Porcine Adventures

One of the best contributors to a homestead farm are the animals—from chickens that eat garden and kitchen scraps and turn them into eggs and compost to sheep that can harvest their own hay in the summer and fertilize the fields at the same time. But nothing quite compares to having some good pigs on the farm. I’m not talking about the two or three pigs kept on cement in the lowest level of the old barn. No, I’m talking about pigs that are allowed to fully express what pasture-master Joel Salatin calls “pigness.”

The porcine aspect of our farm began as an experiment with two feeder pigs. We brought home those first adorable, 40-pound squealers—all ears, tails, and snouts—in a large dog kennel. This proved an interesting endeavor, for the latches on the old plastic kennel were hardly worth their mention, so my sister Kara spent the long drive home holding the top of the kennel down to avoid loose piglets inside the family minivan. We have now graduated to moving piglets in our farm truck, but to this day we lash down the back hatch of the truck topper with some baling twine, just in case those piglets get creative back there.

Pigs, as many farmers know, are extremely intelligent. Some argue, and I agree, that pigs are the smartest domestic animals. Sometimes this works in the farmer’s favor…and sometimes it doesn’t. But it certainly cannot be disputed that pigs know what they want and usually don’t forget. One thing pigs want is grass.

Our first use of a pig’s natural love of grass (and all the roots and grubs that live underneath) was for reclaiming garden space. Each year, we would fence off another large patch of ground, let the pigs work their magic, disk and harrow the soil afterwards, and have a new potato, squash, or sweet corn patch for the next year. After several years of hog rotation in combination with green manure crops and other composted animal manures, we were satisfied with a hearty three acres of fruit and vegetable production. Moving the pigs out to pasture, then, made sense for us because they provide nutrient-rich manure that helps grow top soil. However, we did not want to hold the pigs in any one spot for the entire season—leaving the pasture looking more like a cratered moonscape than, well, a pasture that our herd of sheep might find pleasurable.

Kara had heard that pigs could be trained to respect an electric fence. Really? Very little seems to stand in the way of a pig. As Eileen, a fellow area hog raiser once noted, “When pigs come in contact with an object, if they can’t eat it, they’ll destroy it,” so one or two strands of electric wire seemed small potatoes for pigs…or at least our pigs. Then we made a homestead technological breakthrough. Kara uses ElectroNet mesh fence with push-in poles to create temporary paddocks for her sheep. About hip high, this black-and-white fencing is highly visible, provides something of a physical barrier, and delivers short electrical pulses at multiple levels.

The older piglets soon learned the perils of the “biting fence,” once they had graduated from their initial hog panel refuge. They’d stand in a clump in the middle of the pen, staring at the fence…daring each other to bite it.
You do it.
No, you do it. I double dare you!

And then one would nonchalantly waltz up to the fence, open its toothy little jaws, and SQUEAL! One or two tries of that, and the piglets were cured of challenging the new fence. For a few batches of pigs, this method worked amazingly well. But, remember what I said earlier about how smart pigs are?

It didn’t help that our most famous pigs started in the house (please remember, this was not my idea!). The neighbor’s sow had 14 piglets…too many for her to manage, so Kara brought two of them home as “bottle pigs.” One piglet was white and soft, and the other was coarse and black. On the farm, we try very hard not to name the animals we know will end up on the dinner table, but with bottle animals…it’s pretty impossible. So we had Salty and Pepper. They became quite the characters all summer. As little piglets, they would climb up as high as they could on the dog fence, squealing as soon as people came near—because people brought bottles and bottles meant dinner!

“They are such pigs!” Mom laughed as she and I each held two bottles amidst squeals and squirting milk replacer, which usually ended up all over our pants as the piglets tried to take each other’s nipples (because yours must be way better than mine!). Pigs really are quite talented at being, well, pigs.

When the bottle pigs were reintroduced to the rest of their siblings after weaning, Salty was unfortunately picked on by the bigger piglets. She injured her back, but after confinement and veterinary care, she fully recovered and spent the rest of the summer in her own personal pig spa, where adoring farm patrons paid many visits to enjoy her full and felicitous expression of pigness.

Pepper, on the other hand, melded very well with her porcine compatriots and became something of a ring leader. She was a sharp pig, which we have found to be a common trait of the black pigs we’ve raised. She would look at you with those beady eyes, shaded behind innocent, bristly lashes. Pepper had plans.

One of her plans was to reach the swamp not too far from the paddock that she and her fellow pigs—now hogs by virtue of their size—were enjoying. It was a hot day and, despite available water, that swamp was simply irresistible. If only that darn electric fence wasn’t in the way. Pepper eyed the fence, then the swamp, then the sod in her paddock. I can just imagine the moment when she and the other eight pigs lined up along that fence and began systematically throwing sod onto the ElectroNet. Not just a little sod, either, but two feet deep of it, six poles wide. Under such weight, the fencing simply bowed over, and the pigs had themselves a lovely highway back and forth to the swamp.

It was Saturday. Kara was servicing an estate produce garden on Lake Owen, and I was with our intern, Kelli, at the Cable Farmer’s Market. Mom was home taking care of the morning chores…alone. What happened next has come to be called “Nine Hogs and One Woman” on our farm—a mix of wild dashing, holding back our sheep dog Lena, trying to get in and out of the fence with the ATV, cajoling with feed, water, goodies, anything to get those buggers back into the fence.

This could easily have become a holy terror of porcine destruction, but fortunately the hogs remained curious and civil. But the worst part for Mom was trying to tear off all that heavy sod with her bare hands so the fence could be returned to an upright position to contain the pigs. I had a taste of this myself when I discovered the same pigs had tried to work this trick a second time. Dirt imbedded under my fingernails as I madly threw off the sod, dewberry briars scraping my palms.

Such a frantic act is rather amusing to pigs, and they came over to see what Mom was doing—muddy noses and all. But at last the fence was free, and all the pigs were in but one…a black one, of course. She tried food in a bucket. She tried water. Then, remembering a favorite pig game, she grabbed a feed sack and began to shake it, crunch it, tear it apart. It was too much for the hog to resist, and as soon as it had its front quarters inside the fence, Mom gave it a good whop on the rump and closed in the fence…just as Kara drove into the farm. All the pigs were safe, and Mom was a frightful muddy mess and incredibly exhausted, but that night we laughed ourselves to tears with her tale of heroic porcine adventures.