The Modern Pig Crofter

Crofting times have changed.  The days when a croft was a small west Highland farm which supported a cow, a few sheep, a field or two of potatoes and some cereals, and hardly made its tenant a living, are well and truly over.  Crofting is now serious big business, and Hughie MacLachlan is out front leading the way.  This revolution is reflected in the modern crofter's presentation - in Hughie's case, a new, blue pickup, a matching blue woolly hat advertising Scotch Lamb (why not pig?), and very fetching, blue-tinted sunglasses.

Historically, crofters have always had more than one job - the croft, a parcel of land far too small to support a family, was the landlords' invention to force their tenants to work for them.  But the modern crofter is now working for himself, and operating on an international level.  Hughie is pictured here clinching a deal on a huge consignment of household coal, and he has interests in timber, construction, abattoirs (rumours that the horse meat scandal originated here on West Ardnamurchan have been strenuously denied), and transport. 

The other morning the Diary was swept up in this revolution, being summoned to assist in moving Hughie's pigs.  Thrilled that Ormsaigbeg's burgeoning swine population was about to be reduced, assistance was generously given.  But first the Diary had to watch a masterclass in how to move pigs - compare this with a recent effort by another crofter, link here.

Merely by rattling a plastic bucket containing a few pig nuts, and talking to them nicely, Betsy and Bobby meekly followed their master up the field to the road and, without so much as a look to one side, calmly loaded themselves onto the trailer.

However, readers will understand the Diary's disgust when the trailer only took the pigs a few hundred metres down the road to a neighbouring Ormsaigbeg croft, where a boggy section of a field needs clearing as part of a modernisation drive by another crofting family.  Hughie even had the gall to ask for assistance in laying out the electric fence, and then left the Diary to get on with the job when his mobile phone rang to summon him back to his depot to deal with a coal delivery which had just arrived.

The fence erected (largely by the Diary), Betsy and Bobby, in a very orderly fashion, disembarked from the trailer into their new enclosure.  Evidence of the rising efficiency of this operation is that the trailer will now be left in the field for the pigs to bunk down in, a huge improvement on the old and cold oil tank.  This also enables rapid movement of the pigs from one job to the next.

A new generation of young business people may be driving crofting forward, but Ormsaigbeg is left with a bleak future.  Betsy's piglets are due shortly.  Angie John estimates that his three sows will produce about fifteen piglets each.  This means that, very shortly, we will have over sixty pigs in Ormsaigbeg, a ratio of about six pigs to each human or, to put it an even more alarming way, in the event of a mass break-out, sixty pigs eating the Diary's front garden.

It may be a grim prospect for us, but big farming interests down south need to be warned: your days are numbered.  The West Ardnamurchan crofter has arrived on the agri-business scene.