Friday, August 16, 2013

A Look Inside Our Pig Barns

Yesterday morning this guy:


and 1,144 of his closest family and friends arrived on our farm!

My farmer and I have two feeder to finish pig barns where we bring in pigs around 40 pounds and feed them to a finishing weight of around 270 pounds.  Each barn can hold up to 1,250 hogs, so in the case of this group it will hold 1,145 pigs.  We buy our hogs on the open market, as we do not raise pigs for any specific pork company.  This group of hogs came from a sow operation in Atlantic, Iowa (around 170 miles away) that our family is part owners of.  Our other barn has pigs in it from Minnesota.  We also commonly get pigs from Canada to fill our barns.

Usually just My Farmer takes care of the hogs but yesterday LP, MP and I got to participate in the unloading of the new hogs.

My Farmer and LP counting the pigs as they come off the truck
LP really enjoyed helping his Dad count the pigs as they came off the truck (good thing My Farmer was there to help him though since LP can only count to three...), checking the waters and the feeders, and in general just checking out all of the pigs.

LP making sure the first truck of pigs (first half)
were all settled and comfortable before the second truck arrived
The second semi-truck is here with a little more than 550 feeder pigs on it
Three Generations checking pigs as they come off the truck
The barn is full!
If you are interested in learning more about our hogs on our farm check out these other posts:

4 comments:

  1. I was just thinking a couple weeks ago how we haven't heard anything about the hogs lately! I can't wait to hear more about them...I know how cattle operations work but it's always interesting to me to hear about different livestock operations.

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    1. Do you have any specific questions about our hog operation? For me, the hogs are something that is so regular and repetitive that I don't know what to tell about them.

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  2. Thank goodness there's great farmers like you that have pigs! Not something we could ever do - we'll stick to our cereal crops! ;)

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    1. Thanks. To tell you the truth, at times our corn and soybean production side of our farm brings us more stress than the pigs.

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