Red Valley Farm Shop, supplying our free range pork, eggs and even our very own, kiln dried logs.
We are a small 154 acre farm based just outside Carmarthen in Carmarthenshire, Wales.
The Farm has been in the family for 45 years. It started off as a beef and sheep farm run and managed by Alan and Margaret Washbourne.
The farm was then taken over by their son Andrew in 2010. He then spent five years coppicing and laying the hedges around the fields at the bottom of the farm. This created a substantial amount of timber. This opened up a potential new business venture selling firewood.
The farm then took a big change in direction, moving away from livestock and into forestry and biomass.
We had a biomass boiler and a kiln installed in 2015 to enable us to sell kiln dried logs, moving away from beef and sheep farming.
Moving forward 3 Years
Graeme Carter a good friend of the family started at the farm to help Andrew and to push the business forward.
Well that he did.....
We started selling more logs and now we have moved in to selling pork from our very own pigs.
Why pork you ask, well we had entered into a forestry creation scheme to plant 28,000 trees on the farm and some of the ground was needing to be cleared before planting.
As we all know pigs are great for this sort of job.
We started with 4 girls, mum is a Saddleback and her 3 daughters which are Saddleback x Welsh white.
On one sunny, Sunday morning, Andrew went to the farm to feed the pigs to be greeted by a litter of piglets.
This was a shock as we hadn’t breed the gilts. We then went on to find that the two remaining gilts were in pig.
We ended up with 18 piglets so a plan was needed. Graeme could see a market for our pigs and that wasn’t to take them to market.
We then bought 4 Saddleback weaner boys to bring them up to breeding age. One of the boys would then be kept to breed with our girls and we would slaughter the other 3 boys to feed our friends and family.
We needed a to do something different, something that we could call Red Valleys.
Well someone was looking down on us. A good friend of ours told us about a 90% Wild Boar that was being advertised. Well that was it something different.
So we Picked him up, Mouse, yes that’s his name and he is a softy as he was kept as a pet.
He’s a 3 year old and he has 10% large black in him.
We got him back to the farm and put him in his own pen so he could get used to us before breeding him with our sows.
Moving forward to March 2018
We had the 3 boys slaughtered, processed and packaged and ended up with so much meat!
It was now time to put our plan in to action and that’s when Red Valley Farm Shop was born.
The Saddleback Boar that we kept has been busy with one of our Welsh white sows and as for Mouse, he has been busy breeding with the other two Welsh whites.
We still have our 18 piglets, well there not piglets anymore. They are getting big and are very happy out in their field.
You maybe wondering whats happened with ‘grandma’ pig?....well she’s being very stubborn! A bit like most Grandmother’s! She does not want to be moved. She will have to have the boar taken to her as she’s quite content in her paddock!
