Welcome To Highlands Hogs...

At Highlands Hogs, we are proud to be producing quality, outdoor reared, rare breed, free range Pork: Pork which is succulent and tasty with proper crackling like it used to taste. Over the past 40 years, modern and intensive pig farming has lead to a dramatic decline in our population of traditional outdoor pigs. In the pursuit of profit large breeders and factory farms in Holland and Denmark have, in answer to supermarket demand, changed the modern pig into a genetically crafted commodity. We believe there is a better way...

We have selected two of the West Country's best loved traditional breeds, Large Blacks and Gloucester Old Spots. From our registered pedigree herd, we carefully select choice cuts and create supreme sausages from our finest outdoor reared pigs. All our pigs are raised on our farm, situated in the tranquil rolling countryside of North Devon. Our pigs live in family groups as their wild ancestors would have prior to domestication. They receive no unnecessary antibiotics or growth enhancer's, and are left to take as long as they take to reach maturity. When the time comes they are slaughtered and butchered at a small family run facility just 1 mile from our farm.

W hen you purchase produce from Highlands Hogs, you can be sure that you will taste real meat as it should be. You will also be helping to secure the future of two of Britain’s rarest pig breeds. Pigs that are reared outside, free to roam and forage produce a meat that is a taste apart from bland supermarket varieties. The slow growing traditional pig has a far superior meat structure because the muscles have developed more slowly. The darker flesh also has a healthy layer of fat which aids cooking and makes for a more succulent finished product. You don't have to eat the fat if you don't want to, but remember - the fat is where a Pig's food is stored - so that is where the flavour lies! Cook and discard if you must - but in that order, please!

 

This is Sarah appearing on The Peoples Cook Book  cooking with Paul Rankin and Antony Worrall Thompson. She was asked to provide a traditional family meal which had some relevance to the farm and what we did with the pigs. She also used vegetables from our garden and local cider from the winkleigh cider company.

She cooked one our traditional pork loins with cider gravy and her recipe ended up in the cook book. This was filmed for the UK TV Food channel.

About Our Farm

• Highlands Hogs, started producing and rearing pigs in early 2006. Not only did we want to produce high quality pork but we also want to maintain high standards of animal welfare and full trace ability so our customers know exactly where their meat comes from.
  
  We were fed up with dry tasteless meat due to no natural fat or the typical watery mess you get when cooking bacon. We did vast amounts of research and decided that traditional breeds were the way forward.
  
  Rare breeds have a better natural ability to put down a good amount of fat, this helps aid the cooking process, not to mention that rare breeds also have a far superior taste to start with. Once you've tasted Rare Breed Pigs & Pork you will wonder why you ever ate the tasteless supermarket meat in the first place.
  
  Our farms other main goal was in conservation. These wonderful British pigs are some of the rarest in the country, some people ask 'then why should we eat them?', well apart from the obvious it's simply that they wouldn't be here if we didn't.