3 Little Pigs – JAZ Farm has piggies!!

Our feed store in town found us a line on some weaners! They were such a big help. After having all of our sources run dry either because of the litters dying or others not having enough the Byers America Feed Supply came through! They did what had to have been close to a 6 our round trip for us and came back with 2000 pounds of organic pig feed and 3 purebred Hampshire gilts (females)!

Of course, in keeping with the “nothing is ever easy” theme of JAZ Farm (if you want to do something you better WANT to do it, because everything will transpire to make something relatively easy into an ordeal!) we unloaded the little 10 week old girls in an April 2nd snow storm. We put them in their new shelter and they promptly buried themselves in the straw and went to sleep.

Last night was kind of a sleepless night. Nervous pig parents worried that these new creatures that we had only really seen for a few minutes were now out in temperatures down into the mid-teens. We had gone through the same thing with our first chickens and it is amazing the anxiety you can feel dealing with livestock for the first time. You know you think you did everything right but …….

So this morning we were up with the chickens. We took some warm milk, carrots, and regular feed out to them. They must not have slept much because they were just in a pile in the corner. They had some issues with their eyes being crusted but a warm cloth was able to get that taken care of. We kept going out to see them about once an hour to check on them but they didn’t want to move about much. Zina came in after one check and was very worried that one had died. When we got out there you could hear all of them snoring just like humans. All were fine.

Later this evening, after having gotten quite a good sleep, they made their first ventures out to the door of the shelter. They came out far enough just to get to the pot of feed we had left for them. They truly “ate like pigs”! Once their little bellies were full back they went to bed down for the night. Now that they have gotten over the stress of the move and the cold of last night and have gotten a little used to us we will have to see if we can coax them out into their pen to explore.

Of course we only took a “few” pictures of them. Undoubtedly there will be more to come!