Tag: pastured pigs

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The latest batch of pigs will be ready in May (ish)

When I didn’t have as much actual farming to do, I definitely posted more stories on my blog.

Posting on Facebook or Instagram is certainly faster for me, but I want to keep up with the website too.  And homeschool two children, drive the other one to private school, teach Sunday School, and generally be a mother and a wife.  Whew! But I do try.

Christmas vacation gave me some time to make seed orders, make planting plans for the spring and summer, so, I hope, I am not wondering why I can’t manage to have a steady supply of cut flowers and why I don’t have space open for the next crop.

Spring will bring flowers, farmers markets, and pork.  I expect to finish these pigs in May (ish) and you may place a deposit for preorder through my online store.  For details about how much meat to expect, final cost, and other information please visit this page.

The pigs came to the farm in early December, and they are enjoying life in the woods and on the pasture.  My oldest daughter has always been my livestock helper because, well, she is the oldest and the biggest.  At 14, she can now even help me lift heavy things.

One night as she was working frantically on a project for one of her classes, the pigs got out.  We have a driveway alarm so that we have some advance warning that someone is coming down the driveway, and my 5 year old loves to announce the identity of the new arrival.

We heard it go off about 5:20 PM, conveniently just before sunset on a day when temperatures hadn’t gotten out of the 30s and rain was expected.  My son heard the alarm, and yelled, “It’s probably Amazon!” as he scampered to the door to seek the identity of the new arrival.  He has taken pride in carrying in the delivery boxes and enjoys talking to the drivers during this past year of COVID.

Instead of bringing in a box, he yelled, “It’s the pigs!”

The notification that “The animals are out!” is information no farmer enjoys hearing.  My family had cattle, and I remember many calls from the neighbors over the years and the glum pronouncement that, “The cows are out,” from my father, which meant that everyone available was needed to quickly rectify the situation and to keep the cows off of the road.  Whatever else was going on in the house was abandoned until the cows were restored to their pasture.

These pigs didn’t know me well yet, and didn’t associate me with food, and I knew getting them back into the fence would be trickier than the recapture of the pig that strolled down the driveway on Easter morning, 2020, when we, dressed in Easter clothes as if we were actually going to church instead of watching it on TV, were preparing to sit down to watch the service and I got another announcement from the children of an unexpected visitor.  I was able to lead that pig back to her home with a scoop of food while still wearing a dress.

This time was much more difficult.

As to why the escaped, let me say it was entirely my fault and a comedy of errors in not securing the fencing and pen correctly.

I tried to lure them pigs back into the pen with food, but they scattered in all directions when I got too close, including through my flower field, towards the neighbor’s house, and in the direction of the road, although the road is a good distance from the pig pasture and they never got too close.  I am not an athlete and competitive sports has never interested me.  Six pigs running at full speed towards the road motivates me to run faster in ways a race with a human never has.

I asked my husband for help, and I determined that pig-catching was going to require at least three people: one to gently herd the pigs in the direction I wanted them to go  (me), one to hold up the fence (Ella, the 14 year old), and one to turn the electric fence off and on (Scott).  Clara wasn’t home and Luke, the 5 year old, was left to fend for himself in the house.  I told Ella that pig-catching was currently more important than schoolwork.

I remembered numerous farm situations in my childhood I hadn’t thought of in years: family members placed strategically around an area and my father giving instructions that were to be obeyed immediately without question.  Scott and Ella, for a time, questioned my commands (which weren’t always completely correct), but shouting questions across 100 feet of woods in the dark and the rain is highly inefficient.  When pigs are loose, someone needs to be in charge, and as I was the only one present with much animal-herding experience, I needed to be the one in charge.  I informed them that pig-herding called for “Obey first, ask questions later.”

Ella has learned over the years how to help me herd chickens back into the fence by walking slowly towards them, silently, raising her arms in the air, making sure to not crowd them and scare them to make them scatter.  These skills are much more effective with any sort of animal than shouting and running.

