Accidental Pig Farmers
I’m stuck!” rang a voice from across the soggy gumbo of our backyard, which was also the de facto middle pasture for our little hog operation. I turned my face into pelting drops and made out the silhouette of my mother, mid-60s and rain-drenched, waving in my direction. “Help!”
I took a step forward and felt my right foot slide straight out of my sunken rubber boot. Then, knocked off balance by an unsuccessful campaign to move toward her, I plunged the sock-clad foot deep into the frigid mud.
We were finishing out eight Berkshire pigs when autumn fell on our central Kentucky farm. After harvesting the last of the cold weather crops from the 10,000-square-foot garden, ground strewn with leaves and stems and stalks, I constructed a hoop-style hog shelter, and we — myself, my wife and my on-farm-dwelling parents — moved the pigs across the driveway and into the electric fenced-off garden space. The hogs loved it, eating grass and spent foliage down to bare earth.
Then came snow — an early squall that left inches on the ground. When temperatures rose back to normal levels after a few days, the denuded pasture quickly deteriorated into a loose, muddy slop. But we were ready for this, with a side pasture constructed and waiting, and we rotated the Berkshires out of the mud to a gently sloping pasture on the other side of the farm.
That night, a hard rain fell and the pigs — conditioned to sleeping in the middle pasture — broke through the electrified fencing, tore across the farm and, their bodies glistening with frigid water, stood around in mud. This all would have been well and good had we not taken the solarcharged electric fence panel to the new, dry pasture, leaving this particular piece of soil prime for escaping. And so out into the cold, wet night we went, where our pigs danced around while we bipeds fought through knee-deep mud.
Eventually, I made my way over to my mother and, holding onto a T-post for balance, helped her out of the soil. In time, the four of us wrangled all eight pigs into their new pasture, where they (thankfully) stayed until the next pasture rotation. But that night, after we collapsed into bed after long and very hot showers, my wife and I turned to each other with the same thought: How the hell did we get here?
It Wasn’t in the Plan!
We didn’t intend to become pig farmers when moving from a suburban, yellow-brick home in northeast Ohio to a Civil War-era house in the wilds of central Kentucky. I mean, it was on our minds — my wife had befriended and volunteered with a local pig farmer in the year preceding our relocation — but the move was in pursuit of self-sufficiency, with room to grow crops and raise some chickens. Pigs would come someday. Maybe.
My wife and I moved into the farmhouse (my parents would join us later), built a midsize chicken coop and secured a motley assortment of laying hens from Craigslist. We tilled a large garden plot. We repaired and painted the old cattle barn, set fence posts and tightened up sagging wires. The old house quickly became home, but a glitch in selling our suburban residence left us waiting to close. Then, one day, the sale went through,
and we headed north to sign some papers and relinquish our city life. We also wanted to say goodbye to friends at the organic farm where my wife had volunteered. That’s when things went sideways.
“You guys need some pigs,” our friend Amy said firmly. We deflected, said we weren’t ready. She flipped the script with a plea: “Please take some pigs. Tim came back from the breeder with 13, and that’s too many; we don’t have room.” We spent the night pondering the notion, then, after signing our brick house over to strangers the next day, returned to Amy and Tim’s farm. My family of five drove the six hours home with two Berkshires, tucked in a large dog crate, sharing the SUV.
And we were off, learning pig farming on the fly as we raised a pair of Berkshires. Our new neighbors took an interest in the freezer full of meat they yielded, and after securing a place at the local farmers market, we decided we liked raising pigs enough to do it again and again looking on Craigslist, located a family of heritage pig breeders in Peebles, Ohio, with five Large Black hogs. (Update: This family was later arrested and charged in the Pike County massacre, in which eight people were killed, so I can’t fully recommend this method of livestock acquisition, though we were safe and the pigs were good.)
We followed the Large Blacks with a litter of 10 more Berkshires; then we went “whole hog” and purchased a pair of purebred breeding Berks from a hobby farmer in Paris, Kentucky. The sow farrowed soon after, we moved the piglets into and back out of the middle pasture … and that’s how we ended up knee-deep in cold mud, chasing pigs under a moonless sky.
Plan P(igs)
We might not have intended to become market pork producers, and I certainly never envisioned us breeding heritage pigs within our first couple of years as farmers. But I’m eternally grateful that we said “Yes!” when Amy asked us to take some pigs. I also realize that this serendipity is singular to our experience, so here are some tips for your first pigs, should you get them.
BREED ALL ABOUT IT I’m not sure whether we found Berkshires or they found us, but in the end, we knew this was our breed. Do some research to learn what kind of pigs you want to raise. Berkshires deliver a fair amount of butcher cuts and bacon, but other breeds can yield more meat or more bacon, so consider what you most want in your freezer.
RAISE THEM RIGHT Heritage breeds do better on pasture, while production breeds are best for confinement in a barn or small pen. Temperament varies between breeds, so look into that, too. Berkshire sows, for example, are terrifyingly protective of newborn piglets.
IT’S A NUMBERS GAME We started with the two Berkshires from our friends’ farm, bought the only five piglets available from the breeder and then bumped up our herd to 10. This seems about right, even if we were just responding to what was available. When starting out, two is probably the ideal number, as it’s the minimum number for herd animals; you can react without too many moving parts when, for example, they bust through the fencing on a cold, rainy night. If you think you can do more, try a small increase the next time. Eventually, we grew to keeping two breeding pairs and around 20 pigs at any given time. We knew we could handle that because we’d stepped up slowly.
BE CAUTIOUS This is perhaps the greatest advice anyone can give a farmer, and you should apply it to everything you do throughout the day. Pigs, though, require a special kind of caution; They are fast and heavy, and they’ll surprise you with the occasional bite.
When I think back to my mother and me stuck in the mud with pigs running around our feet, I shudder; had one of us fallen down and gotten stuck, we could easily have been trampled. In general, pigs are friendly and prone to good behavior, but anyone who’s raised them can rattle off a list of scary experiences. Have fun with your pigs, but stay cautious.