The Ranby Curly Coat is a bespoke pig created for flavour and the highest quality pork while thriving on the plants and products of the Lincolnshire Wolds.
We have taken the two pig breeds that produce the best flavoured pork and combined them to create a pig which not only has the best taste genetically but is able to reflect the local area in which they are reared.
The two breeds are the Mangalitza pig which has its origins in 19th century Hungary and the Berkshire pig which is a traditional British breed of pig originally from the Thames valley area.
Both breeds of pig enjoy foraging and the Mangalitza in particular thrives on a high proportion of leafy plants and fruit in its diet. This trait allows the Ranby Curly Coats to gain a lot of flavour in its meat from its diet and reflects the local abundance of particular plants that these pigs love to eat. A Ranby Curly Coat Pig during its lifetime will eat large quantities of windfall fruit, mainly apples and plums, borage, comfrey, nettles, grass, dandelion as well as surplus and waste garden produce like sweetcorn plants, cabbage, carrots and beetroot. During the autumn and winter they will eat surplus sugar beet from local farms. They eat a small quantity of a balancing specialist pig food to ensure their diet is complete.
The Ranby Curly Coat is an outdoor pig. It will live its whole life outdoors with just a small open doored shelter for sleeping. The pigs are protected from both the cold and the sun by a thick hairy coat that has a little curl in it from their Mangalitza parent which is a woolly pig. Their coat is either coloured ginger or grey but their skin is pale.
The Ranby Curly Coat is ready to go off to the butchers at 8 to 10 months old which is a lot older than commercial pigs kept indoors and fed a diet of soya and cereals. The difference in the Ranby Curly Coat is that the extra time means extra flavour and better textured meat, commercial pigs will often have dry crumbly meat due to their rapid growth and limited diet. We care about every aspect of our pig’s lives and use only a small traditional abattoir to minimise stress.
