This is a game like Where’s Waldo.
Realize rocks resemble rooters…
Make a guess in comments of the numbers, colors and locations.
To know what I saw place your cursor over the next word: Answer
Outdoors: 61°F/37°F Partially Sunny
Tiny Cottage: 62°F/59°F
Daily Spark: Just because someone says I said something doesn’t mean I did. I find I get misquoted time to time.
Outdoors: 34°F/22°F Sunny
Tiny Cottage: 59°F/56°F
Daily Spark: If you save something and wait long enough you’ll find out what is important or not, or you’ll forget.
The answer to the question is she has lost some condition (back fat) nursing ten piglets but is still in excellent form. What I don’t like seeing is when a sow goes peakid after weaning. For over a decade we have selected hard for sows that can gain weight on pasture and then maintain their condition on our pasture/hay+whey diet and through are cold winters. That is what it takes to produce strong piglets and give them a good start on pasture life.
Years of hard work that has paid off in gradually improving herd genetics. That’s not to say we’ve reached the finish line. My targets are ever evolving and improving genetics. There is no perfect pig, just a journey forward.
Outdoors: 15°F/2°F 3″ Snow, Windy, A Little Sun
Tiny Cottage: 64°F/55°F
Daily Spark: Perhaps the problem was that Noah took two of each animal and eight people.
In humans genetics, blond hair is recessive and dark hair is dominant. But in pigs it is the other way around, blond, a.k.a., white, is the dominant color and black is a secondary recessive followed by red, brown, yellow, etc. It’s not quite that simple but that will do for today’s lesson.
Those piglets above are all white because of the dominant white gene expressing it’s color and suppressing any other color genes. They will be carriers of both Snow White’s white gene and Spitz’s black gene. If any of them were to have offspring we might see color in that secondary generation. Genetics is fun. It’s like the game of Master Mind or Black Box where you poke and prod to figure out the colors and placements.
This is winter, whether officially nor not – We’ve had snows for a while. The sows who are farrowing at this point are all experienced winter tested sows. I figure our farm work is about six times harder in the winter and some days one doesn’t actually get anything done – we just try not to slide down hill on the ice of life. For this reason we have most of our farrowing in the warmer months but we still need some piglets born over the winter to supply next summer’s demand for finishers and this coming spring’s demand for feeder weaner pigs. Winter is part of why spring piglets are so expensive, on top of the higher demand.
Yes, winter is hard. Like the old saying says, when the going gets tuff only the strongest thrive. I’m always looking for those thrivers in our climate’s worst weather – Sows who can farrow in adverse conditions and raise up large litters of strong healthy piglets to weaning. Winter is a time that separates the warm season genetics from winter-ability. Selecting breeders who thrive through winter improves the hardiness of our herd over the long run. That’s how evolution works.
Those pigs who aren’t at the tip top of their class become feeders and finishers, going to market, culled from the gene pool. The cold season is not a time for gilts to learn to farrow but rather a time for the proven sows who have demonstrated their nest building ability, shown that they know how to lay properly and are winter survivors, nay, even thrivers, proving their mettle.
To get to this point sows have already proven themselves good mothers during the warm season and they grew up and lived through at least one previous winter. Now comes the advance degree work. Mature sows who prove themselves in winter conditions assure themselves of tenure in the breeder lineup for years to come. In turn their sons and daughters get bonus points and are more likely to get selected as breeders too as they were born of winter mothers during winter conditions. They are thrivers.
On the farm, as in nature, most pigs go to feeders, to finishers, to market, to market. Only about 5% of the females (gilts) become breeders. For guys (boars) the odds are much stiffer with only 0.5% making the A-List.
Breed the best of the best and eat the rest. It’s my motto, one I learned from Mother Nature.
Outdoors: 36°F/20°F 4″ Snow
Tiny Cottage: 65°F/60°F
Daily Spark: The tricky part about getting the ball rolling is sometimes it rolls over you.
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Outdoors: 7°F/-20°F Sunny
Tiny Cottage: 66°F/56°F
Daily Spark: Give often, do it digitally, give ’til it hertz.
I’ve often been asked how cold can piglets take it. It’s cold out but they’re doing fine. Some of the piglets in this surge were born at -24°F which is the coldest it’s been this year. That’s pretty typical for our winters. We’ve had a few nights up into the 20′s recently which is unseasonably warm but appreciated.
The sow is a 103°F heating pad. I measure her surface temperature at about 70°F using a radiant heat gun. The bedding is even hotter. It is a deep bed pack that is composting and producing heat coming up to their bellies – this is an important little detail for winter livestock in cold northern climates.
