The Great Pig Escape
One of the first things we discovered about pigs: They love sleeping under conifers.
Raising pigs is an … adventure.
We weren’t sure if the pigs were a good idea. And in June 2021, it looked like it had been a bad year for farrowing — the farming term we learned for sows giving birth to baby pigs. The farm where we had planned to buy weaned piglets to raise for meat, also known as feeder pigs, had small litters. It didn’t help that Drew and I didn’t want to start with just a couple. No, for our first time raising pigs — ever — we figured ten was a reasonable number. You know, make sure we could do it at scale.
But as our to-do lists for our day jobs and the homestead stacked up, we thought, “Nah, maybe it’s a blessing in disguise that the pigs didn’t work out this year.”
I swear we had this exact conversation over breakfast. By 12:30 p.m. Drew texted me that he had a new lead. By 4:30 p.m. he returned to the house with nearly a dozen 50-pound feeder pigs in a makeshift pen in the back of our pick-up truck.
Farming had just gotten very real.
Farmers Note (April 2023)
Oh, it’s still very real. But before you enjoy some porcine shenanigans, we felt like we needed to jump in and explain why we are not raising pigs right now. The story here lays out a funny, but real challenge of getting into farming: What should you farm?? Going into our first couple years, we knew we were … trying out … different things. In 2021, we had a smooth, easy year. In 2022, we had protein mistakes, sprained ankles, death by anorexia, death by rectal prolapse, death by mystery, and too many of us (yes, all of us) got roundworms. We realized that we couldn’t have a sick pig on the same day we were supposed to be at market or making deliveries. We opted for the veggies.
When in doubt, roll in it. Like pigs do.
To be fair, we were as prepared as any enthusiastic novices could be. The farm had been our dream for nearly 15 years and we’d both studied sustainable ag. We had helped take care of various farm animals before, grilled all our farmer friends, designed rotating pastures, and had already bought all the electric and hard fencing supplies we thought we’d need. We also got good advice from the family we got the pigs from.
The sentence we should have paid closer attention to was, “Put them in the garage or somewhere with hard walls for the first day or two.” But our faith in electric netting was not to be shaken.
With ten adorable, stinky, and spooked critters hanging out in our truck bed, we quickly modified the hard panels of the goat yard to make two smaller sections. There was a six-foot gap — and surely just the sight of electric fencing would keep them in.
Plans are for throwing out the Ghost House window.
Of course, nothing went to plan. The pigs escaped. The goats freaked. We turned the electric fence on. One mistake of many, doing nothing but shocking ourselves and riling up the pigs more. At one point, we ended up hopping on our bikes to chase down a particularly determined piglet who went whee-whee-whee all the way down Boston Location Road before sprinting off into our neighbor’s woods.
From picking up the first pig to getting the last one safely into their hard pen took about three and a half hours. And we probably learned more about pigs in that time than a whole winter spent reading or watching YouTube videos (although both of those activities are also immensely helpful).
The lesson we distilled from what Drew started calling the “Great Pig Escape of 2021”: You can plan all you want and the pigs are still going to get loose.
Though this was the first time the pigs got loose, it was not the last and since we’re getting 20 pigs this year it is bound to happen again.
Living the dream does not go according to plan and that’s why it is an active verb. Plan. Do the work. Adapt. Rinse. Repeat.
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