Selling pigs

Well, we have now got rid of all our piglets, and even one of our sows, Wanda.

We put some pallets in the back of the Toyota, and drove the last of the piglets around to sell.

When we got into pigs, there weren't any others around. Now, there are three pig operations in our village alone. We believe in diversity as the key to a good local economy, so we have decided to sell up before the market becomes saturated. We will still raise a couple feeder pigs each year for ham, bacon, chops, etc. but we will no longer be in the breeding business.

It was very sad to see Wanda go, but not as bad as it will be when we sell our boar, Amigo, who sits on command and runs up to be petted whenever anyone goes over to the pen.

Oh well, such is life. At least we'll still have the rabbits, who are the easiest animal in the world to raise.

Johnson Grass

On one of our foraging expeditions we decided to get a load of Johnson Grass. Abe had been reading online about it, and it turns out that it is farmed as a hay in Europe, from where it originates. We had always assumed that this was an unwanted (and impossible to get rid of) weed, but if you process it correctly it's pretty good, sitting at 13% protein. The issue with it is that it contains a lot of prussic acid, which can be bad for animals in high dosages. However, if you leave it to dry and make hay out of it, all the prussic acid disappears. What's great about it is that there's a a lot of it, no one else wants it, and you can collect a truckload in no time flat. We will definitely be getting more of it to store for winter, alternating it with loads of orchard grass.

Gathering

We have spent several days over the last month gathering food for the animals. We collected a couple of truckloads of Mesquite, which is high in protein and both the pigs and the rabbits love it (we ferment it for the pigs). We will also be grinding some of it up into flour for our own use.

Plus we cut and dried a truckload of alfalfa. A friend of ours has a patch that we can cut in exchange for some rabbit meat. Abe uses the scythe to cut it, I pile it up and load it into the truck, Leo chases frogs, and Nico sleeps (that little one of ours is very lazy!). At home we lay it out in our old driveway to dry and then make little bales by compressing it in our ice chest and tying it up. We will be going and cutting another load this week. We hope to store enough over the summer to last us through winter and dry season.

We give the rabbits and pigs a bucketload of grass and weeds each day from the garden. Even though the pigs can get it for themselves, they still like us to give them some - I guess it makes them feel special.

This little piggy went home with us

Pigs have always been on our homesteading agenda. The original plan was to get our feet wet with a couple of feeder pigs in Spring 2011, and then maybe get 2 or 3 breeder sows and a boar the year after. A great plan, and only one hitch so far - it got jump-started.

Abe was talking to a guy in the village who mentioned he had some piglets and was about to take them to the market. Abe naturally asked to see them, and 5 minutes later he had arranged to come and pick three of them up the following day or so. That was Thursday.

We went from his house to a nearby town to get some sacks of feed, a nipple that the pigs drink water from, and a few T-Posts. That afternoon, we began work on building a corral and house for the newcomers.

By 3 O'Clock Friday afternoon, we had finished the remesh pen, the water and feeding system, and the hoop-house, which we filled with hay for bedding. So we went to the village to pick up our pigs.

Joel caught them (not too hard as they lived in a pretty small pen) and lifted them up. Abe held up a feed sack under them and pulled it up over the pig. In the sack, they were fairly calm and couldn't run around. It was funny to see these feed sacks with a pig nose sticking out of them!

We took them home and let them loose in the pen. They were over the moon - they had never seen grass before and were immediately rooting around. We were in the pen with them and Leo just loved it. The hardest thing about the whole thing was getting him to leave.

Abe checked on them a couple of times in the night. The first time, they were bedded down outside the hoop house, so he picked them up and threw them into the hay. The next time he went to check on them, he couldn't find them anywhere. The giveaway was the fact that the straw (where they had buried themselves) was snoring.

Now all we have to do is put up some electric fencing, so that they can pasture. We plan to make the fences follow the contours of the land, so that when the pigs are rooting, they will actually be doing the foundation work for swales.

First thing Leo said this morning was "See pigs?"
"Sure. Let's go. How many pigs are there?"
"Three."
"That's right, one for papa, two for mama, three for Leo."
"One Nicky?" (Nicky is what we're calling the new baby at the moment).
"No baby, Nicky's going to share mama's pig."
"Poor Nicky."

For more photos, click here.