Keeping dry is key and our coldness helps there. The bedding packs start with large chips on a sloped surface. The pigs are nestled down into the nooks and crannies of our farm to keep out of the almost ever present wind. The wind may actually help as it blows away moist air. We build our winter spaces to take advantage of natural wind blocks as well as strategically placing hay bales in the fall to create more wind shadows. Most of the sows are farrowing in open sheds although two chose spaces in hay bales like the one above even though they had readily available sheds.
We have creeps in most areas that sows would be farrowing. These give piglets a more sheltered area they can go into. Sometimes I’ve used lights but I loath to because of fear of fire. When using a light the outlawed incandescent 100Watt are the best because they’re cooler than the more intense heat lamps and thus not likely to start a fire. However we find that a hoover creep ideally of the foil-bubble-bubble-foil on deep bedding is sufficient and that reduces my worry of piglet flambé.
Keeping dry is important. Too much humidity can lead to greasy pig which is a endemic bacterial infection that is carried by the pigs normally but can become a problem for piglets. You’re more likely to see it in places that have had multiple rapid fire litters farrowed and too high a humidity. Iodine baths help tremendously at combating greasy pig by killing off the surface bacteria and giving the piglet’s own immune system a chance to win the battle. Good air circulation, plenty of dry bedding and a rest period for nursery spaces between litters all help a lot too.
In rare extremely cold very windy nights we bring the youngest litters indoors with us. Doing that requires feeding them in the night or they can get hypoglycemic. They go back out with the sows during the day so they can nurse. This is something we used to do more of. The good sows with a good setup don’t need this as they pay attention to their piglets. Genetics matters.
All that said, I would recommend not winter farrowing if you can avoid it. We do it only because we market year round. Winter is a lot harder in all ways. Instead I would suggest that you use the golden months of the warm season if you possibly can. This is one of those “Do as I say, not as I do” things…
There are open sheds with roofs where the pigs, chickens, ducks and geese can choose to be but they generally prefer sleeping out under the stars. During the day they spend most of their time out away from the roofed areas in the winter paddocks where they keep the snow trampled down, like deer yards out in the forests.
The photo above shows finisher size pigs who are perfectly spread out one pig deep. Two pigs deep means they’re cool but okay. Three deep is a concern. Pig piles deeper than that would result in crushing although little ones on top of big ones is not a concern. In the winter we tend to sort the pigs more by size and keep the herds smaller than in the summer where the herds are larger and more mixed size. This means that in the winter there are more groups to take care of since the same number of pigs must be divided into more groups for the winter paddocks.
The pigs in the picture† above are sleeping on a hay pack. They add more hay to the bedding as they want from a round bale just off to the right of the photo and eat the pack down as well. The pack is composting which makes it more digestible as well as creating heat that warms their bellies.
I mention the composting hay above. This may be one of those key little details that makes feeding hay on our farm work.[1, 2] Pigs in nature eat things that are decomposing, rooting up stuff in the forests and fields, chewing up and ingesting even dead trees. Think of it as like how we make yogurt and cheese using bacteria to decompose milk. The deep bedding pack gives food this through the winter when the normal pastures aren’t available because everything lies buried under deep snows. Hay is our winter pasture, canned and saved over for the cold season just as we can veggies for our family’s table.
Outdoors: 29°F/11°F Partially Sunny
Tiny Cottage: 64°F/56°F
Daily Spark:
Prisoner before firing squad is given his last request, a cigar.
As the sargent lights it up the talking smoke alarm to go off which yells…
Fire! Fire! Fire!
†Interestingly, there is a white rooster who sleeps on top of their roof away from most of the other chickens.
Outdoors: 4°F/-13°F Sunny
Tiny Cottage: 64°F/56°F
Daily Spark: Cartoon of Pooh bear standing in some famous Chicago location and thinking, “Hmm… Today is Windsday. I wonder where all the Chicagoians are the rest of the week?”
That is to say:
WL = L x G x G / 400
Since I know the typical ratios L:G of our pigs so I can short cut the formula around finisher weight by assuming that:
G = L – 4
This produces:
WL = L x (L – 4)2 / 400
Pigs who are the length of my stick crown to tail are market size, up about 250 lbs live weight which will yield about 180 lbs hanging weight.††
Waving my wand around gives me quick count of how many pigs are at about market weight, how many are a month off to market, how many two months off, etc. How many hand widths they are off the stick gives me an idea of how long they need to grow through the roaster finisher period.
My hands are about a month wide. My nose to thumb is a yard – yes, I have long arms. My feet are almost exactly a foot long. My thumb is one inch. Rather handy to be the standard bearer of measures…
Outdoors: 14°F/-9°F Sunny
Tiny Cottage: 62°F/56°F
Daily Spark: Anticipation has always been worth more to me than reality. -Agnes by Tony Cochran
†Since we’re still back in the 1970′s I use inches and pounds here in the United States. I hear that soon we’ll be moving to metric. Big government push for a united world. Maybe by when that clown Reagan gets elected. Can’t wait for my flying car in 1999.
