The Farm - Part Six

Pigs

We decided to try raising Hampshire pigs as a 4H project with some apprehension.

• One, we knew NOTHING about pigs.

• Two, we didn't know a pig from a hog.

• Three, we heard the smell was atrocious.

• Four, we heard pigs were mean and stupid.

It turns out that most of our fears and uncertainty was unfounded. After some time, we discovered that pigs are extremely smart and really don't like to wallow in pits of mud after all.

Hogs and pigs are both considered domesticated swine. The difference between the two usually comes into the age and size of the animal. Once a pig becomes a few years old or over a certain weight, they are considered hogs. Since we kept our swine for less than a year and under 200 pounds, they were always considered pigs.

We had good success with pigs and raised 4 or 5 of them every year for a few years. We bought them small (less than 40 pounds) when they were cute and manageable and sold them the same year when they reached about 200 pounds.

Hampshire pigs are best known for their meat. They are well muscled, friendly and non-aggressive. We found them to be smart and trained well for shows and exhibitions. Most are black with white or cream-colored belts that cover the upper chest and front legs like a tuxedo. Ours were mostly white.

Raising pigs is fairly easy - We built them a lean-to enclosure for shade, provided a flat concrete block, a water trough and enough dirt and mud for them to play in if they preferred. Unlike other farm animals, they didn't jump, so the fencing around the enclosure was always waist high or lower.

I'm not going to lie. They did have an odor, especially when wet. But it wasn't overly offensive and because they actually preferred to stay clean, we didn't have to worry about them wallowing unnecessarily. Some caveats:

• They required a large area - pigs like to explore and in order to stay healthy, they needed the ability to run around.

• They are natural foragers - things will be great one day and the next, you'll find that they've dug up the dirt in the pen to the point where the fencing became unstable.

• They require a LOT of water. Each pig can drink upward of 15-20 gallons of clean water per day.

• As expected, they eat a lot. We fed our livestock pig food. Some farmers throw food scraps and food waste at them, but we found that pigs that are fed scraps became fatty and unhealthy. Pig pellets came in 100-pound bags, and we went through a lot of it.

• Because they are basically hairless except for short bristles, they need shade. Our pigs became lethargic and sickly one day and when the vet came out, he said they had SUNBURN and to keep them in shade and hose them down.

The kids showed pigs at 4H shows with great success, winning trophies and eventually selling them at profit each season.

A word of advice. Don't let your kids NAME the animals you're going to sell or use for your own food source. Our daughter became overly attached to one pig she called Rosie. Rosie wound up in our freezer at the end of the season. Her brothers took great glee in teasing their sister during ham or pork dinners by saying "You know, that's Rosie you're eating". Aria would cry and run to her room, much to their delight.

When it came time to "process" the pigs, we would load them into a truck using pig boards, which were basically pieces of plywood with handles to guide the livestock up a ramp into a stock trailer to be taken to Leidy's in Souderton. Somehow, the pigs knew it was their time. Ordinarily, we had no trouble working with them but wound up spending hours trying to get pigs into a truck for their final destination.

Pig boards

Pigs have poor eyesight and even worse depth perception and if they try to walk backwards, they fall over easily. When you try to put a pig up a ramp it didn't want to go up, it would STOP dead and that much weight on a low center of gravity becomes an immoveable force.

Because pigs won't go backwards, this became one of the reasons people eat pork on New Years Day. New Year's traditionally signifies looking ahead to the new year and the future and not going backward. The habit or tradition dates back hundreds of years and many associate eating pork with looking ahead to the new year.