A lot has been going on at Biggers' Farm since my last post. In August our sow, Dirty Gertie had an astounding 16 piglets in her first ever litter. Little pigs need it to be about 90 degrees in their nest when they are born so we used a heat lamp even in August. Sadly she had the piglets before I could put up a board, so she smashed a few lights after a few days. The lights worked their magic though and kept the pigs warm. We let her have them in a shed that was closed in on 3 sides. She successfully raised 12 of the piglets who turned out to be super healthy. I did learn that sows will sometimes snap their piglets and I think this is what led to the loss of 2 of them. One has to understand that 16 piglets is a huge litter for a first time mother and she only has 14 teats. I suppose if we had intervened and stole two of her piglets away and bottle fed them we might have saved one or both. It can be hard to make that call thought when you have no idea how many she has with her and you cannot disturb her for fear of exciting her and smashing the piglets.   

What was also amazing was the demand for piglets. We had so many calls and people wait listed. I heard one old farmer say that people were going back to the old ways and raising hogs and such. Matt and I were both surprised that half of our piglets went to be breeders instead of being raised for meat. Apparently there is a shortage of piglets around so folks are having to breed them up. Hopefully we will get Gertie bred in the next month or two and get more piglets.

Late summer saw us getting back into trout fishing. We had been meaning to for quite some time but always seemed to be too busy with building the house or running the farm. After going hiking and camping for a few days we found a spot where the fish were just jumping like crazy so we came back with poles and caught some nice stringers of trout. This Spring is going to see us doing more fishing because sometimes you just have to take the time regardless. With local trout being $13.95 a pound at the grocery store, it doesn't take much for your fishing license to pay for itself.

Another exciting event of late summer was our Dexter bull going over a fence and beating up the neighbors much larger bull. Of course he them proceeded to breed some of the neighbors cows. As a result Hank is in his own special field fence lot that will soon have an electric wire around the top. The odd thing is that these two bulls had been fenced next to each other at different times over the last 2 years or so. If he had not come home we were seriously catching him up in a trailer and taking him to the stock yard. Hank didn't act up again after that incident so we have kept him. Of course we have new calves this year. The day after Christmas, Bessie gave us a bull calf. We would like to sell him as a Registered Dexter Bull for someone to use as a breeder rather than raise him for beef but that really just depends on demand. 

At the moment we are just trying to get through with the house building. This summer we had some delays related to family members health and saving some money up to continue. With the holidays over we can now focus on the house, farm, and writing. The coming weeks will bring about the butchering of our 2 year old Dexter steer. I hope to preserve the hide with the hair on and plan on rendering beef tallow as well. Unfortunately I ran out of lard because we didn't raise a large pig this year due to just having too many things going on at once. I am also excited to finish my novel enough to turn it over for people to read. Over the last few months we have released a homesteading guide on chickens and one on cattle. The cattle one was a lot of work and research. It took a long time to get photos of 30 different breeds.

I realize that this blog has not been updated for a long time. I appreciate those of you that continue to read even thought I have been anything but reliable in the frequency of posts. The last year has been particularly hectic but things are beginning to calm down and I hope to get on a regular blog posting schedule. Perhaps every Friday after this post? Let's just say that for now.

Hope everyone had a good holiday. Now let's look forward to spring and bountiful gardens.

Well it has been a long time in between blog posts, but that has been because we have simply been so busy on the farm. Spring came early to the mountains of North Carolina, so we really didn't get much of a winter break.

We have been working on the house a bunch. Most of the light fixtures are in, but the biggest news is that we have a brand new hardwood floor now. We went with locally milled #2 Hickory in 3-, 4-, and 5-inch widths with Southern Cypress in the bathroom. Neither of us had ever put down hardwood before, so it went pretty slow. Hickory is the hardest domestically produced wood for flooring, so the cheap hardwood flooring nailer we used jammed a lot. A whole lot. Our best day we put down around 150 square feet, which is about half the rate of a professional. About as good as we could expect to do. The Southern Cypress was very easy to put down, as it is much softer. We chose it for its superior water and rot resistance.

A few weeks ago, we bought 4 jersey/holstein cross dairy calves. I know I have said before that we were not going to do that again. I wish I had heeded my own advice. We lost 3 of the 4 to E-Coli. Matt and I spent over a week tube feeding and giving large doses of antibiotics to no avail. This was one of the most heartbreaking times I have had farming. We did absolutely everything we could, but it hit so fast. A calf would be fine one day, and the next morning unable to take milk. I found it interesting that the youngest calf was the one that made it. We got him off the farm when he was hours old, while the others were at least several days old. I have a theory that the ones that were at the dairy longer simply had more time to be exposed. The scary thing is how antibiotic-resistant things like E-Coli have become. Dairies use antibiotics in almost everything they feed a calf, so when they actually need them, they simply don't work or provide little relief. So, lesson learned. Commercial dairies are never getting any calf business from me again. I took too much of a loss, and the suffering and loss of life was too much.