††Note that Live Weight WL is also often written as LW and Hanging Weight is often written as HW.
Tom asked on the FAQ:
I currently have a boar 9 months and two gilts. One 8 months and one 7 months. All in the same pen. By using your pregnancy indicator I believe she is pregnant. I am wondering if I need to separate her before farrowing and also if I need to be there to help her. Also if I need to keep the boar and other gilt away from the piglets if they would harm them or not. Maybe you could point me in the direction of proper weaning as well. Very useful website and highly appreciated!
If the gilt is bred then she should gestate of about 114 days which is about three months and three weeks plus or minus a week typically. Around two weeks prior to her due date or when she starts to bag I would suggest having a separate space for her.
Out in pasture in the warm months the gestating pigs find a space off separate from the herd, build a nest and defend it to keep other pigs away from it. In colder months this is not easy for them to do so you can duplicate this by giving her a nursery space separate from the other pigs. You can make it so they have a common fence wall so they still can see, hear and smell each other but this way she has her own space.
After the piglets are born on pasture the sow tends to keep separate from the herd for four to ten days before joining up with one or more other sows to form larger cohorts.
You can simulate this by maintaining the separation from the boar and other gilt during this time. Since it is the cold season I would recommend extending this separation to four to six weeks, up to weaning. This is a bit climate dependent. The colder it is, the longer the privacy period that they’ll need to prevent crushing when piglets are caught between larger animals. The problem is the other gilt and boar are not necessarily synchronized to the right instincts to respond to the sounds or feeling of a struggling piglet. A good mother should not crush piglets.
Normally on pasture the sow will move her nest a couple of days after farrowing to get away from the smell of birthing which attracts predators and scavengers as well as to get away from bacterial buildup which causes greasy pig and other illness.
If you’re able to let her move into a new stall after four days that is great. If not then simulate nest moving by adding dry wood shavings. Cleaning the bedding out is good if it is wet but even better is building up a deep bedding pack because that composts creating heat coming up to their bellies from below. They key is keeping the top dry. Don’t risk upsetting the sow and getting hurt by cleaning out the stall if she says no. Better to be prudent and have patience.
Do not add hay or straw to her nest yourself. You can put these in a place, such as a rick, away from the nest where the sow can go and get them to carry back to the nest humans should not put the fibrous bedding in the nest themselves. The reason is you are not good at chewing the grasses up into little pieces and packing them down tightly with your sharp pointy hooves, uh, well, you lack hooves and that’s the problem. The sow has the jaws, the hooves and the instincts hopefully to do good nest building.
Outdoors: 19°F/-4°F Sunny
Tiny Cottage: 65°F/61°F
Daily Spark: When observing politics remember that accidents are few and far between. Most involve careful planning.
The smaller pigs tend to sleep over at the south field shed although mostly out in the open primarily using its wind shield rather than the roofed areas except in the rainy times. It is mostly the big sows who walk further out to the two plateau nests.
One of the things that we’ve found over the years is that pigs prefer having a bright sky above them. Open greenhouses are great because they give more wind protection in the winter, offer protection from the cold mud season rains and if they are left fully open at the lee end plus an adjustable opening at the windward end they get good cross ventilation. Fresh air is critical for both farmer and livestock.
Click on the photo above to see the big picture:
Can you spot the butcher shop?
Can you spot the farm boy in the orange hat?
Can you find the Large Black sow?
Can you find the Tamworth sow?
How many chickens can you find?
How many pigs can you find?
Outdoors: 32°F/23°F Ice
Tiny Cottage: 65°F/62°F
Daily Spark:
There was once a man from the city who was visiting a small farm, and during his visit he saw a farmer feeding pigs in a most extraordinary way. The farmer lifted each pig up to a nearby apple tree so the pig could eat the apples off the tree directly. Then farmer would move the pig from one apple to another until the pig was satisfied.
The city man watched this activity for some time with great astonishment. Finally, he could not resist saying to the farmer, “This is the most inefficient method of feeding pigs that I can imagine. Just think of the time that would be saved if you simply shook the apples off the tree and let the pigs eat them from the ground!”
The farmer looked at the city slicker and asked, “What’s time to a pig?”
-Anon
Outdoors: 34°F/18°F Sunny
Tiny Cottage: 66°F/62°F
Daily Spark: There is a bar in every barn.
