Sorry for the long breaks between posts. Turns out farming doesn’t leave much time and energy behind for things like blogging. I hope to sum up the last couple months in this post, and then intermittently post shorties here and there to have something worth seeing and reading. Anyway, Kate and I have been back on the farm since September 1. We’ve settled into a routine and you can read her blog (reposted at right sidebar) to know what she’s up to. I manage the animals thursday through monday. On my two days off I have been renovating our little cottage, building a chicken coop, setting up a bee hive and now, perhaps, writing blog posts. Our little family has grown to include one mama hen and 8 little chicks, about 50,000 bees and now two kittens, in addition to our sweet dog and two pigs. Rudy is adjusting to the cats but gets along fine with mama hen, who doesn’t take any crap from anybody anyhow. Kate’s grandfather calls it our menagerie.

Mama and Her Chicks

Farming has been a blast. I’ve learned more in a shorter period of time than any other of my life’s endeavors. I also really enjoy what I’m learning, feeling more confident and reliable each passing day. About a thousand animals rely on me and our little crew daily to keep them happy and healthy and I believe we do so quite well. Farming has also been emotional, challenging and, at times, frustrating. Animals escape, hang themselves on fencing, get eaten by predators and die of old age. Recently we had to put down one of our eldest boars, Clinton, who was dying at the age of 7. He was the sweetest pig, very gentle and communicative, but slowly falling apart metabolically. Towards the end he had a hard time raising his 1000 pounds off the ground to eat and drink and we saved his life three times through medication, determination and hand feeding. Finally he had to die and rather than send him on a journey to new jersey to be made into pepperoni (old boar meat tastes horrible in anything but), we put him down on the farm and had him composted locally. This was a hard moment for me, reminiscent of putting my cat to sleep 10 years ago. I suppose raising animals means killing animals, but I didn’t expect to forge such powerful bonds with them.

At first putting Clinton down made me despise the idea of farming pigs. They have such complex characters and personalities, too similar to ourselves. I once wrote in high school, “Cats look down on us, dogs look up and pigs are our equals.” I didn’t know what truth that really was. So we shouldn’t raise them, we should let our porcine equivalents be, right? Unfortunately, if farms like ours didn’t exist, pigs would only be raised in the most abhorrent of circumstances, literally torturing these beautiful animals their whole lives. Farming like this is maybe the best thing we can do for pigs, save for stop eating them.