Tales From The Swine Side
It's that time of year again! This past weekend we picked up our kid's 4H pigs for the season. I love the little pork rinds! Piglets are one of the cutest creatures, and their little grunts will always put a smile on my face.
This year is a bit of an oddity though, it marks the first year that we don't have our own breeding stock on the farm. Raising pigs is kind of a generational thing. Some of my family raised hogs for the military during World War Two. My dad produced some of the finest escape artist pigs in Lewis County, Washington (just ask the neighbors!), and I have produced a lot of pastured pork and weaner pigs for 4H kids to raise as fair projects.
We have a big pig barn, and in the early years on the farm we would pick up a couple of weaner pigs and raise them for our own freezer supply. Then a "friend" gave us a two bottle-fed pigs that she couldn't deal with any more. They had great genetics, and we got the bright idea to raise pigs to sell to local 4H kids, as the supply was critically low every year. The price that a lot of the young people were being charged was pretty spectacular as well, due to the lack of supply. This time around we decided to try our hand at artificial insemination rather than keep a boar on the farm. It worked out well, with 11 piglets farrowed out of one sow, and 14 out of the other on our first attempt.
There is the not so fun side of farming, however. Winter is always a bit of a challenge, and 4H pigs need to be born in February in order to "make weight" for the county fair. What that meant for us was timing heat cycles just right. The other not so fun part is death.
Death is a part of life, and people who raise animals wear that experience t-shirt daily. My favorite sow, a 700+lb Hampshire named Cookie-The-Lovely, vaginally prolapsed during farrowing. I saved as many piglets as I could, and I saved her as well. Staying with her during the long labor, manipulating tissue and removing still born piglets due to the ugliness of the whole situation. During the whole ordeal I knew what was going to have to be done. There was to be no Charlotte's Web experience forthcoming in that situation. If I were a 1%'er I would have kept Cookie as a gigantic pet. She was so cool. She would lumber over to me, sit on her haunches like a giant bear, and I could plop down next to her shoulder. She would grunt happily as I scratched behind her ear, and then she would inevitably fall over onto her side next to me. I loved that pig. She also tasted good.
Everything is something else's food, but anything that is destined to become food on my place has the most amazing, pain free life that I can grant them. People often comment on how weird our animals are. There is frequently a turkey riding around perched on a goat, or a 1600lb steer that follows us around like a dog. A lot of the time that turkey is probably going to be riding around on one of our shoulders, if it beats a cat there. If one of our animals get out, they come to the back door or look in the dining room window. They are looking for us, and I am reasonably sure that it is not because we are special; rather that we provide the food, but the warm feelings elicited by such actions are there nonetheless!
So even though the kid's piglets, Hamson and Darth Bacon, are a touch skittish right now, I give them a couple of weeks before they mentally join the farm fracas and morph right into the weird fray that is our little farm.
And as always, all of the images in this post were taken on the author's pig feed and pine shavings dusted iPhone.