October 2, 2008
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Piglet Update
There are now 19 piglets out there. Mom’s and piglets are doing fine. Two down and one more to go. Then I will be able to sleep all night long in my own bed without interruption. Pictures to come.
There are now 19 piglets out there. Mom’s and piglets are doing fine. Two down and one more to go. Then I will be able to sleep all night long in my own bed without interruption. Pictures to come.
Comments (4)
Yeah!!!! I hate ask this but what happens next? Do you clip their teeth? How long do you get to raise them? This is so fascinating to this city girl
@standingonthepromises - When they are all done farrowing I will clip off their wolf teeth. (those teeth that would eventually become the tusks if they were left in their mouths. very dangerous for the handlers!!!!) Then they will all get shots of iron to boost them and antibiotics to ward off things like navel ill and infection that is common from normal piglet activities like ears that get chewed and tails that get bitten. We dock the tails of the males to make it easier to pick them out when it is time to castrate them. I will treat the navels of all of them with either peroxide or iodine and then put them back with the moms. At about three to four weeks old I will castrate all of the males unless a customer wants one uncut to use for breeding. Then at five weeks I will start force separating them so that they begin to HAVE to eat on their own. They will still be able to nurse some of the time but they will have to eat most of their nourishment from the slop pail. By six weeks they are totally weaned and they should also be spoken for by then. Then they are picked up by their new owners. A week or two later I can contract with the owner of a boar to breed back the moms so that I can have more litters in the spring. That is what comes next.
So much work put into makin bacon. I trust that you make enough of a profit to continue. I know that my grandpa was a pig farmer (we were not allowed near them because he didn’t want us to make them nervous) but not all the work that went into it (I was 5 when we moved and a fire destroyed the house while they were in town so they sold up the pigs and moved into town since they were only renting the farm and he had a job at the co-op and a father in law who’d help build a house on the lot that they owned).
@standingonthepromises - I don’t make much profit now because of the high price of feed. But Doug lets me continue on a small scale because I like to do it and because it keeps pork on our table. It’s too bad that your grandpa didn’t let you near the pigs because it actually makes them better if they are hand raised. I have found that the more we handle them the fewer piglets we lose at farrowing time and also the better they are as mothers. My sows are so mellow that they rarely go after anyone. Doug is the only one who has trouble going into the pen with them. I think that they sense that he doesn’t like raising pigs. He also doesn’t have much time in the pen with them so they really don’t know him that well. The rest of us handle them from birth on so they know us like they know themselves.