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Pipers Farm started as a 50-acre family farm in 1989. Peter Greig and his wife, Henri, wanted to raise animals in a way that was inspired by and respected nature and resulted in healthy food that they wanted to feed their kids. Now, Pipers Farm includes 45 small-scale family farms that share common values in producing food in a sustainable way.
Peter Greig and his daughter-in-law, Abby Allen, are on the show today to chat about Pipers Farm’s new cookbook – The Sustainable Meat Cookbook: Recipes & Wisdom for Considered Carnivores. This is a beautiful book filled with delicious recipes, gorgeous photographs, and wise words about sustainable meat consumption. I highly recommend it!
Peter, Abby, and I have a wonderful nuanced conversation about the importance of consumer education and the complicated topic of access to nutrient-dense meat for low-income families. We cover topics like:
- The origins of Pipers Farm
- The problems with industrialized chicken
- How the pandemic positively impacted small family farms
- The rural-urban divide
- The importance of educating the younger generation
- The benefits of fresh frozen meat
- The future plans for Pipers Farm
Resources:
Pipers Farm The Sustainable Meat Cookbook: Recipes & Wisdom for Considered Carnivores
Connect with Pipers Farm:
Website: Pipers Farm
Facebook: @pipersfarm
Instagram: @pipersfarm
Twitter: @pipersfarm
Episode Credits:
Thank you to all who’ve made this show possible. Our hosts are Diana Rodgers and James Connelly. Our producer is Emily Soape. And, of course, we are grateful for our sponsors, Patreon supporters, and listeners.
If you’re ready to take your support for a nutritious, sustainable, and equitable food system to the next level, join my Global Food Justice Alliance community on Patreon. You will have access to ad-free podcasts, exclusive videos, a discussion community, and much more. Go to sustainabledish.com/join to support my work.
For the month of February, running a free community blood sugar challenge. You’ll learn how to use a continuous glucose monitor (CGM) to guide your food choices, plus a free ebook and access to live Zoom calls.
I’m also partnering with Levels to offer two free months when you sign up as a member to get the CGM without a prescription. Visit sustainabledish.com/bloodsugar to sign up.
And if you are listening to this after our challenge has ended, you can still get access to my blood sugar challenge ebook and the recorded Zoom calls, plus the special offer from Levels.
Transcript:
Diana Rodgers, RD
Welcome to the Sustainable Dish Podcast. I’m Diana Rodgers, a real food registered dietitian, author, and sustainability advocate. I co-host this podcast with James Connelly, who was a producer on my film Sacred Cow. I also founded the Global Food Justice Alliance, an initiative advocating for the inclusion of animal-source foods like meat, dairy, and eggs for a more nutritious, sustainable, and equitable worldwide food system. You can check it out and join me at global food justice.org. Thanks again for listening. And now, on to our show.
Diana Rodgers, RD
Welcome back to the podcast, everyone. I am so excited. I recently got this beautiful cookbook in the mail, Pipers Farm: The Sustainable Meat Cookbook. And it reminded me so much of the Home Grown Paleo cookbook, the one I put out many years ago. It is gorgeous. It is full of really wise words about sustainable meat consumption, beautiful recipes, beautiful photos from the farm, and I have the creators of the book with me today. So welcome. Thank you so much for coming on the podcast.
Abby Allen
Thank you so much for having us.
Peter Greig
Yes, thank you.
Diana Rodgers, RD
Why don’t you both introduce yourselves to the listeners here and kind of go through the origins of the farm and how you came about to produce this book?
Peter Greig
Well, if I start off because I’m possibly slightly the senior, one of the two in this discussion. But it will end up by me introducing Abby but safe to say right from the start for Henri, and I and Henri’s my wife. It’s slightly confusing because she’s definitely got a boy’s name. But after 45 years together, I know she’s definitely a girl. But Henri and I feel incredibly excited by this book because it’s a sort of captures so much of what we might have dreamt over right from the start about Pipers farm. So the very origins of it, were when Will had just been born. So we have two boys, Ed, our eldest son, and Will is a couple of years younger. And at that moment, I was working with my father on an industrial poultry system, so producing table birds. And he had originally pioneered that he’d been over to the States in the early 50s. To bring it back to the UK because my great-grandfather had started a chain of food shops. And so when he had to join that business, he could see people ate chicken once in a blue moon, but obviously post-war, the industrial livestock farming systems were being developed. He brought them or he and my mum brought them over to the UK in the early 50s. And in 1987, when Will was born, Henri and I were living back on that small farm in Kent, where I’ve been born and brought up and where this system of industrial chicken farming had been developed in this country. But for Henri and I, we been farming a high hill farm for six years where nature was king. And then I was back here farming these chickens where obviously the whole thing is you exclude nature. And it literally is an industrial process. But we had young children and we were thinking we’d never feed these chickens to our children. And also we just thought if you filmed what I looked at every day and showed it to the customers buying these chickens, they probably choose not to eat chicken and we were thinking that was no way for us to sort of set out on a career in farming.
