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Electric Gate
Electrified Gate Pigs lift things with their noses and easily throw gates off their hinge hooks. This is an instinctual behavior – there is no particular intelligence about it. They stick their noses...
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North Home Field Sow and Piglets
Nine Piglets in North Home Field A Piglet-Fix for those in need. These little piglets are hitting that maximum cuteness stage designed to pull the heart strings of mammals everywhere. It’s a good...
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South Field Greenhouse Ark
South Field Greenhouse Ark The Ark is a much emptier place now in the summer. It’s a temperate, shaded space of about 38’x96′ with the lovely deep bedding pack of wood chips but I only occasionally...
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Pasture Post Pig Grazing
Pasture Pictured Post Pigs There is the idea that pigs will destroy pasture. This is wrong provided they are properly managed with rotational grazing. Rotational grazing mimics the natural movement of...
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Tusk Hooked
Montpelier Building by Bridge No photo of today’s topic because when a 1,000 lb boar has his tusk stuck on the fence you don’t lollygag around with a camera. Today Spitzon hooked a tusk on the heavy...
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Purple Thistle – Grand Rotation
Purple Thistle (Silybum marianum) I used to worry about thistles and burdocks. That was back before our pigs. The thistles because while they are beautiful they are also extremely painful to brush up...
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Late Summer Piglets
Piglets Sunning in Rock Wall We’ve been having glorious fall weather. Many days of warm sun and scattered rains to keep the water table up. The pigs are enjoying the weather. Sow with Piglets on North...
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Sows and Pigs Conspiracy
Sows Meeting in Sunflower Patch Out on my walk I stumbled on a secret society meeting of seven sister sows. Obviously a conspiracy in the making – All of them were clearly gruntled. Better than being...
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Foot Soak
Hot Tubbing Rooster I’ve mentioned before that we like to hot tub our livestock as an alternative to medications.[1,2] Hot water is very curative. This works on the same principle as a fever but is...
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Pig Proof Fence
Pig Proof Fence Pigs are not terribly hard to fence once trained to electric, provided the electric stays on and everything they want is inside the pastures where we want them to be. Piglets on the...
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North Home Field Greenhouse Foundation
Will and Ben Working on North Home Field Greenhouse Site This year’s big outdoor construction projects have been fencing in a few fields with a new improved method, building a road from our farm...
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MuzzleTov
Ben found this MuzzleTov pig out in the pasture. It has an infection in it’s nose. We have a hospice area up near our cottage where we care for the occasional pig like this. Ben is the pig doctor, and...
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Snug as a Piglet in Hay
Piglets Snuggling in Hay We’ve had a wonderfully warm December allowing us to get more outdoor projects done before the real winter weather hits. The pigs are loving it as they’re still able to graze...
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The King is Dead – Long Live the King!
A Young Spitz As I’ve mentioned the blog posts for part of December and most of January went missing in action due to our web hosting company having one of their server’s RAID controllers literally...
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Off the Charts at -90°F and Colder than Hell
We fell off the wind chill chart… Someone wrote me asking about the temperatures last night here in Vermont. It was -34.2°F on Sugar Mountain. The 70 mph winds were the real killer giving a windchill...
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Broken Rib
Evidence of Violence One of the interesting things about being a farmer and a butcher, a maker and a breaker you might say, is that I get to check out my pigs in detail from the inside out. I am their...
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Wild Farrowing
Private Room with a View This gilt sow wanted a private room. She was willing to go to extremes to get it. Three times she broke out of the south Ark gestating paddock in search of a place of her own....
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Best Pig
A Pig in Hand is worth Two in the Bush. A frequent question from people getting into pigs, or raising any livestock, is: “What is the best breed of pig.” There is no best breed. “Best” is highly...
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War Pigs
Put your cursor over the picture… Someone saw a picture of Archimedes opening his mouth and then on a discussion group about war theory asked why not war pigs? That generated some interesting comments...
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Curly Haired Pig
Curly Hair This is a closeup of the back of a mature sow that has curly hair. Normally the hair on our pigs is straight. In the past I had sometimes seen curly hair on some small grower pigs due …...
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