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Adopt a pig

Adopt-a-Pig

Sarah Todd meets a teenager who offers full pigsty-to-plate traceability

1    It is generally difficult to prise    
 teenage boys away from playing 
 computer games and listening to 
 music, but 18-year-old Duncan 
 Turnbull is not your average 
 adolescent. He was only 15 when 
 he launched Adopt-a-Pig, a 
 scheme whereby customers pay a 
 £50 deposit to choose and name a 
 newborn piglet, visit it as often as 
 they like and keep abreast of its postcards and notepaper
 progress via a website photo personalised with a picture of their
 gallery. chosen pig.
2    When the time comes, seven Pied beauty: Duncan Turnbull, 18, and his
 months later, for the animal to be original brood sow, Hilda
 slaughtered there’s a tough choice5    Duncan is outside by 6.30am
 to make: are you after a hog roast, to give them their food (as natural
 pork for roasting – complete with a as possible) before heading off to
 layer of crispy crackling –, or would study for his A-levels. Once he
 you be more interested in gets home, there is an hour’s worth
 Duncan’s 98 per cent meat of emails and paperwork to deal
 sausages and bacon rashers? with before the evening feed. On
 Friends and family often join forces Friday evenings he goes to the
 to adopt a pig and share out the local brewery to collect waste
 meat between them. The final bill malting barley which, he says,
 is usually between £200 and £300 adds to the taste of the meat. He
 for the whole pig, depending on the has school on Saturday, so
 cuts chosen. Given the quality and Sunday is a busy day spent
 provenance of Duncan’s meat, it’s mucking out and doing other
 surprisingly good value. A pig’s chores.
 worth of anonymous pork products6    With an annual turnover of
 at a supermarket would cost around £10,000 and projections of
 somewhere between £150 and over £25,000 next year, Duncan’s
 £200. enterprise is no longer a laughing
3    Meeting Hilda – Duncan’s first matter among his school friends. In
 pig and the one that got him fact, three of them went with him to
 interested in the endangered last month’s Salone del Gusto food
 Oxford Sandy & Black breed – and fair in Turin to try to break into the
 her litter of eight adorable piglets international market. His plans to
 made me wonder whether promote British meat impressed
 anybody’s resolve has weakened the Department of Trade and
 once the end has come. “Not after Industry sufficiently for an £1,800
 I’ve explained that this isn’t an grant towards the trip. “We had
 animal sanctuary or a charity,” quite a few languages between us
 says Duncan. “It’s a meat and soon got into our sales patter,”
 business. It’s not as if the person explains Duncan. “Mind you, the
 who adopts the animal is signing food did most of the talking,
 its death warrant – the pigs are especially when we started offering
 going to be slaughtered anyway. freshly-cooked bacon and
 The choice is the customers’. They sausages.”
 can keep going to the supermarket,7    With university on the horizon,
 picking up pieces of meat that they there’s every possibility that
 know nothing about, and have no Duncan, who started in business at
 idea of the pig’s living conditions or the age of 12 breeding ducks, will
 diet, or adopt one and follow its spend a gap year [id:77671] rather
 progress every step of the way.” than backpacking around the
4    The majority of Duncan’s world. “I’m happy to continue with
 clients are parents keen for their the management side,” he says.
 children to understand the link “But, of course, there will have to
 between animals and the food on be staffing in place to look after the
 their table. Some drive as far as pigs.”
 200 miles to see their pig at his 
 parents’ 20-acre smallholding near 
 York. Others indulge in the The Daily Telegraph
 scheme’s ‘optional extras’, such as