Banger empire

9:52am Saturday 29th March 2008

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DEBBIE Keeble will never forget the day her life changed.

"It was one of those beautiful clear days and Andrew was in the field," she says, glancing out of her farmhouse kitchen window, near Thirsk.

"I looked above and could see white lines from the aeroplanes and said Oh, I so wish we could just get on one of those'. But I knew that since we had four children, if it was going to happen we would have to do something really radical.'"

So Debbie and her husband, Andrew, pig farmers with more than 20 years' experience, began dreaming up a money-spinner to pay for that holiday.

Their first thought was to make their own dry cured bacon and sausages from the pigs they raised in Bedale and sell to local shops and pubs.

Their sausage empire, called Debbie & Andrews, now has contracts with Sainsbury, Tesco, Asda and Morrisons and is worth two million, but the couple began by burning the midnight oil with a borrowed sausage-making machine on their kitchen table when the children had gone to bed.

The first batch was awful, she says. Sausage meat was all over the floor, the wall and themselves, and they tasted disgusting.

Debbie, who studied cookery at college, decided to give it another go using fresh ingredients such as garlic and sun-dried tomatoes in place of ready-made sausage mix.

The results were amazing. "I couldn't believe the difference, they really were divine," she says.

Their first sausages contained fresh leeks, apples, sun-dried tomato and crushed garlic and went down a storm at trade shows.

"It was fantastic," she says. "People said to me why are they so nice? What do you put in them?', but we actually keep it really simple.

"We only use shoulder pork, which is the cut you would have as your Sunday roast. There is no added fat. People say we must have been really clever but we weren't, we just stumbled on something that worked."

Taste tests are still carried out in the family kitchen every week, under the glare of the Keeble's fiercest critics - their children. Debbie creates all the recipes and often tries them out at the local pub.

Although new to sausage-making, they fell into their roles quickly. Andrew was the natural salesman, the one who banged on supermarket doors, while Debbie created the recipes and paid the bills.

Not everything has gone smoothly. After an expensive re-branding exercise, they booked into shows around the country, only for the events to be cancelled by the outbreak of foot and mouth disease.

The disease also marked the end of Debbie and Andrew's pig farm.

"Foot and mouth knocked all the stuffing out of the industry," she says. "We needed to make a huge financial investment; it was a choice of spending a lot of money on it or to let them go and we let them go. It was sad."

It was an especially sad for Debbie, who had worked on pig farms for years, studied agriculture at college and called herself "pig queen" because of her love and knowledge of the animals.

"The trouble with the pig industry is it is all bust or boom," she said. "It's quick to get into so everyone jumps on the band wagon and goes into pigs when the prices are good, then when there is a surplus of pork and the prices go down, everyone jumps out."

Now, the family has a new cause - Fair Trade for British Pig Farmers. To ensure other pig farmers face a more sustainable future, they have become the first UK producers to pay 15 per cent more for all of their pork, which is passed directly to their farmers and processors.

Everyone in the supply chain is guaranteed a better price, to stabilise the peaks and troughs of the industry.

According to Debbie, the average British pig farmer loses £26 on every pig sold due to rocketing feed costs and falling prices for pork. The National Pig Association says 95 per cent of its members are considering giving up.

"By paying more, it means pork prices won't go crazy but they won't go crazily low. It makes sense that a farmer consistently gets fair prices and makes a profit so he stays in business and we stay in business. Everyone gets what they want."

They have also launched a new range for children, named Ellie and Roddies after their two youngest children. These chunky, short sausages are lower in fat and meat content, and were devised with the help of their namesakes.

Now, they hope to support the British pig industry as much as they can, to ensure the survival of companies like their own.

And did Debbie get her holiday?

"Yes, we went Minorca and it was amazing," she said. "It was very different to camping in Devon like we usually did when you could guarantee we would get soaked."