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Welcome to Westlands Farm Shop

Westlands Farm Shop is a friendly, family run butcher's shop selling quality, free range, home produced meat direct to the public.

Situated just outside the villages of Shedfield and Wickham in Hampshire, Westlands Farm Shop is easy to get to from Southampton, Fareham, Portsmouth and surrounding areas.

Since opening in 2001 our reputation for quality and value for money has spread. 

Our friendly and helpful butchers use traditional butchery methods to work to a very high standard to cater for each customer.
Our free range meat includes all cuts of fresh pork, beef and lamb, as well as homemade sausages and burgers and traditionally cured bacons and gammons.

To complement our own products we also sell a range of locally produced, quality products such as, Loosehanger cheeses, free range eggs, Downlands real dairy ice cream and Hill Farm apple juices.

Buying from the Farm guarantees quality at a reasonable price. We are cheaper than the average supermarket! This makes Westlands Farm Shop the obvious choice for high quality, traditional, welfare-friendly meat.

The Pigs

Our pigs are Free Range and enjoy an outdoor life. They are reared naturally and corn fed. Our sows are half Large White (a breed known for its meat quality) a quarter Duroc ( known for its outdoor hardiness) and a quarter Landrace (known for its succulence and taste). Our boars are pure large white to enhance the overall meat quality and taste.

A sow will have two litters of piglets per year and will average 10 piglets per litter! The litter of piglets will stay with the sow

 for 5 weeks after birth where they will have gone from a birth weight of 1.5kg to weighing over 10kg. By this time the piglets are more than strong enough to be weaned and the sow will be glad of a rest!

The piglets then go into huts with outdoor straw filled yards. Here the pigs are still outside in the fresh air and have feed and water constantly available, they have plenty of space to run and play. The pigs stay in these straw yards until they are fat, when they will be around 5 months of age and weigh approximately 80kg.

The Cattle 

Our cattle are suckler cows. This means that the calves stay with their mothers to be reared naturally, the way it should be.

We have Hereford and Aberdeen Angus Cattle, breeds that are native to the British Isles and are known for their fantastic meat quality and taste.

All our cattle spend the summer out at grass and during the winter the adult cows are kept in fields of kale which they graze during the winter months when it is too cold for the grass to grow.

The younger cattle spend their winters in straw bedded barns and are fed high quality silage (fermented grass) conserved from the summer.

In this picture (below) the tractor is mowing grass ready to be baled and wrapped for silage.

The Sheep

Our sheep are lowland halfbreds ewes (a halfbred is the offspring of a hill ewe crossed to a longwool ram) and the lambs from them are fathered by a Texel ram. The Texel breed is known for its excellent carcass conformation and taste.

The rams are put to the ewes (tupping) in mid October. The ewes will be brought indoors over most of the winter ready for lambing in March.

Being indoors the ewes can be closely monitored during lambing to make sure everything runs smoothly. Each ewe is penned up with her lambs for the first few days.

A lamb when it is born is about 7kg. After a few days the ewes and lambs are put into group pens where the lambs can play together. When the lambs are strong enough they are turned out to grass.

 The ewes are sheared in early June, as their woolly fleeces grow all year round, and will be too hot in the summer. It is at this time of year that the lambs, now weighing over 25kg, are weaned from their mothers. The ewes and lambs now go their separate ways, with the lambs getting the best fields of grass so that mid by mid July they are fat, weighing around 40kg.