Exploring Ghana; Visiting an organic pig farm

In my quest of buying local and if possible organic I got approached by a supplier of pork. After talking to him a bit I got really interested as he offered to bring me out to the farm to see how everything works. After having some samples of the meat I happily agreed to come and visit the farm.

Now firstly something one has to understand, here in Ghana time works different than in other parts of the world. Even so it was agreed that we will be fetched at 7 am..... which turned out to be 9 AM. Generally no problem, but it would have been nice to just sleep in a bit as I took my only day off in this week to see the farm.

It was a good 2 hour drive to the farm which is in the Swedru Region. Everything is lush and green and we saw many palm, coconut and pineapple farms, the region has good soil. The drive was relaxing, even so we had to be careful with all the pot holes in the road and believe me, there are many and sometimes when we were too late to swirf around and hit the pot hole with full force.....that was not so relaxing anymore.

The pig farm itself is very impressive, the pigs are clean, their stall were clean, they are fed good food, a good combination of corn, wheat bran and soy, they looking healthy and nothing is used to make them grow faster. They actually looked happy. We were there around feeding time and all the pigs were standing up in their dens to see where the food is.

Next stop was the butchery, something really important to me as I have seen many butcheries and I honestly do not want to describe them.......yes, that is how bad they are, no cooling, open doors you name it, it is there.

Now this butchery is different. Even so it is straight out at the farm, it is clean. There is a pre- room to avoid flies and mosquitoes to come in, then one has to soak the shoes in a disinfectant solution, then the hairnet, the lot......OK, because nothing was happening we left the hairnet away. The butchers were all very clean and after talking to the head butcher, I knew immediately that he knew what he is talking about.

We checked out the entire facilities, everything is air conditioned and really clean. They took pigs out of the fridge and we discussed exactly which cut I prefer, a major service for me as now the butcher knows what I want.

Satisfied with what I saw we went on for a lovely lunch consisting of......yes you guessed it right, pork chops, rice and vegetables. Everything was prepared with love by the chef and it was a pleasure to be there

Then late afternoon we went off again, through the pot holes back into the evening traffic of Accra.....don't we all love it being stuck in traffic after a lovely day in the country side?

So what is happening next? We just have to do a whole lot of paper work and then we will place the first small trial order to see if everything works the way we want and hopefully within a month time I can proudly sell organic pork from Swedru, healthy, local and in line with our policy of buying as much as possible from reputable local sources.