Home on the range: David Refalo’s free-range pork journey

From buying his first piglet at the age of 15, to scouting the NSW countryside for the perfect farm for his free-range pork vision. This is David Refalo’s story.

It started with one pig, and a humble backyard family farm.

David Refalo, based at Canowindra in NSW, at the age of 15 spent $50 on a six-week-old piglet, raised it, then used the AI services at a local vet to raise a litter of piglets to sell.

And now the 34-year-old is the founder and operator of an entirely free-range pork operation, Refalo Free Range Pork, producing suckling pigs, porker and bacon-weight carcass for direct sale to butchers, wholesalers, caterers and restaurants, as well as breeding stock for other producers.

A childhood spent on a family farm in outer Sydney, was the perfect introduction to raising food off a parcel of land.

“Our family had extensive farming background, my Dad’s side is from Malta and came to Australia in the late 1950s and my grandfather purchased land and they then raised 10 kids,” David said.

What was mainly a vegetable farm also had pigs and chickens, introducing the young David to animal husbandry.

“I just had this idea out of nowhere to buy a pig, I don’t know where it came from but the animal had always interested me.”

“The first pigs I had were purebred large white, but they’d always get sunburnt, and I could never work out what was wrong with their skin. I read a lot of books about pigs, I reckon I bought every book I could.”

Eventually David moved his herd towards a Duroc-Hampshire cross, a breed he found more conducive to an outdoor free-range enterprise.

“The Hampshire with the black band, and the Duroc is probably one of the largest-framed pigs, it’s red in colour and fast growing compared to other breeds … then you use a large white boar over that, it produces the perfect sale pig,” he said.

David Refalo has spent years honing the genetics he uses for his pigs, creating a hybrid designed to weather the Australian sun. PICTURE: Supplied.

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The property was bought 2017, when David realised he needed to expand beyond the family farm.

“I tried to buy land in Sydney, I looked at leasing land, but I never wanted to build a business like this on lease land, especially near Sydney,” he said.

“I tried buying land from the age of 15, I even rang a bank to try and buy land.

“I grew my one sow into 10 sows, but I couldn’t run more pigs because of how many houses we had around us. It upset me, I had all this demand, I was selling suckling pigs through the Trading Post. I’d advertise in that, and went to selling pigs at the Camden and Windsor sale yards when they used to sell pigs. From that, I started in 2008 selling direct to a couple of butcher shops.”

He stayed in Sydney until he was 26-years-old, before looking for land in regional NSW.

“Something I wanted on farm was water,” David said.

“I used to grow sweet corn, I thought I could do that if the pigs didn’t work out. But this place I’m on today came up and I was desperate for my own farmland. I didn’t know what to do, but one of the estate agents rang me and told me about this place and said there was water on it. It was a working vineyard, but I said I’d take it without seeing it.

“It has a high-yielding irrigation bore, it was that and its location, I knew it was the place for my business. The abattoir is only 40km away and the land is almost too good for pigs. But that water was what I was after.”

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The annual rainfall on the property is 650mm, with recent years having been “really hard, really wet”.

“Pigs can be very damaging, which is why our stocking density is quite low, we need to maintain that pasture in the dry and in the wet,” David said.

All pigs are fed a bespoke grain mixture in addition to grazing free range.

“You’re not going to grow a marketable pig without a mixed grain input,” he said.

“We buy in wheat and barley, we grow some here, and produce the bulk of our own straw here for pig bedding.

“Pig nutrition is very complex, we mix all our feed on farm as I’ve got the gear to do it. We run seven different diets for different aged pigs.”

About 1000 pigs are run across 63ha, however livestock is only run on about half of the land at a time.

About 50 per cent of livestock numbers are piglets, with 150 sows and a few gilts.

“The remainder are weaners and growers,” David said.

“We are proper free range, from birth to slaughter.

“We cull sows on production, and occasionally on a very aggressive sow. With the cross breeding, the hybrids I’ve come up with can sometimes be cranky.

“My opinion is when the sows are so free, their natural instincts come back to them. It’s only when they’ve got piglets that they can become aggressive.”

He said stock are rotated through paddocks every few months, while sows are run in five groups or batches with about 20-30 sows per group, giving birth every four weeks.

“Most outdoor farms will put all sows out with a number of shelters. I’ve taken a concept from England, they farrow sows in individual cells,” David said.

“On my farm we have 25 individual cells with farrowing shelters, virtually a house block size piece of land, and every sow is moved to a pen before they give birth, then stay there for a few weeks.

“Things can go very wrong when you throw 20 sows in a paddock and hope they find a shelter.”

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The farm is positioned about 40km from a major pig abattoir, a point of difference that was important to David when buying the property.

“Some farms are hundreds of kilometres away from anywhere that they kill pigs,” he said.

Refalo Free Rang Pork allows pigs to return to the natural instinct while being rotated throughout the property to give pasture time to recover. PICTURE: Supplied.

Refalo Free Range Pork currently produces between 40 to 60 pigs a week, distributed to about 20 different clients each week.

“About 95 per cent of them are butchers, and high-end butchers, the other 5 per cent are into our own direct to the public packs and small goods,” David said.

The investment David has made in finding the ideal parcel for his free-range vision, coupled with the time he spends breeding his stock and cultivating the ideal outdoor conditions for his pigs, is reflected in the quality of the meat he produces, with plenty of butchers willing to sell the story of Refalo Free Range Pork.

“I’ve always had my own ideas. People associate free-range with lower pork production, but our production numbers are as good as an indoor system.”