On the bright side, we sold off two of the older Jersey/Holstein steers and bought two nanny goats and their four kids, and a 5-month-old Black Baldie heifer we have named Panda. Hank the Dexter bull is very curious about the new lady in the pasture. Unfortunately, we have her put up in a pen until she is weaned. We got her from a neighbor whose fence line adjoins ours. The first time he delivered her, she ran through five fences and back home to mama. We are going to leave her in there for a few weeks with all she can eat until she is fully weaned and eating out of our hands.

Bessie the Dexter had a bull calf back in December that has grown off really well. Unfortunately, during the time we were dealing with sick dairy calves, Bessie sprained her ankle and gave us quite a scare. We put her up for awhile, and she got over it, but it was really stressful to have my boss cow hurt like that. I was relieved it wasn't broken. Dexter cattle are such happy little cows that even if they are heavily pregnant (thankfully she wasn't at the time), they will run downhill doing the happy cow dance. There isn't much you can do about it, but it scares me that they will hurt themselves to a possible fatal degree.

We are going into the pig raising business this year. Gertie is over 500 pounds now, and we will hopefully be taking her over to the neighbors to get bred really soon. I tried to sell her because I didn't think I would have the time to fool with piglet raising this year, but I have folks calling me and saying they can't find piglets anywhere and offering $75 a piece!

Back on the house front, we are ordering our solar panels next week. We are getting two panels for a total of 460 watts of solar power. Since all our light fixtures are 12 volt LEDs, even if I have every light fixture turned on, we will only be using slightly more than 100 watts. We still have a few expensive things to buy for the solar, like the battery bank and charge controller, but we are getting there. All told, counting the solar hot water set up, we will have about $1,800 in our solar set up, including some 12 volt outlets in the house. Our television is going to be 12 volt, and I will be able to use the system for my laptop and tablet as well as charging batteries and the cell phone. It will be nice to have some back up power for the chest freezer as well. In a grid down situation, it will at least give me some time to pressure can what is in the freezer. Also, we can have backup power for the electric fence and such.

Oh, and other good news includes a hatch of baby ducks and three or four more ducks sitting!

Last year we raised our first 2 pigs on a ¼ acre lot. We did not put rings in their noses so they rooted a lot but we wanted to clear the area anyway. Unfortunately it was a very wet year and their was a bit more erosion than we anticipated due to a wet weather spring.

We get our pigs from Warren Wilson College Farm. The college only has so many piglets a year so we have to get on a list in January of each year in order to reserve our pigs. The pigs cost us $50 each at weaning and weigh about 35-40 lbs. For that price they are castrated if necessary and have had their needle teeth or milk teeth trimmed. If you just want to raise a few pigs a year for pork, you are much better off buying weaned piglets than raising your own out of a sow pig. It takes a lot of feed to keep a brood pig. If you want to pasture pigs you first need to realize how much space you need per pig. In “The Homestead Hog” it states that 25-35 pigs per acre is a good rule of thumb. I use the lower figure of 25 per acre just to be safe and give them a lot of room to root. This means that you can put 8-9 pigs on a ¼ acre. A single pig can be raised in a lot as small as 34' x 34'. I think that it is better to raise two pigs together than tying to raise one. Pigs are just happier and easier to deal with when they have a buddy. They are less likely to try to escape as well.

This year we decided to raise 4 pigs but we did not want to put them in the same spot as last year. We built a wove wire lot that measures about 60' x 60'. This is a bit small to pasture 4 pigs in but we just wanted the lot to hold them in while they were small until we fixed the fence so that they could graze in the upper pasture which is about an acre. Initially we feed our pigs in a trough once per day. About 3 lbs of grain for every 100 lbs of pig is what we try to feed for the first month or so. After they pigs get a bit of size on them we start to feed them in a creep feeder that 2 pigs can eat out of at a time. They fight a bit but each pig does get its turn because a pig cannot guard both eating stations all the time. We water in a large Fortex tub when the pigs are small. After that we use a 40 gallon stock tank so we don't have to water constantly. Pigs are also notorious for getting in their water and splashing it out to make a wallow as you can see from the photo below.

I find that this is unavoidable and just something you have to deal with if you want to raise pigs. Having an autowaterer or nipple waterer is not recommended for the small scale farmer. The only time I have seen this work out is when the pigs are raised on concrete and the water is sent to a holding pond. On the small farm the pig will splash so much water out to make a wallow that you could very well have a catastrophic water bill or wear out your well pump. I love to watch my pigs when they get a chance to make a wallow but you have to control the situation a bit. I sometimes spray a spot they have rooted up so they can enjoy a good wallow but you don't want them to turn their space into a floodzone.

