Circle M Farm

Gentle readers, I’d like to introduce you to a guest blogger: Shannon Marion, my husband and celebrity pig castrator. This morning he, Jake, our 15-year-old, and a long-suffering vet wrestled down our young boars to turn them into barrows. It wasn’t pretty, to say the least. Here’s Shannon’s version of the story…

Learning The Hard Way: or Pay Now or Really Pay Later

Birthing pigs was a first for Circle M this year. For the past two years we’d simply fattened up, in our gardens, weaned 50-pound pigs from another local farm. Our own cute little piglets were born in June, a great time for the heat-loving piglets, but a busy time for us on the homestead. Kriss was planting all her market gardens and I was trying to open up new pastures, plus traveling a lot for my regular job. We sort of let the castration issue get away from us…

In between farm chores, we read conflicting accounts about when to castrate our male piglets. It is tough learning so much new for the first time! We stay up at night reading books and scanning the web for info like new parents trying to do the right thing. As we read we are also trying to filter out what recommendations are necessary because of the factory farming conditions of most livestock, but not necessary for us. For example, docking pig tails and clipping their teeth are two common practices necessitated when pigs are raised in very close quarters but are not necessary for us.

On the castration controversy, we read everything from laws prohibiting it in Europe, to warnings that if you don’t castrate the boys promptly, you’ll have bad tasting meat. The term is boar-taint, and it really doesn’t sound appetizing. So we determined to snatch up our four little guys and do it as soon as we got around to it. Kriss has been carrying little surgical knives in her purse for weeks, where she put them after buying four from the vet in July.

But today I learned the hard way that it is better to castrate a four-day-old four-pound piglet as opposed to an eight-week-old 50-pound boar. Maybe that seems as obvious to you reading this as it does to me now. But we were busy, and frankly, quite reluctant to attempt the scary new procedure anyway.

We decided to ask the vet to help us, which we generally don’t do if we can help it. He came right out on Thursday, saw the size of the plot the pigs were in and laughed. “Get them in a smaller pen and I’ll be back tomorrow at 10,” he said. “Though I’d certainly enjoy watching you try to catch them in there.” So early this morning, I lured the big momma into the house and put a wire panel over the opening. It took three fence posts, lots of wire and an obscene amount of yelling by me and Piggy Lou both. She was not happy to be separated from her little ones. I thought she was going to lift the panel and the three posts right off the front. Then I lured the pigs to the corner of the garden where I had some other panels ready to surround them. Of course, I chose the muddiest part of the garden, since it contained the gate out. It’s one of those spots that grabs your rubber boots and trys to suck them off, especially two days after a flash flood. By the time of the vet appointment the pigs were covered from head to toe in brown goop.

A perfect spot for pig-plucking.

My job was to grab a muddy pig by the hind legs and lift him into a crate for a quick shower from the hose. Our pigs generally enjoy being sprayed with water, but they don’t enjoy being lifted into the air by their hind legs. Kriss could hear them squealing from inside the house, where she was taking a shower and getting ready to go to work. Once clean, I would lift a pig up again, put his body between my knees while holding the hind legs up and spread apart for the vet to do his work. Imagine 50 pounds of pure muscle kicking and wriggling to get free. I almost fell over more than once. It felt like holding the last rep of a long set curling heavy dumbbells, except that these dumbbells were jumping wildly. Once I had a pig under control, the vet would make two incisions in the scrotum, pop out the testes and cut them free. The pork version of Rocky Mountain Oysters sushi-style for our dogs Sunny and Howie. Next the vet sprayed some antiseptic fly repellent on the incisions and I lifted the pig back over the fence and into his garden home.

We got to do this four times as half of our piglets were male. Kriss swears the vet visit was under 30 minutes, but still my body was soaked in sweat on this 90% humidity day. I was covered in mud and my neck felt like I was rear-ended by a truck. But this was a small price to pay for wonderful bacon that will not taste “boarish” and less aggressive pigs when they weigh over 200 pounds this fall. Plus, who can calculate the value of an education? “Priceless.” Never again will we be too busy to castrate our pigs when they are little. Never again will I put castrating off because I’m intimidated to try a new procedure. No, next time I will know deep in my neck that it is better to pay now as opposed to later. Now if only I can extrapolate that lesson to some other things on the to do list!