Circle M Farm

My first experience with pigs was as a child in Pennsylvania. I’d toured an Amish farm in Lancaster County with my family, and we’d been invited to squat by the pigpen and stick our fingers through the fence so the fat pink piglets could come up and suck on our fingers. Which they did, enthusiastically, while my brother and I squealed in delight. In retrospect, I’ve got some serious questions about that visit.

The first is – where was the sow when we were making all that noise around her piglets? Piggy Lou, who initially was very receptive to us walking into the pen to feed her and check out the piglets, is now on guard the moment we open the gate to refill her oft-spilled water or bring her fresh green weeds from the adjacent gardens. A giant among her scurrying offspring, no matter where they are she maneuvers her bulk with surprising speed to get between us and them. (This is a bit of a problem since we still need catch them up to barrow them.) The horses, now pastured next to the pigs, are ever curious about the babies and in typical horse fashion, want to stick their faces in to smell them. But Piggy Lou wants none of that and jumps up to snap at their noses. She is, frankly, pretty scary, and the last thing I’d do is encourage a strange child to stick his hands in through the fence.

Scary mama.

My second question is – where were the teeth on those piglets? When we had our first litter, last spring, I had the privilege of being at work in the gardens next to her pen when Piggy Lou started quietly delivering . The babies were so adorable, pink, clean and sweet-looking, I couldn’t resist the impulse to pick one up and snuggle it. Just as I would with an adorable, pink human baby, I drew the piglet in to nestle under my chin. As soon as its darling tiny muzzle made contact with my skin, the piglet went into a terrifying convulsion of relentless rooting and chomping that threatened to tear into my jugular. Of course, this instinct is what enables a piglet to compete with a dozen others and survive the perpetual fight for a teat. In this struggle, piglets are aided by the needle-sharp canine teeth they’re born with. Within days, their pristine skin bears multiple cuts and scabs in evidence of the hardscrabble fraternity of piglet childhood. Mamma Piggy Lou nursed up eight of these scrappers last year, firmly clamped onto her udder with ham-ends splayed out like a sausage bouquet.

Little Napster, this year’s runtling piglet still being bottle-fed in our dining room, is a much quieter, gentler animal than her four outdoor brethren, but I would nevertheless refrain from encouraging a child to stick fingers near her mouth. In commercial hog operations, where the pigs are reared in cramped concrete indoor pens, canine teeth are cut off ten or so hours after birth because in the boredom of confinement they’ll gnaw each other’s tails off. The tails are also routinely cut off at that time, to prevent the beginning of such chewing behaviors, which, once started, could lead to ever more gruesome occupations.

I’m guessing the Amish farmer had clipped the piglets’ teeth, even though they were running in fresh-air pens. But they still had their tails, because I remember the little curlicues wiggling exuberantly while they sucked on our fingers.

Of course, I’ve had about a million questions about pigs this spring, based on recent experiences in our hog garden. Many of these questions have since been answered in conversations with neighbors at softball games and school awards dinners, major forms of social life in our vibrant little town. None of them raise pigs these days, but many of their families, farming here for generations, kept pigs when they were young. Used to be, here as in most American agricultural communities, every farm had some cows, some pigs and some chickens along with a big garden and whatever row crops they raised for cash. It’s this history that makes me hopeful about our little homestead endeavor at Circle M. Folks lived in such a way for centuries, and there are still plenty of people around to pass on the valuable knowledge their families amassed.

One of the most serious disappointments about Piggy Lou’s litter this year was that out of 11 piglets, only 5 survived. Many were born dead hours and even days after the others. When I asked a local vet about this, he said that it was quite common for sows to tire out before they delivered all of the babies, and that the problem was regularly dealt with by giving an injection of oxitocin in the middle of labor. This hormone strengthens labor contractions and stimulates milk production, and while I might employ it to save a sow’s life, I’m certainly not interested in using hormones as a regular part of my natural meat production!

But when I mentioned the same issue to a grandmother at a recent softball game, she had a different solution. “Oh, that was my job,” she said. “When the pigs started farrowing, it was my job to stay up in the barn all night and pull the piglets.” And she meant it literally. She climbed into the pens with the sows and pulled out the piglets as their feet emerged. When the sows seemed agitated or started pacing around, she reached in and grabbed the babies. She was 8 years old when the task first fell to her.

Another farmer sitting next to us at the dinner overheard our conversation and asked me how big our sow was. “Well, I think about 600-plus pounds,” I guessed, though I really have no idea. I just know she’s more than twice as large as the 250-pounders we’ve sent to the butcher. “We’d never let ours get over 300,” he said, “After that, they were sausage.”

When I read James Herriott stories, my favorite book source for homesteading lore, it seemed that the much-loved sows were older girls kept on the farm for a decade. Pigs will live at least that long. But back in 1940s England, the pigs weren’t bred to have such large litters or such big babies, so I imagine farrowing wasn’t quite as difficult on them.

But given that she’s a more modern lady, it looks like Piggy Lou won’t be our piggy mama next year, unless we can get her on a diet. And it looks like we’ll have to schedule farrowing for a time when we can be home and up all night pulling pigs. Sounds fun!