However, although now the pigs will follow me anywhere like a pack of dogs,  these pigs didn’t know me (associate me with food) yet, they were scared, and they weren’t sure exactly where they were supposed to go.  The were still in the training pen when they escaped, and their escape introduced them for the first time to the wonders of fresh grass, acorns, and plenty of room to run.  They had no motivation to go back into the pen.

After running across the field a few times (I quickly shed my heaviest coat) after the pigs, I gave up on getting them back into the pen and began trying to complete the repair of the electric fence around the whole pasture.  This involved an hour or so of me wearing my son’s camping headlamp while twisting and cutting wire with fingers numb to the cold.  I had at least done most of the repairs earlier in the week–removed trees and limbs from the fence, tightened most of the wire, and rearranged the fencing around the pen.  I intended to let the pigs out in the next couple of days anyway.

I ran through the woods, attempting to get ahead of the pigs to head them off so they would veer into the fence, while Ella stood by to raise and lower the wire and Scott turned the electricity to the fence off and on.  I stepped in stump holes and tripped over vines, but miraculously didn’t seriously injure myself.

Eventually, we got them sorted back in the fence, and I will make sure to not repeat that comedy of errors next time…although that was a great workout!

I expect these pigs to finish in May-ish.  I have them available for pre-order through my online store.  Non-refundable deposits are $50 for half a hog and $100 for a whole hog.  Please visit this page on my website for details about how much meat to expect and final cost.  If you have any further questions, please call me at 803.465.6666 or email me at onehubcapfarm@gmail.com.

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Summertime, and the pork is ready!

This has been, for everyone I suppose, the strangest summer I can remember.  It sort of seems like this summer began in March and shows no signs of ending.  Instead of having many hours child-free this summer to work while children were at camp, I have had them underfoot, and bored, all spring and summer.  I am thankful, of course, that we are all well and active.

Bacon, bacon, bacon!

I managed to get a butcher date with my processing plant on June 8, and consider myself fortunate that I got my meat back on July 13.  There is nothing like empty grocery store shelves to spur thoughts about where our food comes from, and so there has been an increased interest in local meat.  This is wonderful for everyone, but it does put a backlog in place at the one or two small processing plants accessible to small farmers in South Carolina.  So, I now have plenty of meat in stock, and you may email me with an order, visit me at the Blythewood Farmers Market on Wednesdays from 4-7, or order it from my online farm store. Meat is also available at Buddy’s Country Store on Hwy 321/Winnsboro Road in north Columbia.

Because my children will be going back to school in mid-to late-August in some form (I am praying that it will be what I want, which is private preschool, private high school, and homeschooled middle school–but I guess I don’t know that for sure because they could all have to be homeschooled), I will probably not be attending the Blythewood market much past mid-August.

This year has also been a learning experience with flowers.  I have been selling flowers at the Blythewood Farmers Market but they are also available for on-farm pickup through my online farm store.  I guess one of the few blessings from COVID was extra time at home not spent driving children from place to place that I could devote to soil preparation and planting.  As such, I have a large supply of flowers and I have enjoyed meeting and working with several local florists to help them provide locally grown fresh flowers to their customers.  My flower bouquets last 7-10 days with proper care.

I also have eggs from my chickens available at the farmers market and online.

If you pick up from the farm, I can arrange no-contact delivery for you on my shady porch.

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Online Farm Store

My children are probably tired of me telling them that they are living through a major historical event and they should write down the details to share with their children.  I’m tired of living through a major historical event.

When I wrote my last post, in early March, Coronavirus was still something that was happening somewhere else.  I did put out a bottle of hand sanitizer at a farmers market I attended, but I certainly didn’t imagine that five weeks later I would be forced to stay at home by law.

You know this, you are living it too.

I remind my children to be thankful for our blessings: we have a farm, which means we can go outside whenever we want and not risk encountering any people from whom we might need to distance ourselves.  We have animals and flowers and food.  We are okay, and I hope you are too.

