The Sow that Ate my Farm

A news story about PETA and pig castration, full of indignation over pork production realities, got me thinking about my experience of pig farming. I was raised in Suburbia. A very nice, well-ordered suburbia devoid of farms. My grandfather had a farm, which he did not work, he was a businessman, but had a manager who raised cattle and tax deductions for him. My grandfather died and the farm was sold at about the time I would have been put to work there in the summers, so I just had childhood memories of what was really a very attractive Currier & Ives sort of place. Some memories can lie dormant for years, and come back to bite you.

At the age of thirty, I found myself at loose ends following the sale of the family business. With my portion of the proceeds and with the memory and longing for a farm, I went back to school, this time at the University of Tennessee School of Agriculture. I knew what I didn’t know, and figured UT was the place to start realizing my dream of farming. Pig farming, to be exact. Don’t know why pigs appealed to me, but I was aiming to set up raising feeder pigs, marketing to pork finishing operations.

My first encounter, close range, with a pig was at UT. I was surprised at the smell, not just because it was strong, but because the pig smelled a lot like pork chops. Shows a lot about my knowledge of things agricultural.

In due course, I felt I was ready to buy a farm, did so, and as there were already folks living there, worked out an agreement for them to work for me. First big mistake. We moved into a house in Chattanooga, where we had grown up, so as to have good schools for our children. Nobody not living on a farm can succeed at farming. Lots of good folks who do live on their farms go belly up, and I learned the hard way.

One of the lessons I learned was that sows could be even more difficult to deal with than women. I bought a bred sow that had several litters to her credit already. To jump start my piglet production, you see. The good old boy who sold me the sow was honest enough to tell me that the sow was “bad to eat up all the food.” She hogged food, you might say. I could believe it, as the sow’s back came up to my hip, and her head looked with its long jaw like an alligator with floppy ears.

I knew the answer to rationing her feed, however, had a drawing from a fifty-dollar ag book showing a pig feeder, built of wood on skids, separate stalls for each pig with a feed trough across the front. The first time I tried this out, with my sow and two nearly full-grown gilts in the stalls, Big Mama, as I dubbed the sow, cleaned out the food in front of her with one gulp, then swung that massive head from side to side, splintering the wooden sides of her stall, and scooped up her neighbors’ food as well. On the plus side, I had a good load of kindling to carry home. Thereafter, I fed the sow in the barn, the other pigs in the pen.

The time came for the sow to farrow, and of course it was right at Christmas, with an ice storm raging, and I had to stay home with my family. Or else. My then wife was unsympathetic to the needs of the sow. I trusted to my tenants to take care of things.

I made it out to the farm a day after Christmas, to find my sow with six piglets. There had been 15 born live, but the huge old sow had rolled on the rest. The tenant had managed to save the six, but that was it. The piglets had plenty to eat, at least, and thrived, growing fast.

I went out to the barn one day with some clippers to nip off the tails of the piglets, since once they went to the finishing floor, tails would lead to problems, like being bitten and getting infected. I had read all about it in Pork Production 301 at UT. Thinking to avoid unpleasantness with Big Mama, I gathered up two piglets out of the big stall and retreated to the far end of the barn to nip the tails. The piglets did not like the clippers, and squealed quite loudly. Big Mama heard and began to make a fuss. In fact, I heard the sound of splintering wood and the groaning of nails letting go. I hastily returned the piglets to their mother, who had destroyed the top two boards of one side of her stall, and abandoned the idea of docking the other four piglets. Hell with them, let the finishing floor people deal with it.

Once they were weaned, I sold the pigs to a farmer up the valley, and found somebody going to the stock sale that weekend who would truck Big Mama off to be bought up by a sausage company. The proceeds of the two sales didn’t even pay for half the food that sow had eaten, not to mention the destroyed feeding rack and the repairs to the stall in the barn.

All my pigs now sold, I resolved to cut my losses and go back to working at a 9-5 job, selling the farm and leaving farming to real farmers. I still think about Big Mama and the look in her piggy little eyes as she was chewing through the 1 X 8s of her stall, enraged by hearing her progeny squeal. If I could squeal, that memory alone would make it happen.