| Actually, the dead giveaway this year was the reappearance of Storey's Guide to Raising Pigs, the indispensable reference for everything swine (except, perhaps, for flu). My husband gets full credit for his habit of reading up on a subject before he tackles it, and the pile of material on his bedside table usually gives me a few months' grace to prepare a face to meet the proposal for our next big project.
The pig panels that I fetched up out of the high grass went from leaning against a fencepost to a neat pile on the flatbed, the solar fence charger made its way toward the front of the barn, and there was a daddy-son expedition to remove unused T-posts from the lower pasture. A few weeks ago, the neighbor came over and we hosted Men's Night: The Great Pigloo Move (in which one giant run-in shed gets re-situated in a matter of minutes, thanks to the tractor forks, and the men stand around shooting the breeze for an hour afterward). I listened to the clink of the post-driver and watched my husband lash the panels together and set up the drinker. One night, as we were cleaning up dinner, he said that he had called his pig guy and discovered that there were no feeder pigs (piglets-to-pork) to be had. "But he knows a guy who might have some," he added.
He made some calls. The pig farmer was...shifty. Brusque. Yes, he had feeder pigs. Yes, he'd be around. CASH ONLY. Bring enough. Call when you get on the road. Don't waste my time was the vibe.
Still, yesterday morning DH hooked up the trailer (and the last of the electric fence line) in the rain. We piled the kids in the truck for a trip over the mountain to find the mystery pig farm at the back of the hills, complete with a pond and six happy ducks, barn cats running around the outbuildings, several grain silos and a grinning, bearded farmer in his beat-up Ford pick-up. Talkative man, barrel-chested and full of stories about tire-kickers who never showed up to buy, purchasers who came without cash (the nearest ATM was a good 10 miles away, and only if you drove through town), and the man who asked for 140 pigs only to arrive with a truck that would only hold 40 or so. "And once those pigs are out of the barn, they're not going back in!" the farmer told us in indignant tones. He drove off to get our three little pigs.
"Out of the barn"? But yes. Though I couldn't see it, I was sure that our farmer had a big barn or two full of nothing but piglets. His words gave me pause. The last time we bought piglets, it was from a small farmer and surely the pigs could wander at will, right? Ah. Well. Right, then. He and my husband loaded up three squealing Hampshire-Duroc crosses--black ones, to help protect their skin from sunburn. They had plenty of room back there but stayed together like a three-headed beast, one head looking back, pressed up against each other like that was the way they were used to moving. We paid the farmer and, after more man-chat, drove home.
DH, who will occasionally describe himself as a frustrated farmer, took on the task of offloading the pigs. Sounds easy, doesn't it? Now add their weights--50-lbs-plus--the rain, and the inconvenient, stinky, and slippery factor of pig poop. He did the catching and I got to man the pig blocker and laugh.
So they're home at last. Despite the neighbor child's suggestion, we will not name them "Oinky, Oinky, and Oinky." They are tentative and didn't touch the pan of dinner scraps we left out for them last night. Heck, we're not sure that they've discovered the feeder yet. We know one thing for certain, though, and that is that they like the sun and open air.
I have written elsewhere about raising what I eat and about the emotions involved in bringing our hand-cared-for hogs to the butcher. This time, I know what I'm in for and it looks nothing like Disney. There's the morning trek to check on food and water and to talk to the pigs, the awkward logistics of getting a hundred-pound sack of feed into a wheelbarrow and across the field and into a clean trash can, the nightly stroll to the pen to toss in dinner leftovers. There will be worming day. There will be squeals as the piglets figure out that the white tape at the bottom of the pen zaps their noses. Ugh, I dread mucking the pen out but admit that fresh straw has its summery appeal. And yes, there will be the final meal in the trailer, ramp left down, before we swing the gate shut and bring them a few miles down the road to the butcher. There will also be pork chops and chorizo and bacon on Sunday mornings.
One pig, one meal. Not the meat of a hundred anonymous swine, raised in darkness, slaughtered in fear, shipped across the miles, packaged in plastic. One small act of independence.
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