In the reprieve from some of the busyness of daily life, although springtime is still busy on a farm, I have been able to set up a farm store.  At first, I intended to use it to make it easy for people to place deposits on the bulk purchase of pastured pork, but I decided to expand it to include cut flower bouquets and eggs.

On the website, which you can access from the Online Farm Store tab on the homepage of this website, or by clicking here, you may pay for items with a credit card and then make arrangements to pick up the items, no contact, from the farm.

For more information about buying a half or a whole hog, click here.  When all the hysteria began over buying food and supplies (I had plenty of toilet paper at home because we bought it in bulk before all of this), I was relieved to think of my freezer of meat at home from my pigs when I saw the empty meat cases.  Purchasing a half or a whole hog is a way to ensure you have a supply of meat, too.

I do plan to attend the Blythewood Farmers Market on April 22 with eggs and cut flowers, but I am sold out of meat until the next batch of pigs goes to market midsummer.

My farm is located on Muller Road, about half a mile from Muller Road Middle School, convenient to Blythewood and I-77.

Please visit my my farm store for more information.

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Pastured Pork is on the way

After much anxiety on my part, we finally determined that the pigs had grown large enough to be processed. My goal was to have them all weigh at least 200 pounds, and through a mathematical equation that involved hugging the pigs with a measuring tape from my sewing kit, they hit the correct number. 

I parked the livestock trailer, which my father made some years ago for his own beef cows out of scrap metal, and is kindly letting me borrow, in the field with them, and began feeding them on the trailer.  

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We smell a rat with this trailer, but we are hungry, so we will go on…

They complained about this new development, but eventually hunger won out over suspicion, and they climbed on to eat.  I do not have a loading corral, and although I was prepared to build one out of pallets or whatever else I could find if necessary, I knew it would be best for everyone concerned if they went onto the trailer voluntarily.

I have been present for numerous cattle-loading adventures with my father’s half-wild beef cattle, and I wanted to try to spare us all the drama and danger of that.  I remember being afraid that the cows might trample and kill my father.

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If I crawl under this trailer I can still get some feed without having to get on there…

The pigs began eating on the trailer on Saturday, and by Sunday afternoon they were quite comfortable with it.  I did have a few technical difficulties when some of the more enterprising pigs discovered that the feed fell through cracks in the floorboards and they crawled under the trailer to eat instead of going onboard the trailer.

We discovered that they also chewed off some of the wires to the trailer lights and helpfully spit out the connector and the wires in the woods.  (All of the wires were present, so they didn’t swallow any of them).  Mental note for next time is to make sure to keep the wires away from the pigs.

They had an appointment at the processing plant on Tuesday morning, so on Monday evening, after withholding food all day, I threw some cracked corn and some watermelon onto the trailer as an added incentive for everyone to board at once.  My daughter helped me slam the doors on the pigs, and they all boarded without a squeal from any of them, and with no harm to us.

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Farmer’s helper!

We drove to the plant in the (relative) cool of the morning, and the people there calmly unloaded the pigs with plastic boat oars filled with BBs that they shook behind the pigs to encourage them to move.  Once inside the plant, within a couple of hours of their arrival, they entered a chamber filled with carbon dioxide, where they lost consciousness and were then slaughtered.  I am very thankful that my pigs met the end of life with as little anxiety as possible, and that people attended to their welfare carefully from the day of their birth to the day of their death.

My daughters have some apprehension about eating “our” pigs.  I do too, honestly.  But, as I tell them, every time they eat bacon they are eating meat from a pig that would be just as personable as our pigs.  If he wasn’t raised on pasture, he lived in a building where he never saw the sun, felt the rain, rooted in the soil, or took a mud bath.

I got four pigs so we wouldn’t know which one we were eating, and we never named them.  I was also very clear with my children that they were not pets, and that they were going to be dinner.

My three-year-old,  understands the process perfectly: “Yeah! They will eat and eat and get big and fat and then, “Boom!” they will turn into bacon.  Pretty much.  He asked where the bacon was when I returned home with an empty trailer.

