The pigs are getting to be ginormous!  Came in from the city the other day and they had managed to knock over their feed bin.  It was low on food and (as pigs are want to do) tried to simply muscle their way deeper in to it to get at the feed.

While they won’t get on a scale, I am estimating comparing them to our dog – who weighs about 100 lbs – that they are easily that large.  They love to be scratched (which is something akin to petting a muddy football) and when they come up and push into your legs wanting attention, there is no doubt about their size.  These critters are little tanks!

This video shows Bossy rooting around.  The pile she is on is a HUGE pile of composted horse manure that was here when we bought the place.  It is loaded with grubs and the three of them have been having a time turning the whole pile over with their snouts to get at them (of which I am most grateful!).

Bossy is up to her nose in Sh..!  Go Bossy go!

The pigs have been an adventure and a lot of fun.  Because of the Hampshire markings we have named one Oreo, because she has a white stripe across her shoulders and a black front and back, Double Stuff, same markings but wider, and Bossy…. well, because she is.  Doubles came down with a respiratory infection about a week or so after we got them.  So Farmer Jon got to be a Vet.  2 a day injections of penicillin.  If you have never heard a pig scream…. wow.

Since then, and now that the weather has been a bit more hospitable they are out hopping around.  Bossy doesn’t move around a lot – lazy pig – but the two cookies are almost Siamese Twins.  They never leave each other’s sides.

Pigs don’t sweat, so they need to have a way to stay cool.  We dug out a pit and filled it with water and it has become a great wallow for them to play in.  With the wet weather the flies and mosquitos have been pretty vicious and it seems that they have learned how to cover themselves in mud and that keeps them from getting all bitten up.  Pretty genius for a hog!

Basil the dog gets sooooo jealous when we are out feeding them.  We have let her in on occasion to play with them and they all seem to get along fine.  However, once the excitement has worn off and all it seems that they are doing is trying to bite each others ears, its time to separate them.  Today they all had a great romp in the mud!

We have had better than a week of rain.  Then this morning we woke up to 2 inches of snow on the ground.  The farmers and the animals have been suffering from a good case of cabin fever.  This afternoon it warmed up some and it didn’t take long for the critters to get outside.

The chickens were out chasing bugs.

During all of this lousy weather, one of the pigs (that we named Double Stuff after her extra wide strip of white across her shoulders) came down with an upper respiratory infection.  Whether she was sleeping or awake her breathing sounded like a loud snore.  After a call to the vet, Farmer Jon got to spend a week giving her penicillin injections.  She didn’t like it much.  On a happy note though she is up and around and starting to gain weight again.  I am, however, happy to have had my stint as a farmer vet over.  If you have never heard them before, piglets can scream like you can’t believe.

Now that the pigs are getting a bit older, they are starting to explore their surroundings.  Their pen is right next to our big compost pile.  Zina caught these pictures of them exploring this new mountain to root around in.  The hams get bigger and bigger!

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!

Pigs in a blanket!  Mom its COLD out here!

A future ham in the making!

So not only did we get confirmation that the greenhouse has shipped, our feed store also tracked down some pigs for us.  It has been quite an ordeal and I had kind of written it off.  There is a very serious disease infecting pigs across the country and it did in the first litter we had reservations for.  Not wanting to lose an organic feed order, our feed supply store tracked down 3 weaners and they are delivering them next Wednesday!  We are hurrying to finish up the pen and are saving up our back to unload 2000 lbs of feed into our basement as well.  Other than the electric wire to keep them from tearing up the fences we are done.  Bring on the porkers!

T minus one week!

T minus 5 months!!

The poor piggies!  There is a virus of some sort that has come in from China (figures) that is decimating hogs here in the US.  It causes some sort of diarrhea which causes the pigs to become dehydrated and die.  We had assumed, wrongly, that it was mostly confined to industrial CAFO production.  It turns out that it is very pervasive.  Homestead flocks are getting wiped out as well.  The breeder we were going to use for our 3 little pigs had a litter of eleven and they all died.  Most of the Craig’s List breeders don’t have any either.  Even the pigs being bred for show that 4H kids buy are dropping like flies.  I have several messages in to some potential suppliers but it will be a crap shoot.  So we have the waterers, the feeders, the electric fence, the pen built and the shelter that damn near killed me, but no pigs.  Not a big problem as it has made the spring work a bit less than anticipated.  We will just take them as we can get them.  But for now, hopefully the vets can get a handle on this thing.  If I haven’t mentioned it before, Globalization sucks m’kay.