Diana Rodgers, RD
I just want to interrupt really quickly and let it for the listeners who aren’t familiar. I know a lot of people see chicken in the grocery store. They just think that it’s been… it is the most common meat that… it’s naturally the most common meat for people to eat. And that couldn’t be further from the truth. And in my book Sacred Cow, Robb and I go through the history of how chicken – ‘a chicken in every pot’ was the saying of meaning that we finally made it. That everyone can have a chicken because chicken was such a special food. But once we learned, as you’re describing here, how to industrialize the chicken process, and a lot of that had to do with getting the supplementation right, so that we could raise them in these high stress environments, without them getting sick, with the right amount of vitamins that they needed in order to be crowded the right amount of antibiotics, which really started in the 1950s, you know, before that chicken was expensive and rare, and still in a sustainable farm, it’s still that way, right? Chicken, in a more natural setting takes much longer and cost much more to raise than these chickens that you’re talking about. So I just wanted to interject with that. I know a lot of my listeners probably are familiar, but maybe for the ones who aren’t. So go ahead.
Peter Greig
Yeah, and Diana, I think you’ve raised the really, really important point there. It was antibiotic abuse, which was glaringly obvious to us as completely unsustainable. The whole system was predicated on having antibiotics, to sustain those animals in that environment, which effectively was the perfect environment for food poisoning bacteria. And so of course, there was, the balance was wrong. It was cultivating this bigger and bigger threat of bacterial microbial challenge. And the birds themselves were simply unable to cope with that challenge. So although we weren’t doctors, it seemed to us an absolutely scary prospect that this system was cultivating what would become a massive human issue of antimicrobial resistance. And the other thing I think, which struck us was the concentration of the power in the global industrial food system into the hands of very few giant corporates. And those two things, basically said, we want to build a system of food supply producing food, we were happy to feed to our children, that isn’t complicated. As a farmer, there is no simpler, more passionate instinct and to say, we are going to produce food that we have absolute confidence in. And then we wanted to try and capture the magic as we saw it of the smaller scale family farms, and build a business, which helped them to flourish and become part of the future of the global food system, a rebuilding of functionality in the supply chain. So basically, Pipers Farm was born. And this magical book, which Abby has created, feels like the most wonderful way of conveying what were those very, very simple beginnings for Henri and I 35 years ago.
Abby Allen
So the exciting thing for me is Peter talks about his son Will, who thank God, he had wonderful, healthy nourishing food and grew up into a strong strapping lad, and Will and I – don’t know if you guys you might not be aware of us. There’s a program in the UK called The Archers. That’s all about sorts of country life. And we always joke and say it was a bit like The Archers when Will and I met and we fell in love on the farm. And so Peter’s son is my other half. And I’ve been involved in the business for about well, actually is coming up to 11 years now. Frighteningly, and through this, like, through all of that sort of time, it was just so lovely for me to see this, like amazing family business and what Peter and Henri had just, you know, they were so at the forefront 30 years ago, 30 plus years ago, I mean, probably 35 years ago now. Definitely because Will is 35. You know, they were talking about things that people just thought were mad, you know, they thought, oh, there’s some sort of hippie, you know, like farmers, what do they know about this? They’re talking about antibiotic resistance. They’re talking about, you know, permanent pasture and small-scale family farms. That’s boring. Like we can make things bigger and cheaper and better. And here are these guys absolutely championing these common sense values. And, you know, when I joined the business, it was remarkable because there was still that sort of huge treadmill towards can we globalize and industrialize and yet right from the outset your vision was to say, this is going, you know, this is going on a path that we’re not going to be able to pull back from. We have to shore up the small-scale family farms. So I had an amazing sort of 11 year apprenticeship into really sort of understanding the vision and learning and at a time where, you know, there’s been so much change from this kind of digital side of things from social media to the internet, selling online. And so yeah, the book is really kind of my interpretation and expression of what Peter and Henri have kind of built and what I’ve learned along the way, and probably just with a little bit of my own sort of background, I was, I’ve been incredibly lucky to be brought up sort of in rural England, and had the most wonderful grandparents that taught me everything from you know, how to grow your own food. So, like the growing my own veg was a huge part of growing up to, you know, my granny would boil up a pig’s head and she’d make brawn and you know, she’d use every scrap, but it was that kind of postwar. Like, waste not want not. And, you know, that was just all around cooking was a huge part of my childhood and being connected with the countryside was a huge part of my childhood. So I’ve sort of had that kind of instilled. And then when I met Will, and you know, join the family and all of that sort of stuff. It’s on another level. So, yeah, we created this sort of lease, as you know, collaboration, but definitely, based on Peter and Henri’s vision, all those years ago,
Diana Rodgers, RD
There are so many things you brought up, I was scribbling down notes as you were talking – both of you. You know, I think it’s funny that, and I’m not sure, I know, there are some parallels going on in England, but here in the US when COVID hit, and we had some meat shortages, we had some, you know, shutdowns with some of the major slaughterhouses. I think consumers started to realize that maybe it’s not so safe to have five large companies controlling, you know, 80 to 90% of our meat and that, you know, from a food sovereignty perspective, from a food safety perspective. I mean, you talked about antibiotics, and microbial, you know, infestations with you know, potential with chickens. I still, when I was researching my book, Sacred Cow, I looked into the odds of getting sick, you know, from E. coli or salmonella, you know, just from industrial meat and found that you’re many, many, many times more likely to get sick from chicken than you are from beef, just because still the way it’s produced. It’s just so hard to keep that away. I was also I’m kind of just rambling through all the notes. Small and Medium size farms are more resilient to disease, they create a more resilient rural culture. And I think it’s the rural culture piece. You know, we have a huge urban/rural kind of cultural divide going on here in the US. And I know that that’s… I was in England a few times this past summer and saw that as well. The rewilding movement, I know is much stronger in England than it is here in the US. And maybe it’s because we have so many national parks and untouched landscapes here in the US where it’s harder to see that in England. But I saw such a disrespect from the rewilding community for the fact that rural communities are supported by farming, like that’s how it happens. And Small and Medium Scale pasture-based farming, and industrial farming does nothing to support rural communities. And I think, you know, one of the arguments you could make for, you know, someone who’s more urban dweller, if they like going to the countryside, they need to be supporting the people who are making the countryside possible, right?
