One system to avoid the problem is to move the water from a large trough that the pigs can walk through, to a trickle system. The hardware involves a stainless steel nipple that attaches to a post. The nipple is hooked up to a water line that delivers water. When a pig is thirsty, it pushes its snout against the protruding edge of the fitting and water dribbles into its throat. Luckily, pigs have the brainpower to quickly figure this out and adapt to it.
The pigs don’t knock their water troughs over if they are getting their water from a metal nipple fitting. Should be a good thing: less wasted water, cleaner drinking water for the pigs, more water when they need it. The downside rests in a trait of pigs: They do not have the ability to perspire. They do not sweat and do not pant like a dog would. They utilize water and mud to cool themselves.
When the temperature rises, pigs knock over the water buckets, spilling water in their pen. Then they flop down into it, covering their bodies in mud and water and dirt. The first summer in a new pen, this might be a small bit of water, but after a few weeks and certainly after a few years, the action of large hogs flopping in the ground creates divots in the soil. Over and over the pigs settle the mud and water until it becomes impossible for the water to drain. Small pools of muddy water develop around the pig yard.
I have had these divots in past pig yards and then tried to change the area back into garden or pasture. With a plow on the back of the tractor it is difficult to rip through the holes. Mud packed over and over and then baked dry through the hot summer months creates a durable, rigid surface. When I look out at the old garden, there still appear to be dents in the landscape left over from past pigs that have long since moved on.
Old water frequently remains in the dents without any new water coming to freshen it. The result after a few weeks in the warmth of the summer is a fetid, verdant pool of water—water that pigs have lain in and eaten and probably urinated in. Quite smelly.
This leads me to make a note in defense of the pig. Pigs are essentially clean. Probably the cleanest barnyard animal, plus they don’t smell. The fetid water in the hollows around them stinks; pigs do not.
One thing that differentiates pigs from chickens or sheep or cows is a basic behavioral trait. Pigs will not defecate where they live or eat. It is rather basic, but puts pigs on a rung above the others animals who have not learned this important bit of class. Pigs will find an area separate from their living and eating area to manure. In the world of animal evolution, this is big. It makes for a healthier existence for the pigs. Worms that may live in the digestive tract of the animal can pass through via the manure and would be less likely to be reingested by that pig or another. Sheep especially are susceptible to reinfecting themselves with worms by grazing near where they defecate. Cows have the undignified tendency to graze and manure simultaneously. This does spread the manure through the pasture, bringing necessary nutrients to it, but the cows may end up sleeping in the manure piles. For a beef cow, not necessarily a troublesome thing; but for a dairy cow that needs a very clean udder, it can be a disastrous problem. Pigs do not sleep near their feces. I appreciate that. They leave their manure in the field but not where they sleep or eat.
I picked up my original vision for raising pigs from an old book on small farming. The book described a symbiotic pig setup, which I have sought to emulate. The basic idea is that you have two adjacent pens. Not small pens but large, a half acre, an acre apiece. Both are well fenced and connected to each other. In one, pigs are raised through the year, where they manure the soil and add a great deal of nitrogen to it, raising its fertility.
In the other paddock, corn is planted midyear, to mature in the late fall. Instead of harvesting the corn by hand, the farmer lets the pigs into the cornfield and allows them to eat one row at a time. Portable electric fences keep them where they are wanted; each day the fence is moved over a row. The pigs will eat the corn plus the husk and the stalk. As they graze on the rows of corn, they trample the stalks and root up any remaining corn.
Because the pigs have been removed from the original paddock, it will have a chance to rest through the winter and spring months before it will be planted with corn in late May or early June. The pigs spend the winter cleaning the cornfield, eating every little bit of food available, and in doing so spread their manure on the field to nourish the next year’s corn.
It is a great little plan. It is symbiotic; a bit of a perpetual motion machine on a farm scale. The pigs go back and forth each year, rooting up the soil, refreshing the nutrients in the soil and producing pork. The great part about it is that a lot of the labor of raising animals is removed. There is no need to harvest the corn, store it and then feed it to the pigs each day. The pigs do the work. They also do some, if not all, of the tilling of the soil and the spreading of manure. The much more standard method would be to keep the pigs confined, collect the manure and then distribute it onto the fields. Not a fun task, and one that is legitimate work. This system eliminates those tasks and yet accomplishes the same goal.
I tried it out. I fenced a large flat field, divided it in half and set about finding a few pigs to work on it. My calculations were a bit off. Originally I had four pigs on this one-acre field. The land was bad. Really bad. In places, especially where the pigs were to begin their alternate paddock lifestyle, the soil was especially poor. The first winter, soon after clearing the land, I walked across the field in my rubber boots and started to sink. I had walked across a section that was primarily sand, saturated with rainwater. I began to sink into the soil, and eventually came to rest with my knees just above the surface, my feet deep in the quicksand. The soil had no ability to support me; it was not soil. With my poor soil, the three pigs made little dent in raising the fertility of the entire acre. The chance of growing corn on this land in the near future was limited.
And so began my pig raising. I brought in the three young weaner pigs from the feed store up north. I let them out of their flimsy cardboard box and they began their life on this lifeless paddock. Twice a day I brought in buckets of food for them and kept them with ample water.
