Little Yarns: Mark & Kate Wheal

Beachport Berkshires – Beachport, SA

This edition of Little Yarns heads to South Australia’s Limestone Coast. We spoke with Mark Wheal who, together with his wife Kate, has been farming on their 3500 acre farm in Beachport since 2010 with a focus on sustainability and ethical farming practices. This is one of the reasons we choose to use their pork in our products – that, and the fact that it’s absolutely delicious!

Tell us what you do at Beachport Berkshires and how your farm started.

We have always farmed cattle and sheep and had a cropping program, then about ten years ago we got a pair of pigs to raise as meat for our freezer. However, they ended up having piglets before we got to eating any, and a few pigs soon became over 30 – far more than we could eat ourselves! 

They were escaping regularly into Kate’s garden, and she finally issued the ultimatum of doing them properly as a business (and not right next to the house) or getting rid of them altogether.

Not taking the easy route, I started to look for alternative selling options. One butcher was keen on heritage breeds so we went in the direction of Berkshires and started sourcing specific genetics. Fast forward to now and we have 140 purebred sows and up to 500 offspring spread across 150 acres.

We really love the Berkshire breed; it produces the most flavoursome pork, has a nicer nature to other breeds we’ve encountered, and is well suited to an outdoor environment.

What ethical and sustainable measures do Beachport Berkshires practice?

As our sheep and cattle are outside roaming about in paddocks it was not even a consideration to raise our pigs any differently. 

Animal health and wellbeing is paramount in our farming practices so they need adequate shelter and shade, unrestricted access to outdoors areas, good quality water and wallows in summer (our pigs have their own sprinklers to lie under!) As they are not in temperature-controlled sheds, mud in the heat is essential as a cooling system/insulation on their skin. In the cooler months we go through a huge amount of straw bedding to keep them warm.

Maintaining paddock health is vital too. We are in a water protected area on the Limestone Coast due to aquifers being close to the surface, so we have to soil test regularly to ensure the pigs’ manure is not causing a nutrient build up, potentially causing leachate into the water table. We also try to spread out the nutrient burden within the paddocks by moving around feeders and shelters as these are high traffic areas and likely to have more nutrient deposits there.

But our main goal is to always keep a high level of groundcover in each paddock, so we expanded last year to double our pig area so we can always have empty paddocks to be rested and allow for pasture regrowth before the next mob comes in. We’ve also moved to a batching system now that we have extra paddocks, so a group that is weaned together will stay in the one mob their whole life. This helps maintain their health by minimising mixing of bacteria and pathogens and minimises fighting or stress from adding new pigs into their established hierarchy.

Basically, we want them to be free to exhibit all their natural pig behaviours, to root in dirt and roll in mud; happy pigs are healthy pigs, and ultimately, create tasty pork.

What do you feed your pigs to produce such juicy sweet pork?!

It’s a trade secret!

No, our pigs are totally pampered when it comes to their diet. They are in established pastures of mixed grasses, lucerne, clover and have ad-lib feeders with different rations according to their age/weight and stage of reproduction. We once had an animal nutritionist tell us pigs don’t eat grass, but you only have to look at the difference between the grazed and the rested paddocks to see that they do! We think that grass mixed with their additional ration makes a big difference.

As part of our cropping enterprise we grow barely, wheat and broad beans, and this makes up the base of their rations. Another of our initial drivers with establishing the pigs into a more serious enterprise was to add value to our own cereal production by converting it into a protein source (pork), and pigs have a fantastic feed conversion efficiency.

They get different minerals and additives too and we put all the grains through a disc mill on the farm and mix their combined rations three times a week.

They consume a lot of roughage from straw as well.

What do you love about your job? 

The variety, every day is different.

But also feeding people. We produce a number of products that go into food sources Australia and world-wide, that’s incredibly satisfying. 

And getting great feedback from people telling us it’s the best pork they’ve ever eaten is pretty cool too.

Have you won any awards or have any certificates for your products?

We won Silver in the Australian Food Awards twice and Bronze in the Royal Sydney Food Show for our pork. COVID stopped food competitions for a while, but we hope to enter some more soon.

In 2017 we got our Australian Pork Industry Quality Assurance (APIQ) Free Range certification which really sets the standard for our animal and environmental welfare practices.

What keeps you busy outside of farming pigs?

The rest of the farm! Summer was flat out with harvesting and we are now preparing for the next round of crop seeding and have started calving.

We are also in the process of launching a brewery (Beachport Brewing Co) that will utilise our malt barley in an old Fish Factory that we have spent a year renovating and converting. And squeezing in some family time with our two girls, Lily & Willow.

What is your favourite Little Acre product? 

Your Pork Terrines!

(But also very partial to their Duck Liver Pâté)

Where can our customers find your products?

We have a full list of stockists on our website, but our main locations are:

Meat at the Market, Central Market (Adelaide)
Ellis Butchers (McLaren Vale)
Fosters Foodland (Millicent)
She’s Apples (Mount Gambier)
Meatsmith (Melbourne)

…and in delicious Little Acre Foods products!