A New Hope…

Well here we are again, the weather is changing and the dry brown grass is starting to green a little. I’m filled with excitement as to what this new year will bring and to see all of the improvements bloom.

The reality is that some of this will work out…. and some won’t.

I have an example of that already. Last year we changed our breed of pig from Mulefoot to Duroc because of a moral issue. Mulefoot are a great pig to keep and the meat is excellent. The problem is that they are an old breed, dating back to a time when people used lard to cook with. These days, of course, fats are out (which we believe is wrong) and so are pigs that were kept for both meat and the lard to cook it with. Long story short, animals are weighed and costed on “rail” or “hanging” weight which includes the fat on the carcass. It felt wrong to ask you to pay for the beautiful fat when I knew that most of you didn’t want it.

This led us to look for another old breed of pig that had a more modern meat to fat ratio and we ended up with Duroc crossed with Berkshire, again with excellent meat. Trouble is that they aren’t used to farrowing (having piglets) outside which is something that we have always done. The result was a very sad and catastrophic loss of piglets. Lesson learned!

So this year I was ready. I had retrofitted a building to be a nursery, just for the first ten days, so that the piglets were robust and ready to go as outdoor pigs. By a stroke of luck Ruby, our first sow to farrow, was coaxed out of the field and into the shed where everything went super well….. right up until the farrowing date came and went. You see, I had made a great many changes so as to fix my moral dilemma. The previous year I could not get a boar so I learned how to AI (artificially inseminate) my pigs and it went well but was stressful as we have a very small operation so we decided to get a boar asap which we did. Apparently, as it was his first time, he didn’t manage to get the job done and now the dates were wrong and could only be guessed at….. and I guessed wrong.

The beautiful weather that we have been enjoying is coming to an end tonight, right on track with 10 piglets born today, in the field, again.

I don’t know what it is about pigs, I love them but just cannot get it right. Today is another of those “why the hell do I continue to do this” days. Then I remember the other things that I may have actually gotten right, the things that I’ve been waiting for months to see, literally.

Perhaps next years pig operation will be different…