After raising or selling some 120 plus pigs during these past 4 years, we have decided to take a break from the hog business for a little while!
It is somewhat bitter for us because we really have enjoyed these magnificent animals! We have had many exciting adventures from home birthing baby piglets to home butchering big hogs and all the joys and trials in between! It has been an almost daily chore and sometimes twice a day or more for someone to take care of the pigs. (Mostly Matthew.) After some 1,550 days in a row, we had built up a sort of bond with our pigs! It is a strange feeling realizing that there are no longer any piggies up at the barn or pig lot.
The sweetness comes in when thinking about no more $13.60 bags of 100 pound sacks of corn to lug home and up to the barn; no more carrying water or breaking ice in their water troughs in 15 degree temperatures with 6 inches of snow on the ground; no more worrying if they are warm enough and hauling straw up for their beds; no more chasing the pigs back up the hill when they break out of their lots; no more bloody knuckles repairing said lots; and no more damage done to our poor old barn that has served as our hog headquarters over the years!
Two days ago we were still caring for 8 full grown hogs. After 3 separate journeys today and yesterday in our old hog trailer, we now have none! This was the final leg of our getting out of the hog business, as we sold 13 feeder pigs a couple weeks ago, a market hog the week before that, and butchered that sow a couple days before that! So, really we have gone from the hog wild existence of 23 pigs that we have had since the beginning of October to zero in less than a month. That is a drastic change!
Here are the 5 hogs we were raising for Glen going off to the butcher. Matthew had to leave church early (12:30) to get them loaded up and Glen was here to get them a little after 1:00. The meat market he was taking them to only accepts hogs on Sundays (or Monday mornings before 8:00am), which is one of the reasons we stopped using them. These slow growing hogs finally turned out to be very nice market hogs!
Monday morning, we got up and loaded our last sow, Crimson and our last gilt into the trailer. We successfully butchered our other sow a few weeks ago, and we could have done these too. However, I've been hearing about a new meat market about an hour away from us that we've wanted to try. It is run by a Mennonite family and they are building a reputation of doing excellent and honest work. It will be nice to have all the processing work done for us on these two hogs and it will be interesting to see what kind of work they do. It may be a challenge to find enough room in the freezers, though! Our meat supply is still in good shape from all the venison Matthew brought in last fall as well as the pork from the sow we butchered last month. After we get these two hogs back, we will really be set up for awhile! Here they are, saying goodbye to our homestead:
The name of the meat market we are using this time is called Appalachian Meats, near West Liberty Kentucky. I had a good first impression there, this morning. When we arrived there were two big black steers in the holding area that the owner had to move in order for us to unload our hogs. Apparently they had just been unloaded a bit before us. The neat thing about this, was that the owner told us that these steers were raised at a little college near Jackson called Kentucky Mt. Bible College! I told him that I knew right where that is because my daughter is currently a student there! Small world!
(Gun buying interlude: After taking those two hogs to Appalachian Meats, we swung by a fellow's house that was selling a rifle. It was a Russian carbine from WWII; an M38 that looked and fired good! Matthew decided to get it to hunt with, but I would have bought it if he hadn't! I think the historical aspects of it is pretty neat and I like that it is such a powerful weapon, too. It is from 1943 and after researching it a bit on the internet, it seems that everything is original, matching, and not imported or refurbished, all of which makes it a more desirable gun to collectors! )
We got back to Pure Water Hollow just in time to try to get our boar, Boris, loaded into the trailer and take him off to the stock sale at Lee City that night. He was going to be the biggest challenge (both in size and cunning) because we had been trying to get him to voluntarily go into the trailer for weeks to no avail. He had been a smart one, and would not get into the trailer whenever we were watching. We knew that he did go up into the trailer to eat, but he did not like to while we were up there! It seemed that he knew what it was all about!
At 5:00 I decided that tonight was another flop because we would need to leave soon after 5:00 to get to the market before the 6:30 sale time. Boris was showing no sign of going near the trailer, even though we knew he was hungry. I decided to stay around quietly to watch Boris as Matthew drove the truck down the hill. Boris watched the truck go down the road and then trotted toward the barn where the trailer was! I stealthily hid behind a big tree and watched as Boris neared the trailer, looked around, and then went up the ramp to get the food! I did my best ninja impersonation as I crept up behind him and soon closed him in the trailer! It wasn't much after 5:00 so I yelled on the radio for Matthew to get the truck back up to the barn so we could go the stock market with Boris! Here he is in the trailer:
He put up a bit of a fight, and tried to bust out:
Thankfully, we got to the sale safely and Boris did not bust out of the trailer while going down the road at 60 miles per hour. (I had been envisioning having to use Matthew's new gun to put him out of his misery after he busted out of the trailer and broke himself up all over the Mt Parkway!) We were not too late for the sale, and I was happy with the $95 that he sold for! I was also glad that we would not have to deal with him anymore. They weighed him at 540 pounds, which was less than we thought, but I guess it didn't matter much. Actually, it was probably good that he weighed less because the more those boars weigh, the less desirable they seem to be to buyers. Rufus had weighed 925 pounds last year at this same market and he only sold for $70!
So, here we are. Pure Water Hollow Homestead had been going hog wild since October of 2006, but now, all our hogs have either become money in my wallet or meat in my freezer in the form of ham, bacon, chops, roasts, and sausage!
This vacation from pig farming will free up so much chore time as well as much needed finances that have been getting bogged down with the high price of corn. We should be able to better focus on some other projects around the homestead that have needed attention for some time now. I could post several more pages on the things I would like to see done around here, and perhaps I will during the months to come!
Will we get back into raising hogs? I can almost say with 100% confidence that we will raise more pork in the future! I'm just not sure how much and to what scale. There is a good chance we will buy a couple feeder pigs every summer to raise and then butcher that winter. We may wait a while longer before we get back into keeping a boar, 2 sows, and raising pigs for sale, however. We will just have to wait and see what the future holds. I do know, however, that God is with us and will continue to allow us to learn a variety of lessons as we strive to serve Him in everything we do, and live our lives as closely to Him as possible!
Hello there! I had to chuckle at my vision of you doing your ninja stealth moves to sneak up to the trailer!
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