Abby Allen
Totally, I think, you know, that’s the way we both grew up, even though at very different times, I grew up having neighboring farms, you know, our neighbor, milk cows. They had geese. We would pick out our goose for Christmas, every year, we would see it grow throughout the year and when mom would drive us to school, we’d look out the window go we’re gonna have that one. And, you know, counting down the time until it’s ready and very much like you know, we all help each other in terms of neighbors. We let you know, neighbors use a field and then we swap bits of kit. And the same with my grandpa in his generation, when it came to sort of harvesting time, they shared the equipment and there’s this real sense when you live in a rural community – have that kind of sharing and just sort of a real understanding for your environment for you know, what happens when there’s challenging weather conditions or what happens when these things you know, you band together. And when you talk about that sort of food sovereignty and resilience piece. So much of that is just by sheer grit and determination of rural communities. You get through that and I think you know, when you grew up, you always talk about how you would take the cream off the top of the jersey milk down the road. And there is something really magical about that. And like you say, if we are to rewild, or to industrialize farming, you lose, you know, you take people out of the equation, and you lose so much of that magic. And then you become, you know, so much like we all saw during the pandemic, we have the same thing in this country where, you know, supermarket shelves were empty, and you couldn’t get deliveries. And whereas small-scale farmers, we were very lucky that people came out like they clapped for our NHS, they came out and they clapped for farmers, because they realized how resilient the small-scale farmers have been. Unfortunately, it might have reverted back. And you know, and people have maybe forgotten about the wonderful work of the NHS and the wonderful work of farmers as the kind of world has opened up again. But I guess that gives us even more fire in our belly to say, look, when times are tough, you need to rely on people, and you need to rely on good, honest people that are part of a functioning community. And that’s sort of a huge part of the heart of Pipers Farm is sustaining these family farms.
Peter Greig
Absolutely, definitely. I think Henri and I were lucky in that the first six years of our married life was a high hill farm in the north of England. So we lived at 1000 feet, the farm went to 2000 feet, and we were at the end of a one track road sort of five miles from the nearest village. So and it could be tough up there, it could be very bleak. And you realize that nature was keen. The power of that landscape was way beyond anything any human beings could actually really have any answer to. But the one thing that everybody could rely on and had huge respect for was the strength of the community to support each other. So that was embedded in us quite early in our married life. So then farming industrial chickens was the other end of the spectrum. Obviously, nature was excluded. But I think, as Abby said, it meant that the roots of Pipers Farm equally, were about the production of food that we believed to have real nutritional value, we wanted to feed it to our children. So that was absolutely at the heart. But this resilience that Abby’s just talked about, of rural communities, and in a way I feel, it’s rather like the resilience of nature. The incredible, unbelievably cool world of nature, is something which I think industrial farming has believed they need show no respect for. And that was, is really the glaring, fundamental issue here.
Abby Allen
And I think also industrial processed food is the farming system as well. But it’s also then on to the processing and on to the products on the supermarket shelves. And, you know, there’s so such little thought of either the person that’s produced that food, whether they’ve grown it or made it, but there’s also such a little thought of the person that’s going to consume that food. It’s all about, you know, what money can be made along the chain. And we’ve just becoming more sort of extracting of people in these big supply chains.
Diana Rodgers, RD
Yeah, totally. I want to share just a little nice little story about my son who’s 18 now, and I recently helped him with his college essay. And so we live in an area where there’s not a lot of farmers. So he’s the only farm kid at the school. Everyone else is ivy college-bound or something like that. And he has definitely along his upbringing, sometimes felt a little different than the other kids and maybe I think it’s just hard to grow up in an area where it’s not a farming place. But his college essay was all about how he realized during COVID that he was an essential worker. And while the other kids were home doing zoom, we actually let him take some time off of school. He’s not a zoom learner. And the farm was never busier. And we never had more people coming out and so happy to just be able to have a place where they could walk around and interact with you know, the livestock and the you know, get their hands dirty and support the people that were producing their food and it was like the joy of their week to come out with their family and visit the farm and pick up their farm share. And he was a little bit waffling on on whether or not he wanted to study agriculture, but that cemented it for him. And he has such a strong sense of nature and place itself because of growing up on the farm. And it’s just too bad that more kids don’t have that.
Peter Greig
And I think in a way, Diana, the Pipers Farm journey feels like it’s only a very short way into the vision if you like, because this idea of trying to put food and farming at the center of functional local communities is such a fundamental part of how we believe the farming community should relate to the community. They should become part of the local health and the local education system. And, you know, that is going to require a significant change in perspective. But there are many children, I think of your son’s generation, who would love to have that the joy, the fulfilling, sort of sense of being engaged with real with real food supply with really being part of the natural working landscape. So yeah, it’s a very, very exciting aspect, I think. And, yeah, it’s very much a part of the Pipers Farm journey.
