The Very Beginning
Some of you reading this may know of me from my web site GoatWorld. The work and research I have done in creating that web site has given me an increasing knowledge of many classes of livestock, now to include swine. Do I raise swine? Yes I do. I am a small-scale hog farmer and am continually learning more with each day. What I plan to accomplish with the Swine World web site is very much along the same lines as that which I have accomplished with GoatWorld.
This web site came into existence in August of 2008. I can say that I have dabbled in pigs off and on over the last several years; got my first start back in 2001 when a co-worker offered me a pot belly pig for free...turns out that Wilbur wasn't exactly a pot belly pig, at least not the small cuddly ones many people make pets out of. Wilbur spent his time with my goats in a 5 acre pasture where he did well. It was during this time that I truly discovered just how intelligent pigs really are. I also found out that pigs can be very friendly if given the chance and certainly are not the "filthy" animals that some people make them out to be.
I should probably mention that as a young boy, my step father had a pig or two that was allowed to run our pasture with the horses. At that time, I really had no interest in raising pigs and don't really have any useful experience I can share from that time. However, one side story I can relate is that we often had friends come over to visit who had children near my same age. I remember how our pigs would run up to the fence when we would be outside and the friends kids would get a kick out of that. I would tell them that the pigs would get them if they weren't careful (every kid in that day and age had seen or read the book, Old Yeller). So perhaps instead of promoting pigs, I was scaring the kids to death telling them about our killer pigs. The pigs we had played their part in the joke beautifully!
One of the primary reasons for starting GoatWorld at the time was due to an on-going problem with a noxious weed called kudzu. Goats were the logical choice for controlling this weed with success. When moving to my new location - an 80 acre farm in Southern Colorado, I'm faced with a very similar situation that the goats have proved largely ineffective on - Russian Knapweed. There are many claim that goats will control this weed. I won't deny that they may control it in certain situations. They just have proved ineffective in this situation. And largely due to this newfound problem, Swine World has gotten its start.
Pigs Round One
You'll have to understand that using pigs for the control of Russian Knapweed wasn't my original thought. Since we had left Wilbur behind when we moved from Missouri, we kind of missed him and thought that getting a pig or two would be ideal since we had finally ended up on a larger, true farm setting. So it was no surprise that one day we came home from a livestock auction with three young piglets in the stock trailer. They sure were cute as long as you didn't pick them up. We made them a place within a chain link fence area and they seemed to be real happy as were we.
Well, they must not have been that happy in the chain link pen as it didn't take them long to figure out how to get out of the pen and root around the property. But what was real intriguing about this was that they would come when called! Three young pigs, happy as could be, would come running and it was truly a real nice site to see. As long as you had some corn or feed in a bucket, they would go or follow wherever I led. Sure made it easy to handle them. Especially at their smaller size. I knew they would get bigger.
Unfortunately, one of these young pigs had something wrong with it which became increasingly apparent a few weeks after we got them. One day I went out to the pen and he was dead. I later came to find out that he most probably died of too many ticks or mites. I mentioned "picking pigs up" - they don't like that too much and will squeal louder than a jet plane taking off. So I hadn't made it a daily practice to pick any of them up. The poor dead piglet was covered underneath with ticks and mites and it was a real sad affair to know that I might have been able to do something to prevent this. I picked up the other piglets and sure enough, they were getting covered with them too. A good dose of mineral oil cured this and I'm happy to say, these young piglets have grown into healthy 200 pounders plus. But the chain link fence and their ability to push out and get underneath it was still a problem and would continue to be a problem for a few months to come.
After some time, I had to make a decision to either cut (castrate) or leave my two pigs intact. I decided to leave them intact and use them for possible breeding. I asked a few neighbors that raise pigs how a person would go about castrating pigs and they offered ideas on the procedure. One even went so far as to say that "you have to do it with your teeth". Well, I kind of knew he was joking around and took it in good stride and filed it away in my memory. A few weeks later I saw him and told him I was getting ready to "cut" my pigs. He went through the whole procedure again (including the teeth part) and said it wasn't too difficult. That's when I asked him to come over and show me how you do it with your teeth. He never showed up! LOL
I kept thinking of how I was going to keep my escaping pigs contained and finally came up with a hog panel design that seemed to do the trick. In the meantime, I had let the escaped pigs in with the goats for a short time. It's not recommended to do this if you have real young kid goats in the mix. Pigs can become aggressive if they are confronted with a smaller animal...I saw them attack a young kid goat and I probably would have won an Olympic medal for my sprinting and hurdling ability to rescue the young goat in distress. That pretty much ended letting the pigs mingle with at least the young, kid goats. Into the hog panel pen they went and that seemed to end that problem for the moment.
A couple of weeks later I decided to take the real pig plunge and purchase some young female pigs. It was a good thing I bought when I did - this was just before the big oil price hikes of 2008 and it wasn't long after that I noticed the price of market hogs had gone through the roof as well as agricultural feed prices. Five young female piglets came to our farm and I knew these young piglets were going to be the start of my pig farm project.
For the most part,I thought I had my pig containment problems under control, but I soon found myself having to herd them back into their pen on a daily basis. They had a real knack for being able to get out of whatever area I was putting them in. It was during this time that I began thinking I might have made a big mistake getting pigs. Especially if I couldn't keep them in. But I knew good and well that if a person has experience keeping goats in or out of an area, they should be able to keep pigs contained.
My real call to action was when my wife and I had started trying to grow a lawn in the front of our house. Oddly enough, just about the time the grass started coming up, a pig or two would escape and root up the entire area. I'd wake up in the morning to find them right out there in front of the house, their faces covered with fresh soil looking as innocent as could be. I just couldn't understand how these escape artists were getting out, but one thing I did know is that they were escaping their hog panel pen early in the morning.
I got up real early one morning just before daybreak and watched. What I saw was the biggest surprise of my life. One young sow would walk up to the fence and begin to climb it like a ladder. Another adventurous sow followed suit and off they went to the newly planted lawn. Well, it took me about two hours to rig two electric fence wires on the inside of the hog panel pen and it stopped the escape artists immediately. I felt kind of sorry for them as they unsuspectingly, walked up to the new wires and caught a spark off their snout which made them squeal loudly. But in the end, I had won round one with my pigs and them getting out of their pen at will.
