Category: Pigs

The way it worked is I would drive to the chip pile, get a load, then drive across the farm, through the pasture, and to whatever area Miguel was working to deliver a load of chips. Basically from one side of the farm to the other. Miguel was in the Takeuchi either spreading or piling the chips, depending on what we were trying to accomplish in that area.

The chips do multiple things for us. They stabilize areas where the pigs have made things muddy. The give us good underfoot to walk on with the tractors as we come and go. But most importantly they provide warmth for our pigs for the winter. As a mulch pile breaks down, it generates heat for the pigs. To see more about how this works, check out Walter’s post at Sugar Mountain farm here. If he can make it work at his latitude then I think we can make it work in NC.

The pigs absolutely love the chips. From the moment we started they were into everything we did. Often I’d see Miguel nudging them out of the way, gently of course, so he could keep working. They weren’t worried about the tractor one bit. You can watch them having a ball here on this short video I shot while I was waiting on Miguel for a minute.

One pig I focus on is having a ball with a limb that we knocked down, chewing on it and playing with it. He’s the one that made me get my camera out but they were all pretty funny.

In the end we hauled about 500 yards of chips with our rented loader. That is on top of the 200 yards we’d previously hauled with our backhoe. That’s the equivalent of 56 tandem dump truck loads of chips that we’ve moved to our pig paddocks for their winter needs. We probably have another 100 yards of chips already on the ground at our original pile with more coming in every day. We’ll use the new chips over the winter to top off anywhere we see a need.

The pigs aren’t waiting for winter though.

Now whenever you look into a pig paddock, they are either eating, or they are somewhere on or even in the pig pile. If they get cold at all they burrow under the chips and disappear. The big pigs have carved out terraces and can be found lounging in the chip piles as well. The pigs are cleaner, happier, and warmer with all these chips, which means I’m a happy farmer.

All year we’ve been trying to collect wood chips from various tree service companies. They are routinely looking for places to dump and we had a good spot where they could get in and out easily. We’d managed to get a decent amount of chips but nothing really stellar. Then we ran across an Asplundh crew working right on our road. We made introductions and offered them a few cantaloupes we happened to have on the trailer that day. We of course told them we could take their chips.

“How many loads?”

“All you can bring.”

A knowing smile and, “Ok.”

Next thing we knew, we had two trucks dumping every day, all week.

Our pile of chips very quickly became a mountain. We moved chips with our backhoe every spare minute that we had and still the pile grew daily. We were getting buried in chips. Finally I had to call for help and called over to my old company to see if I could rent a loader for a day.

“What size?”

“The biggest you have or one with a chip bucket.”

“We don’t have a chip bucket but we had a big one just come back off demo.”

I ended up with this.

That’s me standing in front, at 6’5″ barely taller than the tire. The new Deere 944 loader is just coming out, but until it hits the market, this is the biggest four-wheel drive loader that John Deere makes. It’s a beast. We went from hauling chips at 3/4 of a yard per trip to about 8 yards per trip. This thing was literally wider than the road. If you want the details on how big it is, here are the specs.

Although I’ve run them before, I’ve never really run one in production and it was fun to operate a big yard loader with production in mind. The Takeuchi that we keep on the farm wasn’t as tall as the bucket on this thing. And it worked pretty good too, but that’s for part 2 tomorrow.

Excitingly for us, the first of our Large Black pigs is at the processor. This is our new breeding stock and hopefully the basis of our main herd going forward. We are getting the meat back separately so we can sample just the Large Black and make sure that everything is the way we want it. So far I like pretty much everything about them so taste is the final determination. But first we had to get them there.

We only took two hogs this trip (October 1st) as we still have plenty of pork in the freezer but we were running low on a couple of things. It’s good to have some pork already being prepared so as we get low we already have restock on the way.

Both of these hogs arrived on our farm together (hence the tags being so close to one another) The metal tag is the NC required farm ID tag. More on that in a minute.

