Even before the advent of Craigslist I did manage to procure baby pigs. They were found at a feed store an hour or so north of the city. I happened to wander in to buy a watering trough or something for my sheep and saw a sign for piglets. I inquired and there were some available that day. I never really knew why they were available right then, but I took it as a bit of fate and bought three baby pigs already weaned from their mothers and therefore known as weaners.
As it turned out, finding them was the easy part. Pigs are unbelievably strong for their size. They are just bundles of muscle. Even at seven or eight weeks of age, they are very difficult to catch and hold. The feed store put them in a simple cardboard box and duct-taped them closed. I casually put them in the back of my truck and we headed down the highway for the hour-long drive to the ferry dock and then the boat ride to the island and on to the farm. Fortunately, I didn’t travel solo, as my friend Marc agreed to join me on what I had sold him as a lovely country drive. Once we got onto the freeway and I began to accelerate into traffic, I looked in the rearview mirror and realized that the pigs were beginning to break free of their flimsy confines and their little pink snouts could be seen peeking through the folds of the cardboard box.
I pulled the truck over quickly on the shoulder of the busy interstate and found that the only solution was to bring the cardboard carton with the three young and frisky piglets into the front of the pickup truck and have Marc keep his hand on the lid for the trek back to the farm. Marc tried to look annoyed throughout the long ride back to the island, but I think that the piglets, with their small pink snouts poking through the cardboard flaps, eventually cut through to his sense of humor.
A pig’s life here at my farm follows a traditional seasonal calendar. I raise a few hogs every year. Buy them in the spring, fatten them up over the summer and slaughter them in the winter. Animals consume food and convert it to protein, gaining weight in the process. If a portion of the calories they eat goes to keeping them warm, then those calories don’t go toward weight gain. Therefore, raising any animal in the spring and summer is more productive than in the colder months. In the summer months and early fall there is also an abundance of waste in the garden. All the overripe produce, cabbage leaves, broccoli stems and so on go to the pigs to eat. In the darkness of the winter months, food is an expense and must be brought in to feed the pigs.
In addition to the garden waste, the pigs eat food waste. Some comes from the kitchen at the farm and some from restaurant kitchens in the community. Every week Jorge drives around to the restaurants and collects food from their kitchens. The technical terms for the waste are pre-plate and post-plate. As you can imagine, waste is divided into two groups, waste from prepping the food before it gets to a customer and the waste that is left on the plate by the consumer. The county health department feels that pre-plate food is safe for pigs, but that post-plate is not. I respect the health department’s vision, and limit what the pigs are fed to food waste that comes directly from the kitchen.
Jorge gets food from restaurants that are not organic and do not necessarily buy the best-quality food, but it fills up the hogs and they grow quickly. You can’t argue with free. To buy bags of commercially prepared organic hog feed, I would need to drive my truck off the island to a large feed store in the county south of the island. Spending half a day making the drive, then paying for the feed and then disposing of the plastic sacks that the feed is sold in seems worse from an environmental perspective. The waste food from the restaurants is just a few minutes from the farm. There are lots of greasy french fries, lots of carrot peelings from commercially grown carrots and old soup with mysterious ingredients. Feeding the animals with buckets of lesser-quality food keeps that slop from the island landfill and stops me from driving off the island every month for feed. If it fattens my hogs and I don’t have to write a check for it, I’m happy to take it off a restaurant’s hands.
At the end of the long center worktables in the farm kitchen are three buckets. You might call them the garbage cans. The first holds all refuse made of paper, things that are burnable. Right outside the kitchen door is the wood-fired oven. All those bits of junk mail, envelopes from bills, paper sacks that the coffee beans are packaged in—all those bits of paper are burned to start a weekly fire in the oven.
The second bucket is a larger container with a lid. In it all food wastes are dumped. The contents of this bucket are emptied almost every day, headed to the pigs, nature’s best composters. They eat everything. They prosper by it, loading on pounds from food waste.
The third bucket is for garbage in the most traditional sense of the word. Items that will be dragged to the dump. I like calling it a dump. For years it was just that. Here on the island, garbage was driven to a large tract of land and dumped into a hole, a large hole, in the ground. Over time, the hole filled with garbage and then for a few years you would simply throw your stuff onto the ground from the back of your car. At the end of the life span of this garbage dump, the refuse of the island’s inhabitants was pushed up into a mighty hill by large bulldozers, creating a knoll of baby toys, broken lawn mowers, raincoats, shower curtains, and the other detritus of our existence.
The garbage dump is now called the “transfer station.” Garbage is transferred—which reminds me of changing colleges, of being given a new job in a new fresh city, of riding a different bus route. The island has a service that drives around weekly and picks up our garbage cans filled with our unwanted items and treks them over to the transfer station for us, just like in a proper city. The cans are left by the side of the road in the morning and are emptied by evening. Transferred.