Outdoors: 34°F/14°F Partially Sunny
Tiny Cottage: 66°F/62°F
Daily Spark: There’s a joke that some people need to pee on the electric fence to figure things out. Interestingly, I’ve never seen a boar pee on the electric fence. Sows, yes, but never a boar. On the other hand, I’ve seen a male dog do it but never a bitch. I’ve never seen any of them every repeat it. Ask yourself: Do you need to pee on electric fences or is it good enough to watch someone else do it?
It’s interesting that teats are correlated with milk production, past a certain point anyway. It seems like more teats could just mean less milk per teat with the same amount of total production.
One might think so but field experience shows that more teats on a really good sow means more milk. Realize that some sows have small breasts and others have big breasts, just like with humans. In the pigs, bigger breast produce a lot more milk – note we’re talking trim fit sows – we have no fat pigs because we’re on a low calorie pasture diet. Too much udder fat can interfere with milk production.
Thus I breed for not just more teats (nipple count) but also for big breasts (how large the bag is during production). The size of the bag is the indicator of how much she produces per teat and the count of teats is then the multiplier. It gets even more complicated because not all teats on the udder are as productive on some sows. This means I look at the spacing, line, formation and placement of teats as well. Teats too far back may not be in full production (hind teats).
Add to this how well the sow is able to graze pasture, store that as back fat, etc and then release it back to the piglet through her milk without losing too much condition herself so as to provide them with sufficient food to grow at maximum speed by weaning time. Really big bagged sows produce enormous amounts of milk. Realize that they typically take a group of eight to a dozen or in some cases 16 piglets from 3 lbs each to 30 lbs or more each in just six weeks or so. To do that they produce a huge amount of very rich milk and they do it on pasture without any commercial hog feed.
To get this I breed for big breasted ladies with lots of teats. The Tamworth boar’s claim to fame and why he’s gotten to stay on the farm as a breeder is that he has so many teats. He is very good in all other respects but so were other boars. What let him beat out all the other Tamworths boars was his teat count. We also have several Tamworth sows from that line who have sixteen and eighteen teats. However none of them bag up as much as our prize Mainline and Blackieline sows like Blackie, Anna, Petra, Mouse, Jolie, Angela, Big Pig, Saddle, Little Pig who despite being taller nearly hang to the ground when lactating and are able to squirt milk (hand squeeze) over eight feet. They make Holstein cows jealous.
And you thought tits were simple… Sugar Mountain Farm, where all the ladies are above average.
(No, I do not have a breast fixation. Honestly. Really. Besides you would get over it when you’re surrounded by thousands of naked breasts.)
You may find the posts Bye-Bye Petra, Of Milk Jugs and Lactation and The Breast Ice Cream in Vermont interesting.
This message has been approved by The Council Understanding Pig Size (CUPS) and Walter’s wife.
Outdoors: 12°F/-7°F Sunny
Tiny Cottage: 65°F/57°F
Daily Spark: Yesterday I was clever, so I wanted to change the world. Today I am wise, so I am changing myself. -Rumi
Wind protection and a warm belly from the composting deep bedding pack seem to be the most important thing for the pigs.
Also of importance is their cohort within their herd group. The pigs, just like chickens, ducks and other animals, tend to form groupings where they’ve worked out their social order. Within a herd there are many cohorts, sub-herds.
The sleeping group above is one of many strung out along the path from the whey troughs into the south field plateau. I set things up so that the animals must walk some distance from bed to breakfast. This helps to spread manure naturally so that come warm weather our fields grow well.
The biggest, oldest sows are the ones who walk the furthest. The smallest pigs take the closer spaces for the most part. This tendency is useful for self sorting of the animals with creeps to further extend the sorting.
Outdoors: 24°F/4°F Sunny
Tiny Cottage: 65°F/59°F
Daily Spark: Beware of Dogma.
Gestation is typically 114 days to farrowing, that is giving birth of the new litter of piglets. That is not exact as just like with humans it can be plus or minus. I’ve seen as early as two weeks before and as late as two weeks after that. Our Blackieline sows have a tendency to short gestate. We just had a litter at 103 days which is 11 days early.
We do natural breeding year round, that is the sows and boars pick the times other than the sorting of sows between boar herds that I do to control our genetics. Artificial Insemination (AI) is something I looked into long ago but the cost wasn’t economical for us, especially with all the shipping and our wanting to have litters spaced around the year rather than clustered all at once.
Generally sows come into heat about seven to ten days after weaning although we have some in the Blackieline who have jumped four foot fences if necessary in order to get to the boars soon after they farrowed and successfully rebred while lactating. They are eager and take the initiative with the boar shall we say. Nursing is not an effective method of birth control. Most sows produce about 2.3 litters a year but these sows produce three litters a year pushing our average up a bit.