When I got to the processor I checked in like normal, but when I went to unload there was nobody there to help me. There was an open area for my hogs to walk into, and when I checked my guys, they were standing there waiting on me to open the cut gate and let them off the trailer. I waited another few minutes and saw they were still waiting on me to get off so I opened the paddock gate, the cut gate, and the trailer gate and walked in and behind the pigs. The paid little attention to me and gently walked off the trailer and into the little paddock waiting for them. As I was closing the paddock gate, I looked up and saw the USDA inspector was standing there. The MAN was watching me. Uh oh. He said, “You’ve been working with those hogs to teach them that?”

“Nope, they are just really laid back and I don’t push them.” He seemed quite pleased with how they looked, and how they acted so we chatted a minute and I left. Thank goodness I’d put my ear tags in (as required by law and as I forget sometimes) and that these hogs behaved so well. If you are going to show off, may as well do it with an audience.

I think I might be crazy.

Why else would I order a box of sutures? It’s not like I’m a doctor, or even a vet. Or even a pretend Dr.  I have an entire medical bag full of scary Dr. looking stuff, plus a cabinet in the barn full of medical supplies just like the cabinet they have at the vet when I stop by there.

And now sutures. I don’t even wear shoes that need to be tied anymore. Everything I have is slip on which puts me on par with the kids five years ago, except theirs had velcro and lights that light up when they walk which means they were probably cooler than I am. What am I going to do with sutures?

Well first we had this girl.

She was born with a huge gash from the back of her neck all the way down to her throat. We don’t know where it came from, some times child birth can be rough I guess. We washed her, disinfected the wound, and sewed up the gash with my handy sutures. I don’t think I’d win any awards for the suturing job but we did the best we could with a squirming pig. The good news is she is nearly fully healed at this point and is doing well.

Then yesterday we had this girl.

Spork noticed on Sunday that this pig had a gash in her side while we were giving a tour. It had just happened and I knew we’d need Miguel and Vicente to hold her while she was stitched up so we waited till they were at work to do the job. The silver is where the wound is but it’s hard to see the actual gash. We didn’t do the work in the back of the gator. We have a stainless steel table for that. This picture was on the ride back to her home.

It’s still hard to see the wound but it basically covers the entire area that you see is silver forming a big V. There was a great big chunk of skin just hanging like a flap. The pig acted like it was no big deal but we wanted it sewn up anyway. It took about 25 stitches and some staples to get everything closed up, all the while Miguel and Vicente were holding the pig who really didn’t complain much.

It took two packs of sutures for each of these pigs meaning my box of sutures I ordered is now about half gone. I’ve gone from thinking I was crazy to have them, to now having to order replacements.

Miguel was out checking on the piglets the other day and one little piglet decided he was more interested in posing for pics than rooting around for grubs and food. If you look closely, you can even see the smile he’s giving for the camera.

We received two kinds of pork this past week.

The first is in the freezers. I took 5 pigs to the processor a couple of weeks ago and all that product is back and in the freezers. I had a few of you request to know when the pork was in and I’m finally getting around to posting something. Sorry.

We are LOADED with pork products, including the BBQ that everyone was asking for. I’ll be on the farm this afternoon so just give me a call (919)810-2530 or email at dan@ninjacowfarm.com to schedule a time to get by.

The second kind of pork is less tasty but much cuter.

One of our Large Black sows has had a litter of piglets this past Friday. She had six in total.

One was born with a really large gash on his neck which we’ve been treating. First we had to get all the dirt out which required flushing the wound repeatedly over a couple of days. Then yesterday Spork and I took a little extra time after feeding and brought him out for some home surgery.

It certainly wasn’t the kind of stitching that I prefer (Hi Katie!) but it was serviceable for what we were doing. And considering he was squirming the whole time wanting to get back with his brothers and sisters to get warm, it was ok. Another flush of the wound, then iodine, then stitches, then Alushield. We also gave him a small injection of Liquimyacin to stave off any infection. That will likely require a follow up shot in a few days. Till then we’ll flush the wound daily (I left it open top and bottom). If he makes it a week, he should be good. That’s more than I can say for his siblings as it looks like mom sat on two of them and killed them.