I have never participated in this service. Mostly from my inherent cheapness, but also because I want to be more engaged in the farm garbage. I save up my garbage and when it is quite a large mass of sacks and boxes and bags, I load it all into my truck and drive it across the island to the transfer station. The back of the small pickup truck is filled, a tarp covering the potentially loose bits, a rope tying down the tarp to the sides of the truck. It is then that I can see what I am responsible for, what I have created. When I unload each bag from the truck into the deep concrete canyon, I am made aware of how much garbage I have asked to be transferred.
That image is in my head when I see the new toaster at the store. Shiny and new, packed in a box, surrounded by Styrofoam blocks. This toaster will change my life; make my toast quicker, more evenly browned, more pleasing to me. And then I fast-forward to the time a month, a year, a decade in the future when I am pitching that toaster, older and less shiny, into the belly of the transfer station. Toasting my bread in the morning on the rack of the oven suddenly seems good enough.
Although very little refuse ends up in the third bucket—the one headed for the transfer station—plenty ends up in the second bucket—the one headed for the pigs. The diet of pigs is oddly controversial. The question is whether they are carnivores or herbivores. If I go to my shelf and pull out ten books on raising pigs, five will tell me never to feed them meat and five will say feed them everything including meat. I am confused. So I have gone the omnivore route. My hogs eat meat as well as vegetables.
I’ve searched for the term—and never found it—that describes the quality in animals (including humans) that causes us to find our own species’ flesh abhorrent and inedible. That reticence keeps us healthy, keeps diseases isolated and rarely, if ever, fails. Pigs will not eat raw pork except in dire circumstances. They know that it is bad and avoid it. Raw beef or chicken or lamb, no problem, but pork they will leave. Once it is cooked, it is just meat, but raw is a problem.
I did make this mistake early on in keeping pigs. One of the waste products that need to be dealt with on a farm is the detritus from slaughtering animals. Although most everything is used, a few things still remain: spleens and pancreases, intestines and stomachs and lungs. None are particularly tasty, some are downright awful and all require a great deal of work to clean and prepare for an eventual poo
r gastronomic result. Burying these bits is certainly a possibility but there is a lot of protein in the guts of an animal. The farm has paid for that protein either in the form of actual cash for feed or from crops grown on the farm that were fed to the animals—pasture, corn, milk. If that protein is buried deep in the ground so that dogs cannot dig it up, then the value of that protein is lost; it cannot be utilized by the farm. It is a loss. If it is composted or fed back to other animals, then that protein capital can be captured. We have all learned from the mad cow problems of the past decade that animals have been routinely fed back to animals and that it causes problems. The problems arise when the same species is fed back to other members of that species—for example, chicken guts turned into chicken feed.
So the safest option is to feed lamb and cow and chicken guts to the pigs, but never pig guts. The best part is that if you forget, as I did once years ago, and dump pig guts into the pigpen, they will run over to it and sniff it and push it around and then walk away. You then have a mess of pig guts to deal with. I would not recommend it.
There is a trend lately to feed pigs specific diets with the goal of affecting the quality and taste of the eventual meat, especially the hams. The Iberian pigs of Spain are fed acorns from the surrounding oak trees and are thought to be the reason that the jamón ibérico is so tasty. I find this all so very silly. If you have a great many oak trees growing and the ground beneath them is littered with acorns, then running pigs in the orchard is a great solution. The pigs are well fed, you don’t have to exert any effort to take the feed to the pigs and the resulting hams are tasty and unique. If you have a hog farm, need to feed your pigs and you are having acorns, hazelnuts, or chestnuts shipped in from elsewhere, it is folly. The costs, both in terms of effort and time and money to ship the feed in, might be recouped from the eventual selling of a high-end ham, but the result is tainted: a forced product, not one that is the result of a natural synergy.
I am limited, at my farm, in the number of hogs that I can raise per year by the amount of feed I have. I grow a small amount of corn, use all the kitchen waste and garden waste I can for feed and bring in local restaurant food waste. I do keep some grain on hand for days when I need all the milk from the dairy, when there are no kitchen extras and the local restaurants are slow. Pigs, like most of us, expect to be fed each and every day, and prefer at least twice per day. A bag of grain is a useful thing to calm the porcine stomachs on a slow day.
Here at the farm, the hogs live in a small grove of cherry trees that grew from the fallen cherries of a former orchard. I call it Pig Forest. It is dark and cool even during the hottest weeks and has plenty of nooks and crannies for the pigs to root around in and explore. Probably a quarter acre in size, it has housed hogs for the past four years. Surrounding Pig Forest is a simple fencing system. A small wire, eight inches off the ground, runs around the perimeter. Held in place by fence posts, it is electrified by a fence charger located at the barn.
Pigs abhor electrical current, which makes them easy to confine. A fence charger sends a pulsating charge through the thin electrical wire every second. It is a charge that is high on voltage and low on amperage. The charger is grounded with a deep metal stake at the barn. When an animal, with its feet on the ground, touches the wire, it completes the loop and it receives the shock. If you were to touch it, you would certainly feel it, but it is hard to classify it as pain. A shock, nothing more. Pigs avoid such a shock at all costs. Once they learn that the wire contains a current, they will not break through it, even though they are strong enough to easily break the wire.
