Swine

The newest and most exciting thing to happen recently is that we went over to the Mounts farm last Sunday and purchase 3 Duroc pigs. Fall is usually the time for butchering pigs but we will be purchasing ours and doing the difficult thing of raising them though the cold winter months.

Wikipedia says of the Duroc that it "is an older breed of American domestic pig that forms the basis for many mixed-breed commercial hogs. Duroc pigs are red, large-framed, medium length, and muscular, with partially drooping ears, and tend to be one of the least aggressive of all the swine breeds. They also have an excellent rate of gain."

The 3 we are getting are barrows or castrated male feeder pigs for fattening up and butchering.We visited the pigs last week just after they had been castrated and the females of the litter had had their ears snipped as part of their registration process. (I joked with Moshe about snipping his ears so everyone knew when his birthday was.) Despite this it was a great visit and left us all feeling a little more enthusiastic about farming.

The boys an I worked on cleaning up the rooms where we had kept our pig from last year, Sausage Suzie. We are keen to make it a cleaner, safer and more secure space. The bigger challenge will be to create outdoor pens of grazing and training them to follow us to forage for mast in the woods and not run away and get lost. Sausage Suzie spent a couple of nights in the wild and survived but it is not a gamble we want to take again.

K.