Pig talk

[Bird]

Bird, You have to keep going, you are one of the few folks on here that I look to having posted something on a thead that interests me. The reason is, you talk sense, and there is not too much of that about these days.

There are a few more old timers about, will not list them because I am surre to forget somebody, but just like you to know, I appreciate your input from a foreign land. Foreign info (as in USA and other places) is always a lot more beneficial than local info.

Thanks, but don't want you to make my head swell up until my hat won't fit.

 

[Bird]

Yes, there is no tooth fairy, and pgs do not ssweat like a human.

I'll never forget learning that pigs don't sweat. My paternal grandfather had moved into town several years earlier when he took a job hauling the mail between the Post Office and the train station. But he still had the farm, and when he sold it, he had 2 registered Berkshire sows that had been bred. I was 8 or 9 years old and he told me he'd bring those sows to our place and he'd buy the feed if I'd take care of them until they had their little pigs. He said he'd then sell the two sows and give me half the pigs or half what they sold for. Unfortunately, it was a warm day when he got those sows loaded onto his truck and brought to our place. One of them got too hot and died. The other sow only produced 5 pigs, so my grandfather sold 4 of the pigs and gave me half the money, and gave me the fifth pig. And that's how I got into the 4-H Club and got started raising hogs.

 

[buckeyefarmer]

We would feed our pigs ground corn and add water to it, in a trough. been many yrs since we raised them.

 

[Bird]

We would feed our pigs ground corn and add water to it, in a trough. been many yrs since we raised them.

Many years? Yep. 1948 to 1954 in my case.

 

[ultrarunner]

I did not realize pigs could be so heat sensitive... I thought it was just a problem if too much sun.

Pig Louie was sure in Hog heaven when I took a mister and sprayed him down at the Fair...

I only did it because she likes it... didn't know it could be beneficial too... it was just real hot in the covered barn where the pigs were kept.

My niece was so happy a farmer bought her to breed... they went to visit today and Louie seems content and has made a friend... the accommodations were not quite as spacious as what she was use to having a entire barnyard to call her own... but she seem please...

I chided my brother for buying a Registered Berkshire but I guess it was money well spent.

 

[EddieWalker]

Funny about the heat. Mine keeps cool in the pond, but some days he will sit in his house and just scream about the heat before getting off his but and walking the 50 feet down to the cool water. Then in the winter, when temps drop into the teens, and we sometimes get snow, I get dozens of comments from people on FB making sure I keep him indoors and warm. I tell them he loves the cold, but they relate him to a dog. Oscar loves the cold. He will roll in the mud at the edge of the pond when there is snow on the ground. He becomes much more active in the winter months. At 600 pounds, I was still surprised to drive by and have him run after my truck. He maintained a 12mph speed for close to 400 yards. He's even faster on short burst!!!

 

[crash325]

A question or 2, maybe 3.
When did all pork, bacon & ham have to be water injected< up to 30 percent????
Coming across the south many years ago, there were smoke houses all along the hwy. Honey cured & so on.
Many years ago you bought bacon still on the pig skin. Now all the skin is cut of of the hams.
If I wanted water in my ham I would add it myself. At the price of ham, it sure makes water expensive.
Thanks for your input.

 

[2LaneCruzer]

When I was raising my Berkshire, I kept half of a 55 gallon barrel outside the pen where I would put grain and water. My Dad ran a sand dredge nearby, and a lot of the "empty" RR cars had contained grain of different kinds, and sometimes had a couple gallons of wheat or oats or some such. I also fed him corn. The barrel eventually began to ferment over time, not enough to make him staggering drunk, but enough to where you could smell that it was alcoholic. He loved it!

I was told that you could always tell the difference between a corn fed and a peanut fed hog by the bacon. Supposedly bacon from the corn fed hog was firm, and the bacon from the peanut fed hog was very limp. Any testimonials out there?

 

[DrRod]

Similar, I always heard that you could look at the joints in a ham and, if the joint was rough the pig had been raised on corn, if smooth it was raised on peanuts. A few old timers said that, because of this, they ate a few peanuts everyday to keep their joints operating smoothly.

 

[Bird]

There was a time, many years ago, at least in the south central part of Oklahoma when some restaurants put their waste food scraps in containers that a local hog farmer picked up to feed his hogs. But when the government decided that such hog feed would have to be heated to a certain temperature (re-cooked, in other words) to kill any bad stuff in it, that made it too expensive to feed the hogs and those scraps had to be added to the restaurants' garbage.

 

[chinton]

Back when I was in jr high - high school I raised registered Duroc hogs. The joke back then was you made just enough money to break even and lost money when you quit as your equipment was good enough for the hogs but nobody wanted to buy at the auction. We always made sure our fence fabric went a good bit into the ground to discourage the rooting under the fences and then used hog panel on the inside. Seems like there for a while it was kind of trendy to let them run wild in the pastures, but I think they had to refigure that later.

Anyway we fed ours a mix from the feed mill and didn't let them roam with the horses, cows or sheep. They made their own wallow by the automatic waterer, so we didn't have to help them with that.

We had one sow that didn't like being the farrowing crate and an old neighbor guy had told us to calm them down to give them a can of beer. We gave her a can of Buckhorn and she calmed down enough and had her pigs. When we transferred her to her own pen she bit all of her pigs. She then got transferred to the trailer and on to slaughter. She was one of the best tasting hogs we had.

 

[check]

Yes, there is no tooth fairy, and pgs do not ssweat like a human.

Oh, sure, and I suppose you ate going to tell me next that you are not THE "OldMcDonald"

 

[OldMcDonald]

Oh, sure, and I suppose you ate going to tell me next that you are not THE "OldMcDonald"&#55357;&#56866;

It all depends - the last place I owned before I moved to Portugal was Hazza Farm, Culbokie, Scotland.