Porky Is A Barrow Now

Our pigs are continuing to grow. They are no longer shoats (newly weaned piglets). Nellie and Sally are becoming nice looking gilts (female pigs before their first litter), Rufus is growing into a good boar (an uncastrated male pig), and Porky is now a barrow! (castrated male pig)

I had observed our ag teachers doing the castration procedure on the pigs the FFA has at our school, so I knew what to expect. Mr. K was going to come to our home to help me castrate our first pig, but then he decided he would rather us bring Porky to school so another of his classes could observe.

Yesterday was the day of Porky's appointment, but first we had to figure out how to comfortably transport Porky to my school. So far we had only transported pigs in a feed sack, but I did not want to do that now. So we decided to build a hog cage that could go in the back of our truck.

Over the Thanksgiving weekend, Matthew and I went to work on it. We loaded up “slabs” for free from a local saw mill, got them home, and split them into rails with our table saw. We then nailed them all together. Porky is still small, but we decided to build something big enough that we could use to move grown hogs or other larger animals in the future. We made it 4 feet high and 6 feet long, and the slabs made it very strong. (and heavy)

Here it is in the back of the truck:




Not bad for a free cage. This is a shot at the back of it:




Matthew and Erica had to get it ready for Porky without me since I was at school already. We used an old pallet for the sliding gate:



Porky seemed comfortable in it:






Matthew, the man of the family in my absence, made the final checks. (It is hard to believe he is only 13!)




Lisa and Matthew brought Porky to school at the appointed time and we let Erica stay home to watch after Christina and Simon.

(The next two pictures on down will be of the actual castration procedure. They are not graphic at all, but I thought I should warn you in case you are reading this with children and do not want to explain why the piggie is being held upside down.)







I was going to attempt the procedure myself with Mr. K guiding me, but since there was such an interest in it among the crowd, I decided it would be best for Mr. K to do it with me observing again. It was difficult to get good pictures of it, but I guess we don't really want any gory shots of it anyway. These two pictures give you an idea of what happened:

Mr. K castrated Porky in the same manner I described the other castrations I observed earlier, except this time it was in the shop instead of all the way out at the farm. This location allowed several more people from other classes to observe who had never seen this done before. They watched Mr K make the cuts with the scalpel, rinse the area with the betadine solution, and give the 2 cc injection of the antibiotic.

Porky is recovering nicely now, and was glad to get back home. We are feeding him Purina Grower because it is medicated and Mr. K says it will help him heal quicker. We really want to keep everything as organic as possible, and by the time he is ready for butchering the antibiotic and this medicated food will long be out of his system. When the 50 pound bag is gone we will go back to feeding him regular hog chow.

All seemed to go well with our first castration. I know some people would say this was cruel, but we have discovered it is a very common practice when raising pork. Life on a farm is not always as picturesque and glamorous as we think sometimes and most people do not realize what goes into raising the food we all eat!(us included)

This was another good learning experience for us at Pure Water Hollow!