Pigs come next

While the garden can provide many of our food needs, omnivores like humans need protein, the kind of protein that only some good meat can provide. (sorry, vegans, that's my humble opinion) Gardening is very rewarding for the "Gatherer" in our family, but the "Hunter" in me wants something like venison, wild bird, and of course some bacon.

For the new "hobby farmer" I believe that pigs are a good second step. If you can keep chickens alive, why not try a pig or two? If you buy a piglet that is eating grain and drinking water, you should have about 5 to 6 more months of care until it is time for the one way trip to the butcher. Actually, it's a round trip, but the pig won't enjoy the return trip that much.

We've tried many feeding methods for our pigs, some worked and some I won't try again.

"The Chinese Super Buffet Pig" - I remember as a kid, my father bringing home buckets of slop for the pigs from a local Chinese resturaunt. The pigs loved it, lo mein, soy sauce, rice and hundreds of chop sticks. Yes, hundreds of chop sticks ready and willing to be swallowed by our pigs. So as you can guess, Dad and the kids had to sort through the buckets of slop to find the countless sticks. I guess I made up my mind really early that raising a pig on chinese chop suey wasn't going to be for me.

"The Gerber Baby Food Pig" - A few years ago "The Gatherer" was volunteering at a local food bank and she came home telling of the truckloads of food that was being thrown out each day. Some of the food at the food bank was just no longer fit for human consumption. So I drove to the food bank and came home with a truckload of pig food: crackers, spaghetti sauce, pastries, fruit juice and lots of baby food. So for the next few weeks, at every feeding, I stood in the front of our small barn opening dozens of cans of food, pouring all kinds of unknown ingredients into our pig’s trough. Do you have any idea how many jars of baby food it takes to fill a five gallon bucket? I can, too many. Another down side of feeding pigs this way was all the garbage that it produced. A small mountain of filthy tin cans littered the barnyard despite my best efforts to keep them under control. Need I say more? We gave up on feeding this way, it simply took too long and made too much garbage. Most importantly, we realized that we were feeding our pigs things that we wouldn’t have wanted to eat ourselves.

These are just a couple of pig experiences that we have had, I'll add more in a future blog. Happy hogging.