Abby Allen
And that’s why it’s so important to support independent producers and small-scale farmers because it gives, you know, like, we have school visits that come to the farm, and we have, you know, even if it’s just friends and family that come and stay for the weekend, come out of the city and come down. And, you know, they like we always say, you know, they come in, and they’re all tense, and you know, and then by the time they’ve left the weekend, they’re like, shoulders are down. And it’s like it is medicine, the way there’s that lovely, I think it’s Japanese thing when they talk about bathing in nature, don’t know that sort of thing when you go and you deep lung full of it, but it really does connect with people. And I think that is the scary thing about these kinds of globalized food systems. And then the other sort of threat to those small-scale farmers is these large, you know, billionaires coming in and buying land up and turning it into rewilding. And, you know, while part of me feels, you know, anything that encourages more nature into this landscape is good. Again, a lot of those rewilding places the fences go up, and suddenly you can’t walk there and people can’t enjoy that night, you know, it again, it becomes sort of a playground for the few rather than allowing the many to enjoy it. So I think you know that that is a really important role, small scale farmers play that’s not often discussed.
Diana Rodgers, RD
Yeah. And I want to talk about that a little bit. Because I think sometimes I get misunderstood, just because I’m fighting against the global anti-meat movement and the global anti-livestock movement. And you know, people assume that I’m, you know, pro-industrial meat. And that’s not necessarily true. And I was, I was bringing that up with you before we got on air because I’m probably right around when this podcast is supposed to be airing, I should be in England, and I wanted to come meet you. I was gonna be coming to do a talk. But I was being forced to only say that pasture-raised meat was healthy. And I was just trying to explain to you beforehand, why I am against that message. Because there are a lot of people that don’t have the access, maybe to a vehicle to get to a farm like yours. And, you know, for a variety of reasons just can’t access the small percentage of meat that is produced on small and medium scale farms, pasture-based, and all of that. And as a health advocate, primarily dietitian and mother, I feel very strongly that people should be giving their children the nutrients they require for cognitive development, which is meat period. And at the same time, those of us who have the privilege to participate in this better, more sustainable food system definitely need to be doing that. But there is nothing about the fake meat industry or the anti-livestock industry that supports anything about what you’re doing at Piper’s farm. And I was particularly disturbed when I saw George Monbiot speak at Groundswell this summer, to a roomful of farmers, a tent full of farmers, telling them how grass-fed farmers are even worse than anybody else because their animals live longer producing more methane. And we all need to be eating this biological goo made out of hydrogen out of these… he couldn’t even really explain the process or the nutrients that were in it. My heart was pounding as I sat in the back of this tent, and I couldn’t even form the words to ask a coherent question because I felt so angry.
Abby Allen
I was in the back of that tent as well. I didn’t sit at the front, because I knew I would be too touchy. And, you know, so I thought, I’m gonna look at the back. And then if I can’t stand it, I can sneak out and no one will know. I haven’t had to make a scene. And, like, I think the interesting thing was that I listened to it, and it was a lot of the same things that you described. But there was also this tiny part of my brain, because I always try and not see things like all the time, from my point of view, and try and understand how other people get there. Because I think that’s where you can really understand how you unpick this kind of argument. And you become so passionate about these things that to make such little sense. But I found myself thinking, he’s really convincing. He talks like a politician, he’s very slick with his words. And you know, and he uses a lot of buzzwords and uses some of the things that really prey on people’s insecurities. You know, we’re all worried about climate. We’re all worried about energy. We’re all worried about costs all of these things. And so in this sort of narrative that he constructs around how to feed ourselves, he’s very clever with how he really puts those bits in that make people go, Oh, my god, yeah, that’s going to solve that problem for me, and then I can live guilt-free. And you know, and it’s a very clever thing that’s been going on with this whole fake meat, and that, you know, the whole industry. But again, all I would say with a lot of that stuff is there’s a lot of media coverage. But actually, it really hasn’t made traction with people at home. The you know, the number of vegans again, some statistics say it’s declining, some say they flatlined, you know, a lot of people have tried a vegan diet, and they’ve just found, you know, just doesn’t work for them. They don’t feel well on it. Some people have eaten a vegan diet and found they feel great. I mean, good for them. That’s like, whatever, that’s up to them. But I think, fundamentally, no, for us, anything that is driven by profit for billionaires and global supply chains, is a massive, massive red flag and be that fake meat or be that sort of the chicken that Peter was talking about that highly industrialized, highly processed chicken that’s full of antibiotics. We wouldn’t advocate somebody ate that. But that doesn’t mean you exclude meat from your diet altogether. There are other like you talk about, you know, pastured beef. Or like we I have a friend that I know and, and she feeds, uh, sorry, can you hear my dogs barking?
Diana Rodgers, RD
That’s okay. It comes with talking to farmers.
