Service With A Smile

All work and no play is no way to enjoy yourself, but when Liz Shankland gets a break from her new smallholding, it’s often a busman’s holiday

I keep saying I need to get out more, and I have started to listen to my own advice at last. Inevitably, though, when I go out, it’s normally to do something associated with smallholding.

I’ve joined two local smallholders’ groups down here in west Wales – the long-established Dyfed Smallholders’ Association, and the more recently-formed Talley and Cwmdu Smallholders’ Club – so, at long last, I am starting to widen my circle of like-minded people. It’s always good to meet fellow landowners, visit their homes, and listen to others talking about their passions for different types of livestock, the crafts they enjoy, or the various ways they have chosen to make their land work for them.

Still, however interesting it may be to learn about new subjects, my primary interest is, and always will be, pigs. Some people reckon it’s become a bit of an obsession over the years, and I never tire of talking about them. Since moving to west Wales, I’ve been within easy reach of a number of really useful workshops and training events organised by Mentur Moch Cymru, a Welsh Government-funded project set up with the aim of increasing the size of the pig herd in Wales.

Free workshops so far have included sessions on improving piglet survival, successful farrowing, and management of gilts, and I was even lucky enough to get a place on a sausage making and bacon curing course which would otherwise have cost several hundred pounds.

University visit