The wind came up last evening, blowing stronger and gustier all the time. I had just pulled up in the truck, loaded with 1100 pounds of pig porridge (ground-up oats, barley and peas). Buying it like this, in a big cloth bag which you then unzip so you can shovel the contents into a large number of little bags, is a million times cheaper than going to the feed store. The best hack for this job is a bucket cut in half width-ways. Use the top, it holds the sack open just enough that you can shovel quickly. That bag is still in the truck, bottoming out the suspension, because it was too windy to shovel porridge last night.
The big chickens were paragliding all over the barnyard. I gave them the option to go in the henhouse and some of them took me up on it, though the wind was whistling through the hole the goats made when they used to live there too. I started in on a fruitless search for the staple gun. I thought it could be in the greenhouse.
The chicks live in one end of the plastic greenhouse, and though we tried to think of everything to guarantee their safety and comfort, the noise of a howling wind cracking the slack in the plastic was daunting. I crouched there beside the little birds, only a cobweb of chickenwire between us, and sang to them the song that I brought them home on. “Angel Band.” It’s our signal. Big Chicken is here, and will stand between you and danger, starvation or thirst. I have a black and white Norwegian sweater that helps out with this illusion. It makes me look and feel like a giant Barred Rock. The chicks are still too young to know I’m only their foster mother. They themselves are light-complected, a robust breed called Sussex.These are the same chicks who spent an extra night in YVR and arrived chilled and shocked, a very long five weeks ago.
In that period of time, we have weathered a number of difficulties, beginning with the dogs harassing the rooster to death while my back was, unfortunately, turned. I took on a new hire with no experience, and Bea the dog, teenaged mother of four, went back into basic training: “Chickens are for protecting, not for playing with.” Two of her puppies went to their new homes here in the valley, and we acquired a pregnant young sow, who farrowed one night a full ten days sooner than our earliest expectation. Most of the piglets have died.
As I began this writing, we still had 2 males and the wisdom is that they be castrated very early so the procedure is not complicated and later, much later, after a beautiful life in the great outdoors with their family, when they cease to be hogs and become “pork”, their meat will be sweet instead of strongly redolent of “boar taint”. Our neighbour has agreed to teach us how to perform this simple, quick, and not painless procedure. The castrating of pretty much every male mammal born on the farm is one more task that had not necessarily been top of mind when we began our pig keeping adventure.
We saw the boy piglets wrestling like puppies in the sunny straw the other day. We see how the sow, Emmylou, (or “Mrs. Harris”) adores her offspring, and snoozes away most days with her belly warming against the heated hideaway where the piglets can go to avoid being squashed accidentally. Which has already happened to two or three of their siblings. So yes, most of the litter has, in less than three weeks, died of various causes linked to her early, night time farrowing and our relative ignorance. We have learned a NUMBER of difficult, harsh lessons from this experience.
We wouldn’t transport a pregnant sow again, for one thing. Especially not in the cold, even if it was only a 90 minute drive. Pigs are susceptible to something that used to be called, quaintly, “shipping fever”. Emmylou was clearly not well during her first couple of days with us. We covered her with a horse blanket. We brought her treats to tempt her appetite. We built her a wall of hay bales to make her shelter more cozy. My daughter snuggled with her and stroked her, and caught a wave of her sadness and confusion at not being with her sisters and the boars anymore. We visited her frequently and when the rare sun came out, she rallied, and came out to bask in her spacious barnyard. Within a few days she was cheerful, and going for rambles in the pasture every afternoon. Her appetite picked up, and her belly swelled with piglets. According to the dates the farmer gave us, we still had a month to get ready for the happy event.
We have learned that if piglets do not nurse immediately, they miss out on the “pre-milk” liquid, colostrum, which contains all the antibodies they will need in their lives. Without it, they die. Piglets also have no way of warming themselves except on the belly of their mam (which places them at risk for being squashed, no matter how careful the mother is), or under a heat lamp that is strategically placed for them in that hideaway I mentioned. If you think you have another week or two to prepare, one of you could be out of town and the other could come out in the morning to a puddle of piglets and not have the nerve to climb into the hay with the 600 pound momma and get those piglets nursing.
