Growing up in Inishowen we never heard the word Self Sufficiency because it was something we did automatically. Although on reflection it was probably the time were things started to slip. We heated our home with turf, we had a veg garden, we worked on our Uncle's farms gathering spuds, payment was a year's supply of spuds. We bought fish from our local fishmonger who had just received it from fishermen on lough foyle right beside us. We ate fish on Wednesdays and Fridays(the only good thing about a catholic upbringing). My parents gathered seaweed and we would have dulse and Carrigeen Moss. We foraged in the hedgerows for blackberries but for some reason even though surrounded by water we never went fishing!
Within a generation we lost all that in exchange we got "cheap" food and a so called better lifestyle where we didn't have to do backbreaking work to get food we could  just pop into a supermarket and it was all there ready to go and at these prices you might aswell get two.
That's how it was sold but I didn't get what was advertised, I got a banal job which is slowly boring me to death, I needed this job though to pay for the groceries we used to grow ourselves, I got an ever expanding waistline from eating the buy one get one free deals.
I now have children of my own, am I going to raise them in the same manner, go out a spend a fortune getting a degree to get a job they don't like to pay for the things they don't need or maybe together we can go on a different route.

It won't be easy and we will have to take baby steps. We have already started on the weight loss and have a reasonable garden and polytunnel. We used to keep pigs and they have a good shed with adjoining paddock that they can come and go as they please,so we can start back up relatively easy but first we will get hens for the first time.

Our first real foray into keeping livestock was not the traditional route of getting hens, we started with pigs. One of the areas where taste and flavour are non existent is in modern day pork. Also the way commercial pigs are kept, in large factory type conditions packed in, with their tails docked and teeth smashed in so they don't bite and injure the other pigs. This seemed abhorrent to us and we thought that we could rear pigs outdoors with shelter of course and allow them to forage as they would naturally do and feed them a balanced diet and let them fatten naturally not according to a strict schedule. We had re-roofed a shed that was to be their sty which had an adjoining paddock. So we were ready for pigs but what breed of pigs should we to get. At a chance meeting at a parent/toddler meeting my wife met a young mother who also kept pigs and had three pure breed Tamworth boars for sale. After a bit of internet research we discovered it is an excellent dual-purpose pig,  suitable for pork or bacon.  The meat came top in a “taste test” carried out by Bristol University which used both commercial and rare breed pigs in a scientifically-controlled experiment. So hey presto we had three Tamworth pigs arrive and we braced ourselves for the steep learning curve ahead.
The first thing to say about pigs is that they are a boisterous bunch especially un-castrated boars that we had, not particularly vicious but certainly forceful. Table manners go out the window when you have a bucket of feed. They have a great sense of smell and are ready and waiting for you and in the heat of the moment you could get a bite if you're not careful.Once they are eating they are very docile and you can slap mark them(i'll mention more about that in later articles). The last thing I will mention in this post that I have learned from bitter experience is if they break out do not run after them to try and get them back, one you won't be able to do it because they are surprisingly quick and also really strong. Pushing a pig a hundred yards would be a feat, the best thing to do is take note of what direction they headed in, go get a bucket of feed and follow them. They will smell you and the feed and then lead them using the bucket back to the safety of the field and sort out your fencing problem.