our own boning room, we can keep the meat on site."

Currently, carcases are cut up at Jonai Farms, Eganstown, but the meat then has to go straight to customers or farmers markets.

"It's about being the one stop shop, from growth to the product on the plate," Mr Glenwright said.

The Glenwrights moved onto the 25-hectare property about three years ago.

"We wanted to produce our own meat, from our own stock, to feed our family," Mr Glenwright.

"Not being rolling acres of pasture and grazing land, we decided to go with chickens and pigs because it's basically all old gold mine country and it's pretty run down.

"There's not much good soil or microbial growth.

"The pigs and the chickens are a part of regenerative farming - it's a new catchphrase, but I just see it as old fashioned farming."

The pig's diet is supplemented with waste-stream feed, such as muesli bars, brewers grain, grapes, organic potato mash and discarded offcuts from salad mix.

"We also now have oats growing, where the pigs have been," he said.

"The seed goes through the pigs; they turn the soil, add to it with their manure, and the oats self-seed.

"It's kick starting that soil microbial life again."

Glenaleece currently runs a herd of 30 Large Black, Duroc and Wessex Saddleback-cross heritage pigs, including four sows and a boar.

"Even though ours are cross they are a heritage breed, so they produce a different quality of meat," he said.

"They are higher in fat, but they also live outside."

Glenaleece practised cell grazing, with four pigs to every 0.1 hectares.

"They enjoy doing what pigs do, they get to walk around, dig up dirt for roots and bugs and eat grass."

Pigs are turned off at between seven and nine months.

"They all come out of the same litter and some will be huge and some won't but that's the way it is."

The 220 chickens were also an essential part of the production system.

"We keep the pigs and chickens in mobile pens, you don't want them to overwork the land, you want the land to be able to regenerate," Mr Glenwright said.

"It's important to cell graze the pigs with portable electric pens; we might move them every couple of weeks.

"They just stick their heads down and keep going - they could end up in Malmsbury, if you didn't contain them somehow."

The property was "quite shrubby", he said.

"There is not much organic material in the ground, that's what holds the water."

But the pigs turned the bark, sticks, leaves and twigs back into the ground as carbon.

"Then you run the chickens over it, and that adds the nitrogen - all of a sudden you have the perfect scenario," he said.

"It's a matter of timing it right."

Mr Glenwright said he grew up on a farm at Little Hampton, where his parents rang cattle. Alicia came from a farm in Tasmania.

"For me, it all comes down to health - we live in one of the richest countries in the world, but have terrible health," he said.

"After being a wharfie, I got sick and tired of waking up sick and tired."