We have sixty sows so this justifies having several boars. As a rule of thumb I figure that to justify a boar it takes six sows if by seed (commercial feed) and three if by land (pasture). Since we’re pasture based and don’t feed commercial hog feed this lets us cover the cost of a larger number of boars. That in turn lets us maintain multiple genetic lines such as our Mainline, Blackieline, Berkshire, Tamworth and second Large Black line.
Did you know that a gilt is a female who has not yet farrowed (given birth) while a sow is a female who has given birth. Boars are the males unless they were castrated in which case they’re barrows (castrated young) or stags (castrated old). For more fun terminology of pigs check out the FAQ page.
Outdoors: 24°F/-9°F Partially Sunny
Tiny Cottage: 64°F/57°F
Daily Spark: Indiana Pi Bill: 3.2 in 1897
Someone wrote in a comment to a previous day’s posting: “I would like to raise pigs for meat for my family. I’ve been thinking about doing this for a while. Is it hard to do??? How much space do they need? Do they have to have pasture or can I just keep them in a pen? How badly do they smell??”
Note: feed, butchering and piglet prices have gone up considerably, even doubling, since I originally wrote this article.
Keeping pigs is very easy, they don’t take up much space and they don’t have to smell bad. I would suggest getting a book such as “Small Scale Pig Raising” by Dirk van Loon. That is full of information and will get you started. There are also a number of hog oriented discussion lists such as PasturedPork at Yahoo.com’s groups. But, don’t let all the information there overwhelm you. Read a bit and then dive into the muck!
At the most basic level you can imitate commercial factory farms: simply have a pen for your piglets, buy grain, fill an automatic feeder, have an automatic waterer, toss in a few bales of hay or sawdust, watched the pigs grow and then take the finished pigs to the butcher. This will work. It is the fastest and maybe the easiest way to raise a pig if you don’t have much land. The pigs don’t need to have pasture and don’t require much space (about 10′x10′ each). They will smell the worst with this method and it is the most expensive way to do it since you are providing all of their nutrition from commercially bought feed.
If you’re pen raising them in 2005 then figure:
This brings the price of pork up to about $2.82 per pound for about 117 lbs of commercial cuts and smoked product plus the cost of the infrastructure. There is a lot more wonderful eating on the pig but for this exercise we’re just looking at the commercial cuts as that is a standard store comparison. Make use of the rest and you’ll push your per pound price down even further.
For that investment you’ll get hundreds of pounds of prime manure for your garden (compost it with hay, straw or wood chips), about 120 lbs of pork cuts (fresh hams, fresh bacon, pork chops, shoulders, etc), bones for soup and scraps for dogs. Be sure to ask the butcher for the bones and lard! Smoking is additional and runs about a dollar or two per pound for the smoked portions. Doing it this way won’t be cheaper than buying pork on sale at the supermarket. but it is a better quality pork, a much healthier product where you know what went into making it.
Update 2007:
The multiplier from 2005 to 2007 feed costs is 1.259 based on USDA data. This makes the 2007 cost of feed $157, Piglet were $85 this spring. Butchering has gone up to about $45 for slaughter and $0.65 per pound based on hanging weight for cut and wrap. The final cost per pig in 2007 is about $444 and the price of pork $3.80 per pound. Add your pen and labor costs to that.
- $85 for a piglet
- $157 for 800 lbs of conventional grain per pig for the feed.
- $45 slaughter – USDA inspected or on-farm are around this
- $117 butchering – vacuum packaged for quality and long lasting
- $50 further processing
- and what ever costs you have for infrastructure such as pen, fencing, troughs…
- $454 or more in total
This brings the price of pork up to about $3.88 per pound for about 117 lbs of commercial cuts and smoked product plus the cost of the infrastructure.
Update Fall 2012:
Inflation coninues, no surprise, and prices are higher now…
- $150 for a piglet (2012 fall price)
- $240 for 800 lbs of grain per pig for the feed. Grain prices are soaring with the drought and diversion to ethanol for gasoline. Conventional grain is now $15 per 50 lb bag for conventional GMO feeds and $40 for a 50 lb bag of organic feed. That sets the feed in the range of $240 to $640 per pig. Buying by the truck load will save you money but then you’ll need to figure out how to store it. Typically this means buying three to six tons at a time. Don’t buy too much at a time since grain feeds can mold which produces toxins – figure on a maximum of three months storage under proper conditions. Look at how you can supplement or replace the expensive feed with things like pasture, vegetables and fruit you grow, food excesses, etc.
- $55 slaughter – USDA inspected or on-farm are around this
- $145 butchering – vacuum packaged for quality and long lasting
- $60 further processing – $1.65 to $2.50 per pound for sausage making and smoking of hams, bellies, etc.
