'That's Big Daddy,' says Helen Wakeham, pointing at a Welsh White whose truffle snuffling snout twitches the bars in excitement. 'They think it's breakfast. I'll come back and do breakfast soon,' she promised. Big Daddy's in with a Saddleback sow and three of her children. But it is less a mother/daughter relationship, more of a friend thing now. 'It suits us to have them all together for a minute while they are dry. They're lovely, such chatty little things,' she said. Neighbouring pens house pigs at earlier stages of the production cycle, a couple of sows in pig, teenagers and under cover, youngsters and unweaned piglets tucked in with their mums. As an environmentally-friendly business, Proper Pork ticks all the boxes – local, high quality, traditionally-produced meat, selling direct to the public. Based at Colston Farm, Buckfastleigh, what started as an accident is becoming an increasingly-important income stream. Like many farmers, the Wakehams can only make ends meet by Colin working full time as a dry-stone waller on Dartmoor. The pigs live in open-air pens with thatched dens to which they can retreat if they want. Food miles are minimal – at seven months they go to Tom Laing's in Ashburton and are turned into sausages and chops. 'It's so slick there, they haven't a clue. They still have a smile on their faces. In big places it's all noise and clamour and they can smell sinister things. It's helps the meat to be tender,' Helen said. She gets annoyed when people start feeling sorry for the pigs. 'If they don't like it, don't come to the stall,' she said. It's not helpful to anthromoporphise, she says. Pigs don't think like humans. They're happy and importantly they don't know what we know. In its eight years, Proper Pork has established a reputation for quality, winning a Taste of the West silver and gold award. Requests are piling in from more and more farmers' markets. 'Selling it retail is the only way. In days of old the farmer reared stock, took it to market and made a comfortable living. Nowadays, it wouldn't even cover the feed.' Recently, Helen persuaded Tuckers, of Ashburton, to allow them to run a Saturday market in the firm's car park. She couldn't get a toehold in the weekly Ashburton market and traders have succeeded in preventing a Sunday farmers' market setting up in the town. She shrugs at the suggestion that some traders may have had their noses put out of joint. 'It's a free market at the end of the day,' she said. 'The nice thing is that people do come back. We keep more sows because we keep running out of sausages but I will not buy in pork to make up the shortfall. 'That would just make an average sausage then, and we don't want an average sausage.'