On Monday the 17th, Miguel and I loaded up some pigs to go the processor. We ended up taking 5 pigs total which is about as many as we’ve ever taken at once. But we are in a bit of a tight on pork right now for a few reasons.

1. There has been some personnel turnover at the processor and I suddenly went from about a  weeks notice to get on the schedule to three weeks notice to get on the schedule.
2. I’ve been to gunsmithing school three weeks out of the past six so I’m only able to do so much with the farm when I’m gone all week in school.
3. We’ve signed up a new customer, The Hook and Cleaver Market on Broad Street in downtown Fuquay-Varina. We don’t do much wholesale business because we try to make sure we have plenty of product for our retail customers but Joe has been great to work with so we are selling some of our product to them to have available to you in Fuquay.
4. People LOVE our BBQ. We had a good supply of it and a few customers have come through and cleaned us out. Then everyone else who came afterwards tried to buy more. We have a backlog of BBQ demand and we need to catch up.

With all those good reasons, we decided to take an extra hog while we were loading, especially since we have so many good looking hogs ready to go.

We took hogs from two different paddocks, and then combined some remaining hogs into one paddock to better manage who was with who.

We do everything low stress if possible. These hogs pushed their way onto the trailer which is sitting on the ground when we are loading. Then we sort out who we want and cross load the hogs onto the stock trailer. The trailer is raised so the simply walk off one trailer and onto this trailer. Within a minute or two they are camped out and resting. Very low stress.

Since we combined hogs from different paddocks, we loaded them into separate compartments in the trailer. That way they didn’t fight as they didn’t know each other. Again, low stress.

Pictured here is Houdini, who we’ve written about before. 

We should be back in pork in a couple of weeks. Till then we still have most cuts, just no BBQ.

We keep our pigs together as a group pretty much from the time they arrive to the day they leave. Sometimes they move to a new paddock but overall they stay together. Over the past few months we’d been loading finished pigs onto the pig trailer to take them to the processor. All we do is lower the pig trailer to the ground, open the gate, put a bit of food in the trailer, and the pigs all rush on to eat the food. We simply close the gate, then get in and sort out who we don’t want. The point is we always have more pigs get on than we need.

However over the past few months we’d notice that one Berkshire was refusing to get onto the trailer. She’d eat the food but she just didn’t want anything to do with the trailer, like she knew it went somewhere bad. We eventually moved all the pigs in her paddock to a new paddock and that’s when we really found out that she was NOT getting on the trailer. We left her by herself for a few days. She refused to get on. We fed her only on the trailer. She refused to get on leaving the food untouched. We tried hiding and tricking her. She refused to get on. This went on for weeks. Finally on July 2nd, Miguel got her onto the trailer by some sort of magic and we quickly transferred her to the stock trailer to take her to the processor. I’d not planned on processing her but with her being this much trouble to handle, she earned herself the trip off of my farm. When I arrived at the processor, I got onto the trailer to shoo her off and that’s when she informed me that she really didn’t like me, or anyone who looked like me. She arched her back and growled, just about to charge. I backed off and let the guy working there move her with a sorting board which finally worked. It was like being in the trailer with a bear who was having a bad day.

But get off she did and that was one less problem to deal with. The best thing about being a farmer is your problems taste like bacon.

I took this picture last Sunday when I was feeding the pigs. These are some of our finished pigs having their breakfast, about 1000 pounds of apples and watermelons. You wouldn’t think a 250 pound pig could jump or stand up on it’s hind legs, but these pigs were doing exactly that. The two you see so well in this shot had managed to just about get in this tote, which is about 3 feet tall. The rest of the pigs weren’t quite so spry so I cut open the cardboard so they could nose their way in there. While their jumping ability is surprising, their nosing ability is legendary. You give them a crack they can get their snout into and they have the cardboard ripped open in seconds.

I thought this was a good picture as I caught both the pigs in the tote, just taking their first bite of apples. It quickly devolved into a feeding frenzy just seconds after this shot was taken.