Abby Allen
She feeds a proportion of spent grain to her cattle that are leftover from a brewery and it just makes sense because it’s utilizing that sort of, you know, what’s available in the area to, you know, to produce healthy food. That’s her. That’s her system that works for her. I guess what I would say is, I am really passionate, that I think people can eat the sort of meat that we produce. There is this… there’s this thing that frustrates me when we tell people you’re on a low income, this isn’t for you. This is premium. This is for, you know, those that have when my grandparents grew up, my grandpa had, you know, really low income, like they were a low-income household, but they grew their own vegetables. They ate meat with every meal. They were so healthy, they did you know, they would go out and they would shoot pheasants, they would shoot rabbits they would they use what was around they like that. For them, this was never something that they were excluded from, they never sat there and said, Oh, but I can’t sort of eat the meat that you guys produce. They prioritize that because A – they knew it was good for their health. B – they knew it was delicious. C – they had neighbors that were doing all around them and they wanted to work. But you know, they didn’t go on holiday a lot. They maybe had a holiday once a year, different things were important to them. And I do think – I know, it’s probably difficult for me to sit here and say it and I never want to tell anybody how to run their life. But for me, the food that you put in your body is what sustains you and makes you healthy or not healthy. It also impacts your local community and it sustains those people. It impacts the air that you breathe, the water that you drink, and that knock on impact to all those other people that live around you. That’s number one most important to me. You know, I want to live a long, happy, healthy life doing the right thing supporting other people in my community. If it means that I go on holiday that latter it means that I don’t do something else, but I’ve given my family the best sort of nourishment that I can offer them. You know, but everyone’s different. Everyone has different priorities.
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Diana Rodgers, RD
Yes. And I think, you know, that’s something that came really clear to me when I was becoming a dietitian I worked in a very poor area of Boston, where we had a health food store, we were selling kind of expired or close to expired, you know, leftover hummus from the Hummus Factory, you know, very low dollar amount. And we didn’t have a lot of customers, and we were surrounded by more expensive fast food. And those stores were booming, but our store was not. And I went in and did some market research and talked to some community health people. And what I learned was that not everybody prioritizes their health the way you said, and to even be in a position to do that sometimes is something that a lot of people just aren’t, as you know, if you have a hierarchy of needs, yeah, and you’re worried about your car starting tomorrow, or not getting shot, right, and maybe didn’t have the background of learning how to shoot squirrels or, you know, pheasant…
Abby Allen
We’re hunting squirrels next week.
Diana Rodgers, RD
Right. Processed food might be the only joy they have all day
Abby Allen
Totally
Diana Rodgers, RD
And it doesn’t cost too much money, right for $4, they can eat like a king have a flavor profile that lights up all the reward sensors in their brain, that was a comfort for them ever since they were children.
Abby Allen
And often, many of these places are warm places. And at the moment, like the challenges we’re having with energy where you think I can’t actually afford the heat going into somewhere that’s going to be one of those fast food outlets is going to be warm that you can sit there all day. And that is a you know, is a space that you can feel comfortable and safe. And I, you know, I completely get all of that. I think it’s just really sad that as a society, we have drifted in a very short amount of time into something where that is the norm. You know, somebody like my grandpa, who I say, really low income, like they had to absolutely consider every single penny, you know, they were the sort of house where you had ice on the inside of the windows, you lit a fire, you chop some wood to get warm, like that was how they grew up. But again, you know, they had that education of how to grow food, how to prepare food, how to cook, how to feed, you know, like I said, I think it was before this, you know, my granny would boil up a pig’s head because maybe they would… she wouldn’t necessarily buy a loin or you know, a sirloin or something like that. They know that they would buy the cheaper cuts and make the most of those in just sort of my mom’s generation, my generation, that sort of education has gone, that connection to the rural community. And it has been replaced by those, you know, the fast food chains and the warm spaces. And just because that’s what we live in now doesn’t mean that we should accept that and especially accept it on behalf of other people that don’t have the voice that we maybe have. And so I do feel passionate about saying, I don’t think it’s wrong to saying education is so important learning completely. But we have to sort of change the system that it doesn’t… we don’t just sit there and go, Oh, but they haven’t got so this is okay. It’s not okay, it’s not okay, that somebody’s only option to be warm and feed themselves is to go into fast food out there. And we should all be doing what we can do to make that a non-reality and go back to a way where they had more choice. And they didn’t feel excluded from a food system. It’s funny that we do a lot of work with Slow Food. I don’t know if you guys have come across that. Yeah, amazing organization. And when you go to sort of the continent and Spain and Italy and places like that, there isn’t this disparity of like, you’re allowed organic, you’re not allowed organic, you know, people don’t see food systems and say, I’m going to deselect myself from that I’m not, you know, that’s not for me like they do in this country. And I think it may be a little bit the same in the US. And it’s because they’ve retained far more of that food, culture and food, education and knowledge. And that’s really what you know, I’m hoping that this might do a bit of a job on this to help, you know, again, it’s not going to reach everyone. But if we can all use our voice to try and shine a light on the fact that educating people about food systems about how to cook about how to feed themselves is so important. And not just go well, those people haven’t got that. So therefore it’s fine. You know, we’re never going to move it forward unless we start shouting about it and trying to make change happen.
Diana Rodgers, RD
Yeah, it’s unfortunate that in a lot of low and middle-income countries, you’ve made it when you can afford Western junk food. Yeah, right and reject the traditional foods that have sustained these people for so many years, which are, you know, 10 times healthier than modern junk food.
Peter Greig
But I think, Diana, that what we feel very strongly is the next generation will have the benefit of information and insight, which we’ve built up in the last 50 years in farming and food supply terms has really been in many respects that accompany the disaster. And I know there are people in my generation who would say, No, no, no, no, we’ve increased yields, for example by a factor of 10. And I would say no, that simply isn’t true, you simply move fossil fuel from the surface of the planet and plowed it into an industrial protein source that isn’t farming, that is simply moving resources around and industrial process…
Diana Rodgers, RD
At the expense of soil health and water and rural communities and all of that.