- and what ever costs you have for infrastructure such as pen, fencing, troughs…
- $650 or more in total
This brings the price of pork up to about $5.55 per pound for about 117 lbs of commercial cuts and smoked product plus the cost of the infrastructure. Most of that increase is due to the higher cost of grains which has been pushed up by the demand for corn based ethanol and then drought in the mid-west in recent years.
We do it a little differently here since we have plenty of land – we pasture the animals during the warm months and then during the coldest months they are in garden corrals also known as winter paddocks totally about four acres. This saves on facilities too – we have no barns but just some open sheds, simple open greenhouses and dens for the winter months.
I don’t like shoveling shit so I have the animals spread it for me. They do a most admirable job of distributing it across the pastures which improves our fields. They also till and fertilize our gardens, cut the brush and mow the fields. This saves me a lot of labor, gas and equipment. The key there is intensive rotational grazing – moving the pigs to a new spot every week or so as they use up the area they are grazing. Same idea as with sheep, goats and cattle.
Many breeds of pigs can live virtually just on pasture and then hay during the winter. This was how we did it for years before we lucked into the excess milk from the local dairy. The pigs do grow faster if they also have some other feeds besides pasture. On just pasture it takes about seven to eight months for a piglet to grow to market size (~200 to 225 lbs). On commercial feed it is only about six months. With the dairy plus pasture it’s back to about six months from birth to market.
To supplement our pasture and hay we get expired bread from the bakery, excess dairy and cheese trim. We also feed garden gleanings as well as extra pumpkins, corn and other crops we grow here on the farm. The piglets and occasionally the adult pigs also get excess eggs from our chickens during the height of production in the spring and early summer.
Pasturing the pigs is the easiest, cheapest, least smelly way to do it – in fact pigs on pasture don’t stink and are a clean animals other than a pleasant roll in their mud bath on a hot day. The pigs are a lot healthier and happier for it. On the topic of smell, a balanced diet makes a difference since most of the smell is wasted feed that are excreted when there is an excess of proteins. This isn’t so much the total protein content of the feed but rather the balance of types of proteins.
Adding carbon to the pigs diet in the form of pasture or hay as well as plenty of high carbon bedding (again we use hay) soaks up the nitrogen (often in the form of ammonia) which is the source of much of the smell. This binds the smell producing chemicals and saves them for composting into your garden. Healthy pig poops smell less.
Of course, one solution to pollution is dillution. If you had to live in a 10′x10′ box you would get pretty stinky too. If you’re raising the pigs in a pen, clean it out frequently adding fresh bedding and it will smell less.
Since I don’t like to clean pens I pasture the animals. Given the opportunity to graze on pasture in the warm months and eat hay in the winter the pigs don’t stink because they spread their own manure, keep cleaner and get plenty of fiber and carbon in their diet.
Here’s a trick: If you’re going to keep them in a pen consider using your garden or a new space you want to turn into a garden. Divide the space up into four to six sections and then rotate the pigs through the sections. Put them in each section for about one week. After they leave a section, rake in some red clover, buckwheat, turnip seeds, grass or other fast growing crops. By the time you get the pigs back onto the first area it will be a wonderful treat for the pigs and you’ll be growing some of your own feed. The pigs will appreciate rooting in the soil. Just as importantly, they need iron which they can get from dirt – otherwise you need to give them iron and vitamins for good health like the factory farms do. Doing it this way, in just one year you’ll have a very rich soil for your new garden. This technique works very well to make a garden corral for raising pigs in the winter. Note that it is important to give them plenty of hay to work into the soil to absorb the nitrogen from their pee and poop. This also adds organic matter to the soil making it fluffier – great organic gardens!
You can of course do any mix of the above techniques from small pen to a garden corral to truly pastured pigs. Do what ever fits your budget and resources. Pigs are very versatile and grow well under a wide variety of conditions making them an excellent source of meat that you can raise yourself.
Also see: Pastured Pigs
There was this city fellow driving out in the country who passed a farm where he sees an old man sitting out on the porch with a three legged pig hopping around in the yard. The fellow backs up and pulls into the driveway to investigate.
Getting out he goes up to the farmer and says, “Good morning, sir. I couldn’t help but notice your pig only has three legs. What happened to his other leg? Did he get attacked by coyotes, a gator or fall in a leg trap?”
“And good morning to you young fella” replies the farmer, “no, it wasn’t anything like that. You see this pig is a very fine pig. Once my wife was cooking bacon and she stepped out of the kitchen. The grease caught on fire. No one in the house knew about it but the pig and he saved me, my wife and my three kids.”“That’s amazing sir, but why does that pig only have three legs?” asked the man.
“Then there was that time the pig saw a big flood coming and we didn’t. The pig ran into the house and dragged us out up on the hill. If it weren’t for that pig we would all be dead.”
