Butcher
Russell Kilvington loves pigs and has always worked with them and only them. He was a pig farmer in Italy for a couple of years and when he came back to England, he started his own pig business - Royal Berkshire Pork - with the help of a loan from the Princes Youth Trust. Back then in the early ‘90s he had 100 pigs, now his herd totals around 2,000. In 1994, his farming operation became Freedom Food approved. All his pigs are free-range outdoor-reared following RSPCA Freedom Food welfare standards which, as he says “are constantly being reviewed and inspire confidence.” Fed on a compound feed of wheat, GM-free soya and barley his Hampshire Large White pigs are slaughtered at around 6 months.
It is at this point he differs from many a pig farmer as he sends them away for processing. “It’s all done to my recipes. And as the unit works on a fully traceable system, I know that it is my pigs that go in the sausages with their 80% meat content, and the dry-cured bacon and hams that I sell. My skill and expertise is in farming and welfare systems – not in production. I knew that if I was going to grow, I either had to take the production off-farm or invest millions in a state of the art unit”.
Russell still dreams about the Italian-style prosciutto and salami he wants to have made from his pigs – to remind him of his carefree times in Italy.
