Settling in for another litter
9 03 2008
We brought Delilah, one of our Berkshire sows, inside yesterday evening and she’s spent the day settling in to the farrowing pen. It’s familiar territory for her as this will be her third litter farrowed in the pen and she was quite pleased to move into her nesting place.
Delilah is already impressively large, with about two more weeks to go before she’s due to farrow. By this point in her pregnancy, she’s not keen on walking far or often so she spends most of her time snoozing, although she’s always ready for a chat and a scratch behind the ears. Belly rubs are also appreciated. To get the piglets up to a good size and give her enough resources to feed them up to eight weeks, her feed intake now rises to 6kg of food per day, plus vegetable treats.
In other pig news, the first of Daisy’s piglets left for pastures new yesterday with six of the remaining eight being collected between now and next Saturday. We’ll keep a boar and a gilt to breed from in future.
In other pig news, the first of Daisy’s piglets left for pastures new yesterday with six of the remaining eight being collected between now and next Saturday. We’ll keep a boar and a gilt to breed from in future.
I thought you were keeping two of them. So will Graham still be bred ? I was reading boars can only be breed for 30-34 months.
I know Dolores is being sold, or will end up dinner.
We have four breeding sows—Delilah, Doris, Dolores and Daisy—at the moment, plus one working boar—Graham. We’re keeping one of Daisy’s gilts to replace Dolores and one of her boars to give us two boar lines (due to the difficulties in getting pedigree Berkshires this far north in Scotland).
Boars have a working life of three to five years as they get too heavy to use on gilts and many sows. They can also suffer leg problems, while their fertility starts to decline. However, these effects are most noticeable in commercial herds where the boar is worked hard. So we’ll just see how it goes.
Ideally, we’d get at least two more years out of Graham, with the new boar coming into use around 10-12 months of age. That would give us an overlap of a year between the two.
There’s nowt as cute as piglets!
Will they all be ending up as dinner or will they be sold on for breeding purposes? I have absolutely no knowledge of pig keeping other than mini-pigs kept as pets and that’s an entirely different subject, obviously.
We’ll keep back two of Delilah’s litter to raise as porkers for slaughter in November. The rest will be sold, almost certainly for pork. We’re in the midst of deciding whether it’s worth continuing to sell pedigree animals for breeding as people generally aren’t prepared to pay the extra money.
It’s a difficult decision to make as we breed pigs to produce meat for ourselves, preserve a rare, traditional breed, supply a few friends with pork and then to cover the costs of those three things. If we stop selling breeding animals, we lose our second reason for keeping them.
However, if people aren’t prepared the pay the real value of a top quality, pedigree animal then I don’t see much point in supplying them — especially when they’ll then compete against us, undercut us so they can dump unwanted piglets and they don’t have to rely on pigs for their living (most people buying stock from us have the luxury of “proper” jobs with pigs as a hobby).
We’ve happily paid £300 for a very good, proven breeding sow and £100 each for good breeding gilts from breeders further south, but we find it difficult getting more than £60 locally for the latter ourselves. It’s not that we’ve paid over the odds, more our location.
If we were further south in Scotland or well into England, we’d get more money for our animals (and pork) as there’s a larger group of people who value quality. Up here, though, most buyers think cheap is best, although there are a handful of notable exceptions.
Ahh too bad about that. Well at least Graham will have lived longer than most boars. I hope his son is as nice tempered. I have heard conficting accounts on how long a female pig can breed, from two to four years. Then seeing a show pig at ten years old, breeding with a large group or I thought a large group of piglets. Well I know in the US a guy was using his berkshires to take care of apple pests, by them eating the fallen apples up. Too bad you can’t hire them out to do that.
Sows can have a much longer working life. So long as they keep producing good-sized litters of healthy piglets that all survive to weaning, then we’ll keep them on.
At the end of the day, though, the pigs have to pay their way so if it starts costing more to keep an individual pig than it brings in, then it will have to go.
Ahh okay, thanks. So they breed until they can’t keep themselves. Then they are sold/or slaughtered. Or they die in birth. Or from sickness. Or just old age from the few and rare farmers who retire them, but don’t keep a working farm.
We don’t have the money to run a retirement home for pigs. We give them much better conditions than on most commercial farms, keep them outside, don’t push them hard through the breeding cycle, don’t automatically cull them at set intervals because it’s “not economic” to keep them longer, don’t cull them if they’re ill or injured but it’s “uneconomic” to get a vet in, and look after them very well. But let’s be realistic, they have to pay their bills and that means they have to bring in money.
There may be a few rich people who can indulge themselves by keeping farm animals until the “natural” end of their days (and I know of a vegetarian who keeps “rescue” sheep in this way), but for the overwhelming majority of smallholders, crofters and small farmers that’s not a viable or realistic option.
We look after our animals, treat them well without turning them into “companion animals” and then we eat them, wear them, and make useful things from them.
What a shame you can’t get what they’re really worth, especially considering that you don’t just see them as “produce”, if you know why I mean.
It’s very interesting learning about the different aspects of crofting. Thanks for the in-depth reply
Sorry, didn’t mean to upset you. I know I didn’t mean you at all. Your like a Buddhist of pig farmers. I know one other place here, that takes in rescued farm animals. But is a like a petting zoo/farm for children. I think even had pigs at one time, rescued female that had piglets. I think they had her for quite a while. Even had a bear.
Another place I know has rescued goats, and chickens, and a turkey. But it to is a petting zoo. I know a lot of shelters
don’t allow rescued farm animals to be used as food. Sorry about the double post.
Don’t be so gosh darn happy about wanting everything to have some kind of easy life, what kind of world do people live in these days? You should see how much we spend on animal shelters, if an animal is wild it’s a tough life, mother nature was everything until we came along. You could rescue a billion animals right now because of the poisons and overpopulation of man and woman in general. I quite buying commercial meats years ago and the meat I eat comes from people who loved the animals.
Here is a local farm to me that is somewhat related to stoneheads gig, his beef and pig are awesome. http://www.fountainprairie.com/