Pigs use their snouts to test the world around them. Pig snouts are generally moist and free of hair, so when they approach the hot wire they inspect it with a smooth, wet, flat surface, which is perfect for conducting current. If they were to pick up their hoof and tap the wire, they would probably not feel a thing.
Pigs love to eat. Actually, all animals love food, but pigs especially love food and learn very quickly where they are fed and when they are fed. If they are fed in the same spot, they will make sure they will be there the next morning, the next afternoon or even all day, in hope of another meal. If they were to get beyond the confines of Pig Forest, they would most likely return by the next feeding for a bucket of pig slop.
Pigs are great escapers, none more so than the first and last boar I’ve owned. After a couple of years on the farm, Junior, a name he aquired from previous owners, was rather rotund, slow to move and quite set in his ways. Junior discovered a place in the fence where the electric wire in no way crossed his path; he could walk under it and avoid the shock. If he had simply climbed under the wire and headed for greener pastures, I would have immediately noticed. Junior would leave just after his morning feeding, presumably just after I returned to the house. He would travel quite a ways, crossing three other properties to a lovely pasture with a small creek running through it. When the afternoon arrived, he would venture back, walk under the fence and take a nap, awaiting my arrival for his afternoon feeding.
This went on for at least a few weeks. Although the owners of the bucolic pasture rather quickly noticed a four-hundred-pound boar in their midst, they had no idea what to do about it. He appeared to be far more menacing that he was in reality. He also had no tags, no brand, no moniker that would give them an idea of his home base.
I raise pigs in a suburb where the primary crop is children, not farm animals. There are few pigs in these parts, and consequently I had, unbeknownst to me, a reputation for errant farm animals. Years later, when I meet someone from the neighboring properties, they often mention that my pigs, my sheep, my cows, my goats have traversed their land at some point. Although I have generally forgotten, they have not. Some find it charming, say that this reassures them that they live in an agricultural community. Others find it downright annoying and take pleasure in reminding me whenever we meet. “Oh, yes, you are the man with the pigs…. In 1996 they got loose and walked all over my lawn, don’t you remember? Should I remind you? All over my lawn.”
Thankfully this part of the country does not have the tradition of pig reeves. In New England, small towns appoint a resident to be the reeve, the one responsible for tracking down errant pigs, and for enforcing local laws against pigs running amok in neighbors’ gardens. I would have run afoul of the reeve on many occasions.
The pigs test the wire often, squealing with a sound that greatly exceeds their discomfort. They are vocal beasts and can certainly be classified as drama queens. My neighbors must have the idea that I am torturing pigs on a daily basis. Nothing could be further from the truth. In reality I have given them so much food that they are climbing on top of each other to get the best bits. They push each other so that one slides into the hot wire and gives an extremely vocal response. As I don’t worry about them being hurt, I simply take these sounds as confirmation that the hot fence is on and working adequately.
Pigs are rambunctious and take their eating seriously. They are not dainty eaters. When the food hits the ground, all the pigs attempt to get to the center of the pile of food. As we all learned in high school physics, only one bit of matter can occupy one space. The same holds true with pigs. If one pig makes it to the top of the pile of food, all the rest will immediately attempt to topple his domination, and one will be successful. Once that lucky pig has his time on top, others will bring him down and so on. In a few short moments the food will be eaten.
At this point, bits of food remain: the odd kernel of corn, crust of bread, corner of cheese. The pigs are thorough; they want it all and they will find it. And this is where it gets interesting. Pigs are insanely qualified to root. Their snout is a rigid bit of cartilage with great strength, and they have a tremendous sense of smell. They use this snout to unearth, to burrow, to upend anything in their way. When they have found the morsel that their keen nose alerted them to, they eat it. Seems rather straightforward, except that this often happens within the soil. As they are constantly rooting through their
paddock, the soil is often deep and friable.
Their snout may be delicate, but their mouth appears crude and awkward. What they appear to be doing is eating great quantities of dirt, and in the wetter months, mud. I watch this daily. Are they eating the dirt? Are they filtering out the dirt? Do they digest the dirt and then it passes through them? My conclusion, although not proven, is that their tongues are actually as developed as their snouts. A pig can pick that individual kernel of corn up from within a great sea of mud and draw it into its mouth.
The pigs here often frustrate me. I don’t understand why they don’t have enough smarts to take care of their food. The most common scenario involves them walking through their food, trampling the food with their hooves in order to keep other beasts from eating it. True, their competitors don’t get the food, but they don’t either; it is completely soiled by the time they are finished with it. After this little scenario plays out, they look up at me, hoping for more food.
In addition to a great deal of food, water is also an essential ingredient in pigs’ diet. Presently we use plastic troughs to hold their liquid nourishments. Pigs have great strength and ability with their snouts and hooves to move, upend, destroy, flip, break and smash anything in their pen. A water trough is no exception.
Growing a Farmer Page 20