On our farm we do not use antibiotics unless an animal is actually sick enough to need them. It can be incredibly hard to find nonmedicated feed for pigs. We feed our pigs beef cattle grower, corn, or sweet feed. We feed mostly the beef cattle grower. It cost about half what medicated pig feed does and seems to grow a pig off well and be high quality. To get a good deal on beef cattle feed we have to go to Southern States Cooperative or to the Farmers Co-Op. If you have a cooperative in your area, you can likely get a discount for buying beef feed a ton at a time which can be nice if you are raising a lot of pigs. I encourage you to choose to not feed medicated pig feeds. If you are raising the animals right than you don't need them unless the animal is truly sick. It will take a bit longer to grow a pig off without antibiotics but it is worth it.

We have some wove wire pig fence but pigs can be trained to respect electric. Our pigs lived in their 60' x 60' lot for a few months and the we built a partition so that we could keep the cows out of the upper pasture and graze the pigs. The wove wire lot has an electric wire at pig nose level to prevent them from rooting under the fence and to get them used to electric fencing. There is a gate leading from the 60' x 60' lot to a full acre of woods for the pigs to root in. The acre is a 4 strand electric fence that is normally energized to 10-12K volts but pigs can be kept in less powerful electric fences.

After we turned them out on the acre, our feed bill went down drastically because of all the fresh forage they were getting. We also gather apples that fall on the ground at my grandmothers. Giving the pigs 30 lbs of apples every few days helps as well. That is what is so great about a pig; any household scraps or garden waste you have (besides pork of course) can be fed to pigs. Sometimes produce stands give away produce that has reached the point where people don't want to buy it but it is still fine for pigs. Some people choose to never feed their pigs meat. I don't because I usually give meat scraps to the Great Pyrenees dogs. This is not to say that I think it is wrong to feed pigs meat. Pigs are not natural vegetarians. My father used to raise Russian Boars and they would catch chickens and eat them if one happened to get in their lot.

Traditionally hog killing time in western North Carolina was in November, right before Thanksgiving. Now the winters are so mild that you are lucky if you get it done by Christmas. The reason you want to wait until it is cold is because you don't want the meat to spoil while your cutting it up, you don't want to deal with bugs trying to get at the meat, and you need to hang your pork overnight to let it cool or the “heat go out of it”. Last year we didn't butcher until the week of January 27. Part of this had to deal with the weather and part of it was planning We had never butcher a pig before so we got an acquaintance from the feed store to show us how to do it in exchange for some bacon or “middlings” as they call it around here. Since the pigs were about 9 months old they had gotten too big to dip in a barrel to scald. We heated water in a 55 gallon metal drum that had previously stored grape juice. We put the drum up on concrete blocks and build a fire underneath it. We used two barrels, each filled ¾ of the way. The water was heated overnight. The pig was shot in the head with a .22 pistol and then its throat was cut and the pig was allowed to bleed out for a few minutes. We then lifted the pig onto a stainless steel table we had borrowed from the feed store. In order to get the hair off the pig, we placed burlap sacks on the pig and poured scalding water on the burlap and let it sit for a few seconds. To scrape the pig we used the edge of a knife. If your water is the right temperature, the hair will come out easily. If the water is too hot or the hair just won't come out, you will have to shave the hair off. The pigs we butchered last year were 350 and 400 lbs. It takes awhile to scrape a pig that size. After the pig is completely you can gut it. Since we were working on our house and living in a 1979 18 ft Holiday Rambler last winter, the only place I had to hang and gut a pig was my house which at the time was a shell with house wrap and a metal roof on it. The windows and doors were in as well.

At this a I need to explain that a hog killing in the south can easily turn into a community event/party if you let anyone at all know you are doing it. During the butchering process I had several extra old farmers and relatives hanging out and drinking beer and offering advice and such. We had to haul the pigs up to the house (the road was absolutely horrible and washed out) in the back of our acquaintance from the feed store;s, Gator. We used my grandfather's hundred year old single tree and pulley to hoist the pig up and hang it from the first floor rafters. Don't get ever get rid of old farm implements like single trees if they are usable. I never got to meet my grandfather but I am still using his tools. After the pig was hung up we got a 10 gallon tub to catch the entrails in. After the pig was gutted it was allowed to hang for 24 hours. We did both pigs that day and I am glad we did not wait to do the last one because it snowed 13 inches the next day. At this point I had no idea just how much work it would take to cut up the pigs and wrap vacuum seal the meat. After the first day of packing, it was just me and Matt so it took us 4 more days to process the meat into sausage, vacuum seal, and wrap. It was in the teens and twenties the whole week so there was no danger of spoilage.

I am glad we started raising all of our pork. The difference between homestead pork and that from the store is unbelievable. It is firmer, seems to be less salty, and is much leaner and higher in Omega-3 fatty acids. It takes a bit of an investment to get set up initially but is well worth it. It is nice to walk outside and see happy livestock that is raised in a more natural environment.