Little by little they changed from those cute piglets, to actual pigs, to large hogs ready for slaughter. There is a basic idea of pig raising that I have never challenged so I must assume is correct. Hogs raised to market in this country are slaughtered at 220 pounds. The wisdom is that that is the upper limit of muscle growth; beyond that pigs only gain fat.
Whether this is true or not I don’t know, but most pigs are slaughtered at that weight. Your basic supermarket pork chops come from 220-pound pigs. You will recognize the ham or the loin or the tenderloin or the bacon from that size of pig.
The question that quickly comes to mind when raising pigs is, how do I know when I have a 220-pound pig? Pig farmers of old devised a great invention: a pig tape. I ordered one up from a farm supply catalogue and was totally intrigued when it arrived in the mail. They look just like your mother’s cloth measure in her sewing basket: about three feet long, a half inch wide and flexible, with an assortment of measurements written along its length. Instead of inches for hemming skirts, however, the hog tape has the weights of pigs inscribed. There are also a few additions and subtractions listed for longer pigs, shorter pigs and so on. The challenge is to have the hog stay still long enough to wrap this tape around its midsection and then to try and read off the appropriate poundage. I did it once, years ago, and have convinced myself that now I know the basic sizes of hogs. With the tape draped around my neck like a Seventh Avenue tailor, I emptied the largest bucket of food in the pig paddock. I chose the calmest pig I had and came up behind her. As she greedily consumed the food in front of her, I bent over, wrapping my arms around her rotund midsection and pulling the flimsy paper tape around her fattened torso, all the while trying to read the numbers I now realized were far too small to read on the fly. I’m not sure I got it exactly right, but I didn’t feel like trying again. Since then, I usually just estimate by sight.
I find
the standard market weight to be a bit pale anyway. I like fat, I want more fat and it makes for tastier, moister pork, in my opinion.
After setting up this corn-pork relationship and raising a couple of young weaners, I took a bit of a wrong turn. A path that I needed to follow, but not one that I would recommend. I decided to breed one of the young female pigs.
It sounded like such a great idea. One boar, one sow and in a few months I would have ten young weaners, maybe fifteen. I could sell most all of the weaners to others on the island, make a few bucks and keep the best two weaners for myself. Great idea, right?
Pork is relatively cheap compared to lamb and beef. Pigs can convert feed to muscle quickly and efficiently. The twenty-pound weaner on April first can be butchered at 220 pounds by Halloween of that same year. If I were a big factory farmer I could rattle off their “feed conversion index,” but I find that quite creepy. Pigs are animals, not protein machines.
The ability of pigs to reproduce quickly adds to their financial benefit and the eventual low cost of pork. The gestation period of a pig is three months, three weeks, three days. A litter of pigs is generally around ten, but fifteen would not be unusual. As the gestation period is so short, it is possible for a sow to have two litters per year.
For these reasons you can go from a breeding pair of pigs to conceivably twenty pigs in the space of twelve months. This was quite intriguing from a business standpoint. Weaner pigs sell for a fair price and the demand for quality pigs is always high.
I also reasoned that I could drive my boar around to other farms on the island and leave him with neighboring sows to breed them. The standard relationship is that the owner of the boar gets his pick of the litter or cash for the stud fee. This idea of breeding pigs just seemed better and better. When the boar is at the neighbor’s farm, it is fed by the sow’s owners, reducing the costs of keeping it. The idea is to keep the boar in motion from farm to farm, except when he is needed at home. I was hooked.
And so quickly I had a sow and a boar: Junior. And then life got more complicated. The sow was quickly bred. So far, so good. She was kept in the hog half of the paddock; the corn was yet to be planted on the opposite side. The boar ended up taking up residence on the not-yet-corn-growing side.
And in less than four months, the day finally arrived for her to farrow. Actually I had lost track of the time when she was due, so I was a bit surprised one morning to find her with the hours-old piglets suckling on her side. There were not a dozen, nor even ten, but six. My business model was quickly evaporating, but I was still hopeful and excited. Baby pigs are most endearing. I was especially fascinated by the looks of the pigs. Because a litter of pigs is so large relative to other mammals, you get to see many offspring all at once. A cow having one calf at best per year doesn’t give you any sense of the span of genetic traits that is possible. With six, eight, ten progeny in front of you, the full spectrum is covered. Both the boar and the sow were dark brown, almost black. Of the six piglets, no two looked the same. A couple were all black. A couple were spotted in a variety of ways with black and white and two others had great white banding around their midsections on a black ground. Breeding for a specific look could take place quickly. Breeding for specific physical traits as well.
If we go back to drawings of pigs a couple of hundred years ago, we see fat, rounded, squat pigs. They appear to nearly drag their bellies on the ground and yet are very short in length. The hog of today has completely different dimensions—lean and long. The best description I have heard is that a modern pig is “as long as a school bus.”
