Circle M Farm

I like to tell people that I’m my sow’s baby daddy, but that’s really only half true. The other half, this year, is Tex.

Tex is the handsome, lean Berkshire boar who will be providing progeny via Fed Ex today. He presumably lives in Iowa, at a place called Swine Genetics International, living the life of Riley and exporting excellent hog characteristics to farms all over the world. There are quite a few like him, but I chose Tex because in his online profile he was nibbling on a metal stool and he seemed curious and playful, but not mean. Quite like our Pigalicious, only with the advantage of a pure-bred Berkshire heritage that promises to make our fresh-air pork even more lean and flavorful. Simply put, Berkshires are hot right now (with chefs, anyway) and we want to see what the fuss is all about. Hopefully, Pigalicious will be as eager to find out as we are.

While we keep roosters here for our hens, drakes for our ducks and rams for our sheep, we rent bucks for our goats and we artificially inseminate the sow. Roosters and drakes are magnificently gorgeous and add some drama to our flocks. Rams provide great wool in addition to their other services. But bucks (which we’ve kept in the past) smell terrible and become quickly adept at using their height and strength to leap gates and push over fences. Boars eat way too much to keep around for just one date a year, and importing them (which we’ve also done in the past) is far too much of a rodeo for our limited facilities and abilities.

We’ve currently got a neighbor’s beautiful black-and-white buck locked in with our as-yet-uninterested doe, Wendy. She may not cycle for weeks because it’s not really breeding season here for goats, and so we’ll be holding on to this large, pushy, increasingly smelly animal indefinitely. But pigs are wonderful that way – they cycle reliably every 21 days, regardless of the season. Another wonderful thing about pigs is that they make it unmistakably clear when they are in heat – by standing still. In fact, the actual term for when a sow is ready to be artificially inseminated is “standing heat,” which literally means that all you have to do to get this 350-pound, normally rambunctious animal pregnant is walk up to her, put your hand firmly on her back, and then calmly do the deed while she stands stock still.

Definitely artificial insemination for dummies, and we give thanks every year for how easy it is to insure that we’ll have 9 to 14 little piglets born in June. The whole thing takes under 10 minutes and involves a rubber-tipped two-foot long tube called a spirette and a little squeeze container of refrigerated semen. We’ll get that in a box delivered tomorrow and we’ll deliver it to Pigalicious in the afternoon. To be extra assured of success, we’ll repeat the procedure in 12 hours. Then we’ll wait 3 months, 3 weeks and 3 days for piglets. This is one of the few aspects of homestead farming that is truly easy, and we thoroughly appreciate the technology and research that have made it so.

We trust that we’ll thoroughly appreciate the addition of Berkshire characteristics into our homestead meat production, as well. We’ve experimented with a number of different breeds – from rare heritage Mulefoots (too fatty, they were originally raised for lard!) to a mixed-breed cross of neighbors’ animals and high-tech commercial boars (also sourced on-line). We’ve been really happy with the meat from these cross breeds, but feel that they grow a bit too fast for our taste. If we don’t get them to the butcher at just the right time, we can start to see them put fat on day by day. We have a hard time reducing their food at this point because our animals live outside in the gardens, and when they start to get anxious and look for more to eat, they can really do damage to our fences in a hurry.

A Berkshire is at home on grass. We think they’ll do very well here.

The Berkshires, a handsome ancient black English breed, have enjoyed a revival among gourmet chefs in recent years. Famed for their pink, tasty, lean meat, they grow slower and forage better than modern breeds (which are selected for their ability to grow fast in commercial concrete indoor pens). Since we raise our hogs outside and count on them to forage and clean up the weeds in our off-season gardens, the Berks seem like a better match for us than commercial breeds. Plus, we like to raise heritage animals, whenever they work in our farm’s particular eco-system, in order help preserve genetics that are disappearing. Berkshires are currently listed as “vulnerable” to extinction. We’ll see how they do here.

This Berkshire breeder’s logo seems to imply these rare animals are quite friendly. One friend who raised them last year thought them too friendly – they were forever running up to her for attention and she got scared as they got larger.