Some Observations about Pigs

On Wednesday, I had to go in to work on a computer, so I left the three older boys with the Bessettes for a couple of hours. Isaiah and Abraham were thrilled to get to sit on and “ride” the horses that the Bessettes started boarding. I drove away with the sight of Isaiah, bike helmet on his head, sitting on Sue-the-horse, with a HUGE grin on his face. What a precious sight. He has wished for a horse for a long time.

On Thursday, the pigs ran out of food. I decided to be frugal and go to the little orchard I had visited before, and buy several buckets of grounder apples for the pigs. So we drove there—45 minutes—to find that they were closed for the season. We drove home—45 minutes. Blah. Jadon called it “the fateful apple orchard trip.”

Today I worked in the garden, shoveling compost and making more raised beds. And making the raised beds I have already made higher, so when I go to plant garlic and onions, those crops will thrive. I had planted turnips and turnip greens in a bed. The turnips are doing great; the turnip greens produced about one reasonably sized plant, and the rest didn’t come up. So I will make that into an onion bed, I think.

The baby, unfortunately, does not like to be away from me, but he doesn’t like walking around the garden, either, as there are pricklies all over (and I don’t like him walking in the garden, as he doesn’t respect the raised beds very well). So he was on my back, which makes shoveling a bit tiring.

As the pigs are still out of food and have begun to look at me longingly, I drove to the Bessettes to get one of their large bags of feed. Michelle was going through her kitchen cupboards, and I was THRILLED to help. I love to go through kitchen cupboards and make them more efficient and orderly. Fun!

I was out feeding the animals after dark this evening with my headlamp on, and I saw glowing eyes from the pig pen. The pigs were ecstatically consuming the feed I had fetched, and as I got closer, I realized that the eyes belonged to Bouncer! Our cat is yet nearby. There have been hints that Bouncer had not permanently vanished (thawing ground beef on the table a bit eaten; butter wrappers removed from the garbage bag), but I was happy to see Bouncer again, even for a brief second.

And finally, some observations about pigs.

It is a bit shocking to me to have animals on the land who are dedicated solely to growing large for slaughter. Up until now, we’ve had domestic pets (dog, cats) and breeding animals (sheep, goats), all of which may become a bit more plump or a bit more skinny, but not noticeably different in size.

Now, behold the pigs. Abby and Alice came to us weighing, Phil figured, about 60 pounds. I almost think I can see them growing day by day. In the two months since we’ve been here, the Bessette pigs have more than doubled in size; seeing them today made me a bit concerned for our little land—a full-sized pig is BIG. And the Bessette pigs have a month to go before slaughter! Eek!

Phil was hoping to do a “root, hog, or die” type feeding system, where they would root up our plants or die in the process. But they look so HUNGRY to me when I don’t feed them, I have been feeding them.

But hog feed has its own issues. We bought a 50 pound bag of organic feed for $22.50 or so from Countryside Naturals. It was good quality stuff. The shoats ate it in about three days. And, calculating that a pig needs about 5 pounds of food to produce one pound, we are looking at a price of $2.25 a pound, not counting butchering costs or waste costs (I’m not planning to eat bones or anything). This is pretty expensive pork!

I don’t think that’s terribly fiscally responsible.

So Phil picked up a bag of nonorganic feed from the feed store. It’s what a standard farmer would use. Meaning: it’s medicated.

Medicated feed has tetracycline. I was just reading this week an article about how animals routinely fed antibiotics—tetracycline—poop out those antibiotics. Even in trace amounts, it causes up to 40% biomass reduction in any plant grown on the soil where the manure lands. So to feed standard feed to a pig is basically death to the soil.

I don’t think that’s terribly ecologically responsible.

What to do?

I called the Bessettes. Michelle doesn’t THINK their feed is medicated, so I bought 100 pounds from her for about $17. Much more reasonable. And I suppose that the pigs are eating some food from their rooting and their foraging, so the total price per pound isn’t quite so high. But still—the question of feed looms large to me.

Michelle gave me the number of the man who mills Joel Salatin’s feed. How handy that she has all these resources already figured out.

Other pig notes: their awesome noses remind me of an elephant’s trunk: they move in different directions. The pigs can’t grab things with their noses, but they can sure flex them in neat ways!

I have heard that pigs are very intelligent. Well, I am going to guess that, as a group, perhaps, pigs are intelligent. I suppose, though, that some are smarter than others. We have less-intelligent pigs. They still get shocked by the electric fence (I’m SO thankful we kept the chicken netting up around the pen—I cannot imagine chasing pigs all by myself). I fill up their water bucket and they go and sit in it and dump it over. Multiple times a day.

Since filling a bucket multiple times a day won’t work long-term (what happens when we need to leave for a few hours?), Phil brilliantly fixed up the following: he bought a “hog nipple,” which is a metal device on the end of a hose that allows water to flow when the hog presses on the nipple. The hose runs up to our 35 gallon water container. I leave the water open, ready to run at all times, and the hogs can get water when they need, and they can’t wallow in it or dump it out. GREAT!

The pigs are not really scary. I was pretty scared of them at first, because the previous owners seemed pretty scared. And they will, apparently, nip. However, Michelle scratches hers behind the ears, and showed me that they got started with a stick, scratching the backs and bellies, and now the pigs are okay with human hands scratching them. I will try that soon; it would be nice to have Alice and Abby not bark in fear and scatter whenever we approach.

They are together all the time. They will sleep next to one another, with their hooves on each other. And sometimes they tussle. I try to be far away when they do.

Pigs smell bad. Well, their manure smells bad. I think sheep and goat manure (at least the females’) smells rather nice. So barn-like, or hay-like, or natural. Pig manure, though, probably because they are omnivores, smells stronger and stinkier. Right now the pigs are penned just upslope of our trailer-house. I don’t know if we can keep that up long-term, as I fear the smell will continue to get worse. And their manure is not nicely pelletized like the sheep and the goats; it is larger than dog droppings, and about the same shape. Eeww.

I am glad I do not have piggy eyes. They are small and, I think, a bit mean. If chickens have reptilian eyes, and goats have eyes with strange irises, and sheep don’t want to look you in the eyes (too threatening), I think pigs have, maybe, malevolent rodent eyes.

Do I like pigs? I like sheep the most, and I like the goats. Maybe after I touch the pigs, I will feel a greater affinity for them. Right now I look at their haunches and think HAM. I think they are interesting to watch, but I am not a pig lover … yet.