Peter Greig
Exactly. And really, we need to be very clear that the younger generation needs to be given a very clear, simple message. Look at nature be inspired by and respect nature because nature never wastes anything. And it is unbelievably complex and incredibly intertwined, and interdependent, and resilient. And those are the characteristics of something that is really sustainable. And so for billions of years, that nature has put down a marker, and it’s just as Abby was talking about education, helping the younger generation to see clearly the massive lessons that nature can teach us, and humanity is part of nature. And if we can go back to saying to the young generation now have respect for nature, and see ourselves as part of it, it puts a completely different complexion on where we might be in 10 or 20 years time. And I’m afraid George Monbiot has, you know, we are going to feed the world out of a laboratory narrative has absolutely no place in our vision anyway, that nature is unbelievably cool and should be at the heart of sustaining humanity on this planet.
Abby Allen
I think it also disrespects those people that are on the low income because that, again, is a lot of the narrative that this sort of stuff is targeted at, oh, well, you can’t afford pastured meat. And oh, there’s not enough land on the planet to raise livestock in that way, which we can all argue at another time. But, you know, it’s taking away the choice from people and saying, This is all you can have, you know, we’re going to make the sort of cheapest, most rubbish thing. And now that will be what feeds you. And it’s totally wrong. Because as a society, we didn’t grow up like that we didn’t behave like that for most of humanity’s existence. It’s literally been since the industrialization and globalization, where people are becoming incredibly greedy, and they are monetizing resources, you know, resources are getting more finite, and so they’re becoming more expensive. And it’s just becoming more and more exclusionary for people. And that’s the bit that, you know, I know, some people might sit there and go, Oh, well, you know, it’s easy to say it but um, I feel someone’s got to say, you’ve got it… it’s wrong, that people don’t have a choice. And at the moment, they don’t. They don’t, you know, someone on a low income household couldn’t necessarily buy from Pipers Farm. I would love to see in 50 years time that everybody could, that the food that we produce is accessible and they’re not having to buy, you know, some sort of rubbish that’s come out of a laboratory that hasn’t been tested and does God knows what to their human health and their children’s human health.
Diana Rodgers, RD
Right. And we were mentioning also earlier that you know how when you compare it to a lot of the foods that people aren’t complaining about the price of like chips or crisps you call them potato chips, you know. I went to look at the price per ounce or I guess per gram. And organic grass fed beef is and it doesn’t necessarily have to be you know, certified organic or whatever, but it is less expensive, just by weight. Then fancy coffee drinks that no one’s complaining about the price of that nobody needs all these foods that are extra. Alcohol, you know, no one’s complaining. You know, cheap wine is destroying people’s health is actually quite expensive per ounce. Also not farmed in a great way but nobody’s complaining that, you know, that’s elitist, but yet, you know, someone can do very well with ground meat and more of the organ cuts and more of the… I think you had… I saw a recipe in here with pork neck I think I saw. So let’s talk a little bit more about Pipers Farm because we’ve been kind of waxing philosophical and I also just want to mention I completely am on your side 100% with trying to educate people. I guess with all the traveling I’ve done globally and seeing so many policies made on a complete misunderstanding of this concept of nature. You know, farmers in New Zealand being taxed for methane or being told to take farmland out of production to plant mono-crop trees that aren’t even native. Airlines buying up farmland in Wales to take it out of farm production, just to have the carbon credits. I mean, there’s just so many policies I see. And that’s where I think someone like Monbiot can be very dangerous, because it’s not necessarily consumers that are buying into him. But he does seem to have the ear of important decision-makers when it comes to policy. And he’s noisy. So anyhow, let’s get… let’s talk about the farm though. Can you just briefly let people know like the types of animals you raise? What type, what size you’re at? Just talk a little bit more specifically about the farm and how people can learn more about the farm?
Peter Greig
Well, it started I mean, the hub of the business is the 50 acre farm, where Henri and I have lived for 35 years and where we brought the boys up that 50 acre grass farm just north of Exeter in the southwest of England. And because our vision was always in scaling the business not simply to farm more land ourselves, but to embrace this landscape of smaller scale family farms. The Devon landscape where we are is a wonderful, rich tapestry of many different family farms that have in many cases been going five or six generations, a wonderfully varied landscape from the high moors of Dartmoor annex more down to the coastal, the valleys, and then the coastline itself. There’s a lot of that in the southwest of England. So now the jigsaw if you like of Pipers Farm is about 45 of these smaller family farming businesses, all of whom are part of the supply chain. They are a link in the chain. So right at the start, I taught myself to butcher. And the objective of that was to try and make sure that if we helped these family farms, to rear livestock in the way that if you’re like their grandparents would have done, we didn’t throw a big rulebook at them and say: these are the rules for Pipers Farm because really, what we wanted them to do was to be able to say, to the salesman, selling all of the industrial inputs into farming, the fertilizer in the sprays and the non-natural rations for the livestock, preclude those. Go back to the simple, common sense approach that your grandparents might have had, using, as Abby described earlier, the resources that were specific to that farm and that community in that landscape. So that’s what we’ve done and helped them to adapt their farming system to be part of the supply chain of what needs to be a consistent product for our customers. So although there are these 45 farms, each time somebody has a mouthful of Pipers Farm beef or lamb or pork or chicken, they’re thinking, wow. It’s got that wow factor. And it then is sort of nourishing, nurturing the diversity of this rich, farmed landscape. So that’s a snapshot, if you like, of the Pipers Farm jigsaw of today. And then we have the processing operation and the fulfillment center.
