Bringing home the bacon, the soulful way

Jul 18, 2016

Anthony Huckstep hoofs it to Port Lincoln’s Boston Bay Smallgoods, where builder-turned-pig-farmer Jason Stephenson is bringing home bacon with soul.

I was more than a handful when growing up. Chubby cheeks with a scarlet spandex devil suit kind of personality. That annoying little Huck was constantly asked by his mum to, “Stop carrying on like a pork chop”. It’s one of a throng of classic Aussie turns of phrase delivered with a sense of endearment that relies heavily on our laconic swagger to express the sentiment. You know ‘fair suck of the sauce bottle’ or ‘full as a fat sheila’s sock’. But ‘you are what you eat’ doesn’t settle well in my stomach. It’s the finger pointing that I find hard to swallow. That somehow enjoying a less than healthy moment of joy leads to a questionable personality or appearance. Best to avoid eating spotted dick then.

Anyway, earlier this year I asked a gaggle of chefs a twist on
the premise – if you were a meal, what would you be? Some of the answers – strawberry jelly and chicken sandwich – surprised me. It got me thinking, what am I? Well, you certainly don’t get a body like mine by reviewing salad, so perhaps Mum was onto something.

After careful consideration I announced to my fiancée that perhaps I’m a roast pork roll with crackling and gravy. She agreed a tad too fast for my liking, but it does sum me up rather well.

I’ve been to many piggeries, from free-range to mass-production farms, but Boston Bay Smallgoods Company is particularly unique. I catch up with owner Jason Stephenson at his property overlooking Boston Bay (pictured) on the morning of the Port Lincoln Cup – the race day that stops the tiny South Australian town – and discover something quite special.

“I’ll have a 60kg pig on a spit for you to try later at the races,” he smiles. A builder by trade, Stephenson started a free-range pig farm during 2015 in Port Lincoln but after the verbal agreement with council went pear-shaped he opted to take the pigs elsewhere.

He purchased a 2500 acre property in Rudall, South Australia, and got busy on his boutique breeding of Berkshire. “We use about 300 acres for 400 pigs, so they have plenty of room,” he says. It’s at terrain, though scrub belts and sand hills run like corridors through the landscape. The sandy soil allows water to drain rapidly, unlike his previous plot where the clay meant that smaller pigs got their little hoofs stuck in the mud, so to speak.

Each pen is roughly 500m by 1000m and houses just 40 pigs at a time, and while most free-range farms still rely on huts as breeding pens, here there are no man-made shelters. Rather, the mothers pull out grasses and shrubs to make nests to have their piglets. It’s just as a pig would in the wild – only it’s on a farm.

Pigs feast on the fallen native fruit from quandong (native peach) trees, but it’s not their main feed. A diet designed by a nutritionist utilises grains mostly grown on the farm – wheat, barley, peas, legumes – to ensure their diet is spot on. “Sure, they’re going to end up on the dinner table like every other pig that is consumed in Australia, but it’s the life they have before that matters most.“ Stephenson says he needed something to put a spring in his step again after losing his appetite for the building game, but pig farming? “It’s the nature of them. I didn’t do this because I like the pork. I do, but I love pigs, they’re amazing animals,” he says.

It seems Stephenson’s fondest memories of the building industry are when he had his hands on the tools. Putting his hands in the soil on the farm is rekindling that feeling. “I’m nally getting job satisfaction. It’s something my whole family get excited about and it’s not about making money, it’s about a satisfaction in your soul.”

I guess it’s why I’m a roast pork roll. It’s the food that makes my heart beat a little faster, not just my arteries clogging up. For all the breathtaking meals I’ve been lucky enough to experience, it’s often the simplest that sates this beast’s soul most.

Later that day Stephenson hands me a roll filled with pork and crackling from a 60kg Berkshire pig on the spit. The flesh is rich, yet delicate, with glassy crackling that induces food comas. Guess that makes for two pretty happy piggies.