“Well, that is quite the miracle but how come that pig only has 3 legs?” the man said rather annoyed at all this dissembling.
“Well,” said the farmer, “with a pig that special… you can’t eat him all at once.”
It’s an amusing story but sometimes you really do want to have your pig and eat it too. This issue comes up with breeder pigs. Especially when bringing in new genetics in to the herd since I don’t want to bring in boar taint.
In the past I did my taste testing post slaughter by eating progressively older boars to test them for taint but that makes it rather hard to then breed the pigs. That method isn’t going to work with the new Berkshire breeder boar Spitz who we aquired this month. I don’t want to slaughter him to taste him nor do I want to take the two years that we did to prove out the genetics in the past by tasting the offspring.
So how to do it? How to have your pig and eat it too? I suggested to Holly that I simply take a small bite and see what he tasted like. She laughed and said that Spitz might object to that. But, I had a plan. A man with a plan am I.
With wildlife, biologists routinely take small biopsies. There are special tools made for doing just this. I bought a set and a biopsying I went. Ironically, I got my biopsy tools from a tattoo, body art and piercing store. These are medical, human grade, stainless steel tools so I figured they would work well enough for the boars.
Interesting Taint Factoids:
Most boars don’t have taint at market age.
Taint is not found in a most pig breed lines.
Lighter colored pig breeds are less likely to have taint.
Some research suggests Red Duroc has a high incidence of taint.
There is a breed where even females have ‘boar’ taint.
Taint is genetic, that is to say heritable.
Only about 75% of people can smell taint.
Statistically women can smell taint a little more than men
but some women can’t just as some men can’t smell taint.
There are many kinds of taint besides ‘boar’ taint.
True boar taint is caused primarily by two chemicals:
Skatole produced in the small intestines;
Adrostenone produced in testes and adrenal glands.
There are several other less common chemical taints.
Stress at slaughter can cause taint that is often confused with boar taint.
Improper bleed out causes blood taint – often confused with boar taint.
Improper carcass chilling causes taint – ibid.
Confinement raising increases the odds of skatole based taint.
High corn/soy diets increase the odds of taint.
High fiber diets reduce the odds of taint.
Boars grow about 10% faster than barrows and are better at converting feed into meat.
Barrows (castrated males) grow about 10% faster than gilt pigs.
Gilts (females) tend to have the most fat and slowest growth.
Nearly nothing is absolute in the real world.
Take everything with a grain of salt,
Especially bacon.
Both Spitz, the new Berkshire boar, and Hamlet, the new Tamworth boar, didn’t object to the sampling. They’re pretty big boys and I was only taking a 12 cubic-mm sample. I had been prepping them for this day for well over a week by training them to accept the movements I would do to take the biopsy. To them it probably felt like getting a shot at most. I slapped the biopsy spot as I took the sample and I suspect that distraction was more noticeable than the actual biopsy. Penn & Teller would be proud.
So we took a few very little bits of our new boars, fry them up and pass the bacon around for everyone to try. No need to waste the whole pig when all you want is a tiny bite. The verdict was no boar taint in either of them. Yeah!
And that folks, is why our boars still have all four legs.
For more about boar taint try this search pattern.
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We’ve built a number of temporary greenhouses over the years, leaving them open for good ventilation. Pigs really like those and I would like to put in a large greenhouse someday which would give us perhaps October or November conditions inside right through most of the winter. Like our past greenhouses we’ll leave it open for air flow but it still tempers the micro-climate. Ideally I want this to be setup as layers within layers, rings of heaven through the cold months, so that the smallest pigs can be in the inner greenhouse. We call this the Ark.
New posts you might have missed in the mess:
April Snows
Blog Updates April 2014
Firewood Borer
Exploding Dish of Color
Piglets Sunning
Hope’s Gore
South Field Winter Paddock
New Piglets Nursing
Piglet & Chicken Sunning
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Daily Spark: In the spring the soil’s soft so we have loose morels but right now we’ve still got 3′ of snow so I ain’t got no morels.
In my case, it was not a pirate’s head I wanted but the whole, unsplit, large tusked head of the big black breeding boar of our Blackieline who went by the name of Blackbeard. Normally the butcher splits the skulls which are then available for making pig’s head cheese more appropriately known as brawn, a delicious solid, sliceable gelled soup.
Blackbeard, our Blackbeard, had served his time well as a boar on our farm, given us many offspring. He had gotten to the size and age where he thought he could challenge the other boars and this was causing trouble. I have several other better boars coming up in his line, sons of his, thus it was time for Blackbeard to meet his disassembler.
“Why,” you ask, “would I want the head of Blackbeard?!?” Well, you see, it is quite simple, those big tusks are ivory and can be worth as much as a whole pig. Some of our boar tusks have been as long as 11.5″ and almost a complete circle. Thus in the tradition of making use of all the pig, I save the tusks too.