I am now begging coolers off of my friends to use to go to pick up the 600 pounds of meat (or more) that should be ready next week. You may come to the farm, conveniently located 3 minutes from Exit 27 on I-77, for your meat.

View our price list by clicking on the “Pork Price List” button at the top of this page. You may also email me at onehubcapfarm@gmail.com. If you are on a mobile device, click on the Menu bar and select “Pork Price List.”

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Pig Olympics

In my house, I add the term “Olympics” to the name of any offending creature who causes me undue exertion.  We have Toddler Olympics when I shop with a tired toddler in a crowded store.  We have Cat Olympics when the cat dashes through our legs into the house from where she has been unceremoniously deposited in anticipation of our leaving the house for several hours. 

Sometimes Toddler and Cat Olympics are combined activities, like when both toddler and cat go missing and I find him with a pair of scissors attempting to remove cat whiskers.  Chicken Olympics occur when the chickens escape their fence and attack a garden full of new seedlings.  

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Happy pigs!

This spring we have added a new sport: Pig Olympics.  Although I can manage the other three versions alone, I need help for Pig Olympics.  I hesitated to write about this pig’s difficulties because sometimes people don’t want to hear about the actual details of the raising of their food, but I decided that you all might be interested in this story and could gain an understanding of pig-keeping.  I only wish it had been videoed for your entertainment, but we could spare no camera operator.

On a lovely Sunday afternoon, after leaving the Ladies’ Tea hosted by my church, in which I sat with 80 other nicely dressed women while we sipped tea, ate goodies, and chatted, I went home, put on farming clothes, and visited the pigs.  I am willing to bet that no one else went from a tea party to a pig pasture.

For a week or two, I had noticed a raised spot on one of the pigs that seemed to be growing larger.  Other farmers told me it was an abscess and advised me to watch and wait, which I did, but it continued to grow larger and began to seem to cause him pain when it was touched.  It expanded from the size of a golf ball to the size of a tennis ball. Although he appeared to feel well, we decided it was time to lance the abscess to remove the pus and the source of infection.

After admonishing the children to stay in the house to avoid adding Toddler Olympics to Pig Olympics, my husband, Scott,  and I headed for the field with some rubbing alcohol, my sterilized dissection knife from college, and a rope.  

We lack any corral or other structures in which to restrain the pigs, and so Scott’s plan was to lasso the pig.  Yes, he used to be quite good at lassoing fence posts as a boy, and no, he hasn’t lassoed anything in 30 years.  

I won’t go into all the details, but we chased that pig around the field for probably 30 minutes trying to catch him.  They will come to food, and they will let me scratch them, but holding them down is another matter.  Unlike toddlers, chickens, or cats, they weigh 75 pounds or more and have no loose skin, long limbs, or fluffy tails I could grab.  I was also more than a little nervous about actually tackling a squealing, muddy, terrified creature with hooves.  I wished my boy was closer to 16 than 3: pig catching is the perfect occupation for a bunch of fearless teenage boys.

Scott did finally manage to lasso the pig, after avoiding, by some miracle, breaking an ankle by stumbling into a pig wallow.   I grabbed the dissection knife, wiped his skin with alcohol, and plunged the knife into the abscess.  (I will not go into the details of what came out, but the surgery was a success). 

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An example of the pig-craters that we did NOT fall into

I poured more alcohol onto the wound, and what I should have done was spray it with Blu-Kote, an antibacterial spray.  I didn’t plan that far ahead, so the pig went over and plopped down into the mud by the watering tank. 

I had a moment of fear that I had somehow mortally wounded the pig, but then I remembered that pigs don’t sweat and this pig was simply hot.  We rinsed him and his friends with water from the hose, congratulated ourselves on our veterinary skills, and went into the house where the children were quite impressed with Daddy’s ability to  lasso a pig. 

Over the next few days, I sprayed the pig with Blu-Kote, and was pleased to observe the abscess decreasing in size.  The pig decided we were friends again: I think he was somewhat relieved that I had ended or significantly reduced the pain from the tennis-ball sized abscess.  Pigs are tough creatures, and I believe he will be okay.