Breeding for specific traits reflects our use of pork and our cultural attitude toward it. Up until the middle of the twentieth century, lard was the primary fat used for cooking in this country. As large quantities of cooking fat were needed on a daily basis, pigs needed to produce a large volume to stock the larders of the American kitchens. Since that time, we have collectively switched to vegetable oils as the primary cooking fat. Pig lard has been replaced. As there is very little need for pig fat, pigs are bred and grown to produce very little of it.
If you walk through the meat aisle of the supermarket today, most of what is in the trays of pork are pork chops and bacon. Certainly the odd pork roast shows up, a few “country-style ribs,” but for the most part, pork chops rule. The goal of the contemporary hog grower is a lot of bacon and a lot of pork chops. The result is breeding pigs for length: the longer the hog, the more bacon, the thicker the pork chops.
At this point I had a sow, her fairly small litter of pigs and a boar next door eating away.
I proceeded to start hiring out Junior. I found a couple of guys who had a sow that they needed bred. I borrowed a horse trailer from a friend and dropped Junior off across the island. At this point he was fairly manageable and still not too large. He was still young, still easy to lead with a bucket of food and still interested in entering a horse trailer. It would be the last time.
Unloading the boar was painless. He was curious where he was headed and happy to be out of the tight horse trailer. He was introduced to the sow and then I got a quick lesson in the intricacies of hog breeding.
Pigs gain weight fairly quickly and never stop. It’s what they do. My boar was a spry young man, full of life, but not terribly tall or large at this point. His potential suitor was a mature woman of some girth and stature. Although he had an interest in the ladies, her size was a difficult obstacle for him to overcome.
The owners of the farm wanted to keep my boar around for a while; they felt he hadn’t done the job he’d come to do. Since they were feeding him, I thought it was great. Finally, three months later, I returned to pick him up. I now knew why their sow was so large; they were most generous with the feed. My young spry Junior was now an obese sloth. He also seemed to have lost any curiosity concerning entering the horse trailer.
A very long afternoon and many buckets of grain later, we had him reloaded into the trailer. My business plan was in tatters.
Junior never did sire any offspring from that long visit to the neighbor’s piggery. I can’t say for certain why, but most likely it was a problem of sizing. Pigs are not static animals, they are dynamic; they gain weight and size daily. Hundred-pound boars can physically breed hundred-pound sows, but don’t have the stature to breed four-hundred-pound sows. Same is true if the weights are reversed. I realized that I would have to match the boar to his intended.
Junior arrived home that day and was returned to his former partner, the ideal sow. Being the same age, he was similar in size even with his overfeeding, but his strength was dramatically more than hers and sadly he broke her leg soon after arriving. She would be put down later that week, never to breed again. Pig breeding seemed rather more complicated that week, but I still had Junior.
A few months later I bought another young sow and began again. As it turned out, my original sow was a tremendous mother; she took care of her piglets, and only one died of the entire litter. Visualize the birthing of pigs: the sow is certainly 250 pounds, and could easily reach 500. Her hooves are small and pointed, and the baby pigs weigh at most three pounds when they are born. The result is sows crushing their baby pigs, often by simply lying on top of them and stepping on them.
Commercial pig breeders have devised a solution to this problem: a farrowing crate. This contraption is a means to keep the sow completely vertical before, during and after she births her piglets. She is given very little room to move about and does not have the ability to lie down and squash her young. These crates continue to be used, so I must assume that they are successful.
As with most things in life, moderation is everything. Keeping a sow in a farrowing crate of some kind for the week that she gives birth might be reasonable. Three months I would consider animal cruelty.
I kept my sow outside with a bit of a shelter provided to allow her to get out of the rain if the weather went bad. She made a nest of leaves and ferns in the woods and proceeded to almost bury herself in thi
s large mound of greenery. As she was building this nest I knew that she was soon to farrow; I had also kept better track of the breeding date this time.
When the day came, it was amazing. One by one the small piglets emerged from her and entered the world. I so wanted to take charge of the situation and help them along; bring them closer to her teats, bring them back to the nest when they blindly wandered off. I forced myself not to interfere.
The next morning was not so jolly. Even with the large fluffy nest of woodland ferns and salal branches, the mother had crushed several of her young to death. Three lived through that first week and were raised up for meat. More shocking than the deaths themselves was the mother sow’s reaction. Those that she had mistakenly killed, she eventually ate. Or so I must infer. They were gone hours later, and although it is conceivable that a raccoon might have enjoyed a small piglet, the sow never would have allowed anything near her. Her protective strength kept me at bay for weeks; there is no chance anything else could have gotten near enough to her to remove one of her piglets.
Which is crueler—the farrowing crate to protect the young, or letting nature take its course with all its inherent cruelty? I have since seen an acceptable pigpen that is the best of both worlds. The sow is confined in a relatively small indoor pen of maybe ten feet by five feet, with areas in the corners where only the piglets can escape. The sow, being tremendously larger, is stopped by a strong metal bar that blocks the corners. The piglets can easily slip underneath to safety if need be.
My days of pig breeding ended there. The piglets born that day were raised up for meat, the sow and boar soon slaughtered. Buying weaner pigs each spring and slaughtering them for meat ten months later works well. Breeding pigs did give me an insight into their unique nature, but overall it was an experience I’m happy not to repeat.
Growing a Farmer Page 21