Te Mara Prime Organic Pork
James Langton and his fiancé Kelly Martyn have launched Te Mara Prime Organic Pork, New Zealand’s only certified-organic pork brand. Their commercial venture is centred on Langton’s BioGro-certified Taranaki property in Ihaia Rd, outside Opunake.
We went organic because we believed in the pureness of it. We’ve since found out that customers think the flavour of the pork is superior to anything else around. Not only is it better for the sows and the porkers and the wieners, it’s a far superior meat to anything else on the market.
We’ve had people ring us up after eating our pork and say “Thank you" and "we haven’t tasted pork this good for so long, and their kids want to eat pork and bacon every night.”
The couple’s pig farm achieved BioGro organic certification in March, and this month they completed the package by linking with a certified-organic abattoir and butcher. They now aim to supply restaurants and distributors and use the Te Mara Prime brand to change the way New Zealanders think about pork production.
“We knew if we were going to go organic we had to look the part. We couldn’t just have a grotty old pig farm. It had to look good and be clean and environmentally friendly and so we spent the conversion time not just doing the pigs, but also creating a look.”
James has put a tremendous amount of effort into making sure the farm looks attractive. We’re setting up to have the ability to take tours through so they’ve got lakes and gardens and a barbecue area.
It is part of our brand that we’re challenging the traditional idea of a pig farm. We’re clean, and we’re green and it’s a welcoming environment for people to be, as well as pigs, and we welcome people to come and look. We have nothing to hide.
We’ve got a farming system that’s quite unique. We’ve based it around a feed pad, where the pigs can come and go off the feed pad and go back to the pasture. As far as we are aware this hasn’t been tried before in NZ but it has worked for us very successfully. We’ve got fresh water on the feed pad and during the summer months we run sprinklers to keep them cool, so it’s like having a spa bath for them. That’s also where their sheds are and their sleeping quarters.
We’ve started with 55 sows, so it’s over 800 porkers a year. We didn’t want to be just 5-6 organic pigs. We wanted to have a proper business that can be viable and supply numerous restaurants and not just one or two.”
Their pigs spend the first eight weeks of their lives inside, but the pens are about 10-15 metres square so they’ve got heaps of room and they’re on wood shavings. After that eight weeks they head outside.
It creates a great environment. They can be born inside, with no sow crates in sight, and on wood shavings. “There are reasons why we’ve gone that way. We bring them inside to be born. They’re warm, they’re dry. We can keep an eye on them and make sure everything’s going alright and then they can go out and explore the world when they’re self-sufficient. Most freedom type pig farming does the opposite; they have their pigs born outside and then they bring them into barns for the rest of their lives.”
“The death rate when pigs are outside is quite high” says James, “so we’re trying to achieve the best of both worlds. They’ve got big pens. They’re on wood shavings; they’ve got clean water. Rain, hail or snow the temperature stays adequate in the shed. Our death rate is under 2 wieners per litter. If they’re outside it can get up to about 4 deaths per litter.
Te Mara Prime conforms with BioGro’s organic standards, and they say they wouldn’t have done it any other way. “There has to be a point at which you say what is best for the animal, and we firmly believe this is what’s best. It’s great to have the pigs outside, but we know in Taranaki how wet it can get and muddy so that’s why we’ve gone for this particular set up.”
“It’s a very unusual situation. When we were first setting up we had issues with them being too fat. Now that we’re completely set up sometimes they end up being too lean. But that’s what happy pigs do: they run and they play and they just burn off their fat.”
“We came into organics and didn’t know anything really so we’ve had to learn everything the whole way through. Of course, with nobody else having done it there was nothing else to base ourselves on. We had to feel our way a little bit and see what we could come up with.”
But now we’ve got a story to tell and we’re happy to share our story, so if anyone wants to come and have a look at our organic pig farm, we’ll be happy to show them around. Once they’ve had a look we think they’ll be very impressed.