I also sometimes save the entire skull, with the tusks in, as they are most impressive. Some people seek them as desktop decorations. It is certainly a very unique object d’art and each one is different. This is why I asked the butcher not to split Blackbeard’s skull.
I don’t cut tusks on living boars so that means harvesting the tusks when the boars either die in the field or go to market. I’m continuously looking to improve our genetics thus I rotate boars and have a continuing slow supply of tusks.
We maintain multiple breeding herd lines of our Mainline, Blackieline, Tamworth, Large Black and Berkshire pigs. I’ve been hard selecting our Mainline for over a decade. Our Blackieline for almost as long. With weekly cullings to market and a keen eye for the qualities we need the lines continue to improve. The eventual goal is to end up with a single line that combines the best characteristics of all the breeds and lines. A pig ideal for our cold northern pasture climate with top mothering skills, a gentle temperament, fast growth, marbling and delicious.
The meat in the picture at the top is ham cubes. These are a delicious lean cut which is great for stewing, shish-kabobs, in chili, as pulled pork and other dishes. As you can tell, our pork is not, “The other white meat.”
One of the characteristics of our breeding lines is a lack of boar taint. However, every time I get to slaughter a large boar there is the question, will he show taint? Thus when the meat came back from Blackbeard this week we taste tested it prior to making deliveries. The answer: It Taint Free!
Blackbeard is not the oldest boar we slaughtered – that honor goes to Archimedes at eight years of age and 1,157 lbs in the fall after the warm golden months of summer. Blackbeard was just two years old and about 400 lbs – a good weight for his age coming out of winter.
Nor was Blackbeard our largest boar, by far. Neither was Archimedes. That honor goes to Spot at over 1,700 pounds of muscle bound, long lean mountain boar. One hears of ‘fat boars’ but our boars never get fat because of their low calorie pasture/whey diet and all the exercise they get climbing up and down our mountain.
With Blackbeard’s passing Spitzon is now the new head boar in the south herd.
And so the boars did rotate…
Related articles you might enjoy:
Spot Out
Speckle’s Rooster
Big Pigs, Pet Pigs
Seeing Spots
Archimede’s Farewell
Essential Differences
Taste Testing Boars
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Just curious, is there a tank of certain dimensions that would discourage a pig from getting in? Like, how tall/narrow would it have to be in order for pigs to opt NOT to take a swim? I only keep a few pigs, so it wouldn’t have to be huge. They are on pasture, and it sure would be cool to keep them with my cows, (they get along really well actually!) So if I could find a tank that would provide adequate amounts of water for all AND discourage the pigs from getting in, all would be right in one small corner of the world.
The bigger problem is the pigs don’t have a choice. What happens is someone comes up behind them and pushes them in. It’s a very common thing to see. As cute as piglets are, and as nice as Hollywood makes them appear, the reality is pigs are not particularly nice people. If you’re in the way of their food, they’ll move you.
The problem is one of dynamics: Making the trough entrance so small that the smallest pig can’t get in would mean making it so small that the biggest pig can’t drink. Piglets are born at about three pounds while big breeders are 400 to 1,700 lbs. The head of a breeder sow or boar is bigger than a two or three month old feeder pig. And the feeder pig won’t stay small because they grow to about 250 lbs by finisher age which at around six months of age.
Fortunately pigs can swim quite well. The bad news is they can not swim forever and in cold weather will get chilled eventually. If there is no way to get out or rest they would drown.
The solution is to have a way for the pigs to get out of water and whey troughs. Thus the rocks in our feeders.[1, 2]
If all our pigs were the same size, like on a factory farm, then this would be easier to size the troughs to the pigs however we have pigs from 3 lbs piglets up to 1,700 lbs breeder boars that are 12′ long. The smallest are smaller than the tongues of the biggest. Most are in the 30 to 250 lb feeder pig range. Even that narrow range the smallest are about the size of the head of the largest.
Within some specific groups like weaner pigs we do size the troughs because there we have a small range of ages and sizes. That does work well. But still they need rocks to climb out since we use open flowing troughs. Our waterers are fed from springs and flow from one to another down the paddocks. Still water would freeze solid much of our year.
One solution is to use nipple waterers. But that only works in warm climates or in summer up here. Unfortunately nipples are made of steel and they will not only freeze solid in our cold winters but the pigs’s lips and tongue will freeze to the steel. Never lick a steel railing mid-winter in these parts… I did this as a young child and lost a large piece of my tongue.
What you might do is have a drip line off our cow water tank down to a small basin the pigs can get to. I would still put some rocks in the cow tank. Here is a photo of a very low trough for piglets.
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