Abby Allen
So yeah, we have 45 farmers that rear meat for us, and that is native breed beef, native breed lamb, mutton, native breed pork, and then chickens, ducks. And at the moment, obviously, it’s Christmas, so we’ve got turkeys and geese and all that sort of exciting stuff. And then we have our own butchery so all of the carcasses go through small scale abattoirs some of the herd is killed on farms, farmers and against what has got to happen to us, then it comes to us into the butchery where we hang it. So we hang every bit of meat apart from the poultry. And our amazing team of butchers are sort of looking at that optimal moment to when to break down that carcass, everything is then butchered on site by us. So we control all of that we’re basically massive control freaks, you realize, because we control every part of every detail. So then we basically butcher everything, and then package everything ourselves. And then we have a fulfillment center. And that’s where not only do we have these 45 small scale meat farmers feeding into us. And but we’ve opened up not just to meat. And so we sell a wider range of products from absolutely amazing artisan cheeses, that again, they’re produced in a way where the farming is sort of, you know, within the same mindset of what we do with meat. So lots of sort of pasture-fed cattle, not all pasture-fed actually in the dairy but the majority is. So we’ve got amazing Jersey milk. We’ve got the raw milk butters, all sorts of incredible products. We’ve just launched SIFI this year. So we’re sort of trying to do a little bit… what we’ve been doing in terms of the farming because it’s incredibly challenging in this country. What’s happening with the fishing industry. Again, there’s the same sort of globalization issues where boats are getting bigger and bigger and the small scale fishermen have just been excluded. So we’re, you know, working quite closely with Brixham harbour, which is our local kind of port to bring really good sea quality seafood to people. So it’s yeah, it’s a pretty exciting operations – lots going on all the time. But I think that’s the thing we so believe, in every single product that we sell, it wouldn’t be on the website if we didn’t think not only does it taste absolutely incredible. That’s number one. So it’s gonna pass the like taste test. Is it amazing? Does it make people go, Oh, my God, this is the best whatever I’ve ever eaten. And then obviously, number two is making sure that the sort of farming credentials add up. And then number three is kind of, yeah, making sure it kind of works for the customers and we can deliver it to them. So it’s really cool. Yeah, it’s a cool place that we’ve got two from Peter with his frying pan in the shed, butchering, teaching himself to butcher and you know, and working with the cattle that he has reared to now 45 farmers plus all of the other people that feed in. So yeah, everything comes into the fulfillment center, we box everything up. And then it’s nationwide delivery around the country. So we deliver… so the next day to the door to all our customers need to do is go online, just explore all of the wonderful range of food, pick out what they want for that week or that month, and then it gets delivered to them. And the kind of final piece on it is where we can, especially with things like meat, we freeze things, because again, it’s such a massive, crucial part and that whole sustainability, shoring up a supply chain, you know, carcass balance, all of that sort of stuff, this idea of freezing. And not only that, we passionately think that actually the quality is so much better. You know, we’re picking those carcasses when they’re absolutely at their optimum with blast freezing them locking in all that nutritional value, all those nutrients, all of that quality, and then giving it to that customer rather than something sort of sitting around and degrading and sort of sweating and, you know, and then eventually potentially being thrown in the bin because it’s gone off. Yeah, a huge part of what we’re kind of all about that sustainability mission is using the freezer. Yeah.
Diana Rodgers, RD
Have you found that that holds people back or makes them I mean, I know that that’s kind of old fashioned. I’m certainly… that’s pretty much the only way I buy meat or seafood is in the frozen state. And I just take a few pieces out each week and as I thaw and I cook them off. But I know that’s not how most people are used to buying, especially when it comes to fish because fish is so perishable. I mean, it really starts degrading the moment it dies. Meat has a little bit of a longer shelf life you can get especially if you seal it really well. But has that been something that you’ve really had to educate your customers about falling meat and buying it in a frozen state?
Abby Allen
I think actually in a way no, like I think when I first started in the business that possibly was a little bit more education then but actually like people love it. They – our customers absolutely love it because what most people tend to do, they’ll you know, they’ll spend sort of 80 to 100 pounds with us. The first thing they do when they get it home is put it in the freezer themselves because they’re not going to store all of that in the fridge. And actually the way that we kind of process it and package it and do all of that stuff is far better than they would at home. You know that there is this sort of desire with people of I need to have this now and I fancy this tonight. But again, the way Peter so cleverly designed the packaging is you can take out something like one of our steaks if that’s what you fancy or some beef mince. You drop it in cold water. It’s literally thawed in 10 minutes, you’ve got something fresh ready to go. And I think by the time people have realized like, you know, they’re just wasting so much less food. They totally love it. And we’ve got people going, I’ve just bought a bigger freezer because like you because now I just eat out the freezer, and it’s just made my food bills go down and wasting so much less. I’m enjoying things more. So yeah, it’s, yeah, I would say we haven’t you know been kind of at the front end of the customers, I think most of the experience we get as a positive positive experience.