I have to include these stories, because this is the Dark Side blog, where I don’t try to be amusing at the expense of leaving out the hard parts. There is the whole matter of eventually killing the animals we have nurtured with our heart’s blood, but first we have to get them to maturity, and that is keeping us so busy that we don’t really have time to think about what it will be like to have their actual meat on our actual plates. I also have to say that the piglets are destined to have a relatively short life even if they survive babyhood, and so we will try to let them be happy, mostly by feeding them well and giving them the run of the place, fresh air and sunshine and by not interfering with them too much. Except for castrating the remaining male with a razorblade in the next couple of days, so you see how it is. Relentless is what it is, the responsibilities and the unpleasant tasks at times. And that’s not even considering the butchering, down the road when they’re 6 or 7 months old.
I don’t want any of you whining in the comments about how could I? because if you are reading this blog, you are not faint of heart, and you have an interest in the farming life, and you are trying to figure out how it is okay that you got a human life out of all this complexity. You are also trying to understand what it is you should be eating to keep yourself healthy for the struggle. If you do eat meat, you have compassion for yourself, the animals, and the people who do their best to give them a good life before you eat them. And you are realizing, perhaps not for the first time, what a contrast this is to the way nearly every food animal on the planet is treated during its life.
Oh, and during the past five weeks, we had other incidents to deal with. Birdy the goat fell through the cold-frame glass she was dancing upon and gave herself some deep but miraculously placed cuts, which we packed with honey and wrapped in Vet Tape. I personally fell off the fence (or was swept, more like, by a stray piece of plywood I happened to be perched upon for a split second as I was jumping down into the barnyard: someone grabbed the other end of it and swung it around, giving me some air before I landed hard on the ice on one knee.) And, after months of being hyper careful, I also fell down the basement stairs. My elbows took the brunt but the miraculous Arnica saved me from lingering effects. That stuff is magic.
We have so far held two separate sky burials off in the woods away from the barnyard. The bodies had mounted up over the winter, what with the chickens that couldn’t take the cold before we got the henhouse properly insulated, the baby chicks who didn’t make it, and the mound of shrews mice and voles that Po the Cat has brought in through my bedroom window and left as gifts.
Actually, I don’t transport the little rodents out to the woods, I feed them to the chickens. Uh huh, yes I do so. They need protein too. Some of it they get through store bought feed and some through bugs and slugs and grubs. So then the chicken eggs feed us and sometimes the puppies or the pigs. The goats will soon give birth and after awhile we’ll start sharing their milk with the goatlings, which will also go for meat when they’re big and fat, as will the male half of the baby chickens. Boys get a rough ride at the farm, no question. Some of the goat’s milk will go in the freezer in case we have babies in the future who need it. We are gradually creating a circle of life here, managing the pasture by letting the horses (and goats and pigs and chickens) forage over a thirty acre area. They all leave behind their nice healthy grass-fed manure, which nurtures the pasture and eventually will go in the garden to feed the vegetables, which we’ll share with the animals. The pigs will be turned loose to root in brushy, overgrown areas, so we can reclaim more pasture. The woods will remain the woods, and we hope to reintroduce the wild foods that grew there before the clearcutting that marred this entire area.
The endless novelty keeps us going, the chance to learn to actually do a thing instead of assuming we’d know how to do it if we ever had to. It’s crap though when you really want to build something or design something and you don’t have the skill, or the tools, or the stuff, or the money to buy the stuff or pay someone to do it. So you do it “for now” and then either get away with that for awhile, or deal with what happens when a strong wind comes up,
Although there are lots of ways to get hurt out here, there is a special kind of vigilance that kicks in when you’re a long way from a doctor or a vet. Even a small cut, like this window-washing injury on my ring finger, can interfere with daily life. A bandaid gets in the way of any task that requires dexterity, or speed (like typing right now). Mostly the vigilence, in my case, shows up as a little voice that whispers “be careful, be careful, be careful”… and that constantly checks in: “okay, where are the dogs? the goats? the chickens? How is the pig? How many babies NOW?” The horses and cats pretty much take care of themselves but the other night, during that big wind, there was a wonderful, musical clopping noise and a lot of whinnying and suddenly there were twenty extra horses in our winding driveway, calling over the fence to our four. We pay attention to noises, to smells, to fire and smoke, to water. We have learned to follow up with that little voice if it says to go do something.
Right now it says to go have a cup of tea. Right after we finish with that truckload of pig porridge and make the rounds again.