Peter Greig
We had the shop in Exeter for 23 years. So that was a face-to-face experience five or 600 customers a week. And it taught us two things. I think one where people have felt, as we discussed or alluded to a bit earlier, that Pipers Farm because people believe we sell a very good quality product, presume it can only be people with lots of money who buy it. And I think that was something the shop taught us our best customers, were those people who regularly spent a little. They spent to their budget, it might only have been a few pounds a week. But for them, they knew that they were spending that money on something that gave them the best possible value for the money. But the other thing was we had a fresh meat counter. And right from the start, we introduced this idea of this free flow packaging this single portion of frozen product. And it was so interesting to see the journey our customers went on. They would come in for some fresh mince. And the diehard ones would say, Oh, I never buy frozen. And then they’d see somebody else who might have been their neighbor was picking up a pack of the frozen mince as well as buying a bit of the fresh and quickly, it just became a no brainer. They said, why on earth do I not have all of the benefits Abby’s just talked about of absolute convenience, zero waste, complete flexibility. So that has been a very, very big part of the Pipers Farm journey, meeting people’s expectations for convenience. Because otherwise, the Pipers Farm story would be in an echo chamber, and people say, Well, you know, we do this amazing things, but this, it’s really inaccessible. The ease of ordering, the delivery system that works straight into the freezer, take it out of the freezer, when the children come home from school, or when they come home from work 10 minutes, it’s into the pan, and it delivers massively on convenience, which is a fact we have to achieve that. And it’s an exciting journey to be on.
Diana Rodgers, RD
Yeah, do you ever, you know, offer workshops or tours or any other ways that consumers can engage with you directly?
Abby Allen
Yeah, we try to… we try our best. It’s, I mean, I think, you know, potentially, we could look at doing a bit more of that for so long, Peter was sort of doing everything in the business from like being in the butchery to out on the farm. And you know, it was very difficult to have enough time to be able to do that and fundamentally Pipers Farm was Peter and Henri’s home. And so kind of sometimes you think I just want to be my one of not doing stuff, I just want to be my pajamas. I didn’t know if I want to sit around the farm. But I think it’s it’s interesting now. Will, Peter’s son now runs the business. And I sort of help him where I can to make that happen. And so it’s given us a little bit more kind of, there’s more people in the team and more headroom, and it’s definitely something that we want to look at doing more of. We definitely do things where we can. We get to food festivals, we will try and do events at the farm. But it is can be ch… in the past, it has been challenging, but I think in the future, there is definitely more that we can do. But again, one of the things that we do like to do is, is things like this, so we can talk to people and you know, try and get that message out there. And, you know, we use social media a lot like you do. We were really flattered, this year, we won the best social media account from a major newspaper called The Observer. So the Guardian and The Observer in the UK, gave us… in The Observer food monthly awards, the title of best in food, which was incredible, you know, at the moment with quite a lot of hostility towards farmers, quite a lot of anti-meat, especially in some of these publications for them to pull us up on the pedestal and say you guys are doing the best job at social media in the country. So we try and use a lot of those things to educate because again, not everyone can get to the farm and drive all the way out. And, you know, logistically, it’s quite challenging. So, yeah, that’s maybe some of the bit that I bring in the some of the kind of digital way of bringing the farm to people as well.
Diana Rodgers, RD
That’s just wonderful. Well, I hope to come see it sometime. I am so blown away by the photography in your book,
Abby Allen
We should definitely shout out to my very good friend Matt Austin, who is one of the most talented photographers in the country. So yeah, Matt and I’ve worked together for about 10 years. And that’s sort of yeah, a lot of our work that we’ve built over those 10 years that’s in the book,
Diana Rodgers, RD
I can tell that it was 10 years of, I mean, because you’ve captured just the most beautiful imagery, such a good sense of season, when I look through everything, the food photography, but then also more exciting to me is the farm photography, and also just the process photography is really beautiful. And so I just highly recommend it. It really gives you a very good sense of what it’s like to be there, just from looking at the books.
Abby Allen
So that’s really what we try and do with, you know, everything we want people… we want it to be a little window into our world and people to feel like they can really connect with you know where their foods come from. So that’s like the best compliment you can give us.
Diana Rodgers, RD
Yeah, really wonderful. So we’ll put a link to this and to your social media account in the show notes. So it’s the Pipers Farm, The Sustainable Meat cookbook. Thank you so much for your time. Thanks for putting up with me with all the philosophical questions that I had, I really look forward to hopefully, seeing your farm sometime and meeting you in person. I really support what you’re doing. And I wish you the very best. So thank you so much.
Abby Allen
Thank you so much. Thank you for having us on.
Peter Greig
We would love to welcome you to the farm Diana and maybe fire up the fire pit and have some of the simpler if I’m doing the cooking. It’ll be very simple.
Abby Allen
I mean, I needed to write a recipe book a cookbook for this man that does not follow a recipe. And I’m like, here we go.
Peter Greig
Not good on recipes, but give me a firepit in a lump of meat, and we will make you very, very welcome. We would love to to invite you and have you down at the farm. Thanks.
Diana Rodgers, RD
Thank you. All I need is a lump of meat to be very happy and a fire and some great conversation. So sounds great. So thanks again and highly recommend your book to everybody who’s listening. Thank you.
Abby Allen
Thank you so much.
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