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www.thelandonline.com — “Where Farm and Family Meet”
THE LAND — FEBRUARY 7/FEBRUARY 14, 2020
The good, the bad and the ugly: The truth about pigs The truth is, there are and I quickly learned my more pigs in Iowa than own limitations after witthere are people. nessing that birthing strategy out in the farrowing For some of us, there are house. times when we have a hard time discerning who are There had been a lot of pigs and who are people. stinky and uncomfortable But that’s a conversation jobs for us over nearly we’ll have another day. three decades of raising TABLE TALK hogs back in the 1980s, ‘90s My dad was a pork proand early 2000s — during By Karen Schwaller ducer. It used to amaze me the early years of our maras a kid when I would see riage and while our chilhim clean out the hog dren were growing up. waterers — scooping out green scum, hay remnants, straw, weeds or whatThere were hog loading days when ever else landed in there — with his the dust created a fog in the lean-to. bare hands. And after the pigs had There were hot, humid days when we been drinking out of it. had to go out and spray the sows down several times a day. And days Yeesh. when we had to power-wash the farBeing all grown up now, I know that rowing house after the farrowing wasn’t the worst thing Dad probably cycle. ever had to do while raising pigs. I It was a day when singing opera have laughed at my husband over the while you worked was a very bad tastyears about his near-inability to ing idea. change a dirty diaper. But on the other hand, as a pork producer who There were days of grinding hog ran a farrow-to-finish operation, he feed when the sub-zero weather made was able to be up to his elbow in the it such a miserable job; and days back end of his sows and gilts, pulling when the hogs escaped their confines pigs. — creating an all-out family emergenI would have been passed out on the cy. (When we got some four-wheelers around, that job became considerably floor if had to do that. easier; but nonetheless, we hoofed it We all have our gifts and talents, for many years behind hogs that were
on the loose.) There was cleaning out the barn with a shovel or skid loader; cleaning out the flooded barn after someone left the hydrant running (disclaimer: this example may or may not blatantly expose my faultiness). There was going head-to-head with territorial sows and boars and having the wisdom to know they really did run the show — although you couldn’t let them know it. There were fences and pens to fix, water lines to repair, and in one instance at our farm, when an entire nursery full of young pigs had to be hauled out one at a time and left for the rendering truck because of some mysterious overheating malfunction that happened overnight. It was gut-wrenching to see, let alone think about the cash flow issue that was coming. One day, as my husband and I were talking about our farm story, he said he couldn’t remember when we stopped raising pigs. One of our sons chimed right in. He said, “We (he and his brother) were freshmen. I remember it well.” Well of course he remembered. What kid wouldn’t mark that as a national holiday? And for all the times we’ve had a
love/hate relationship going on with our herd, it was a sad day early-on in our marriage when the last of our hogs left the farm during a financially tough time for a beginning farmer in the 1980s — a time when so many were struggling. That Christmas, Dad and Mom provided the net underneath of us. They let us take home some of their bred sows to farrow, asking only that they got the sows back. We could keep all the piglets. That act of compassion and kindness got us back into the hog business. It was a Christmas miracle that no amount of bacon-love could equal. So the truth about pigs is, we can love them or we can hate them. But a world without pigs would mean there would be more people in the world than pigs. And I’m not entirely sure that would mean a nicer world overall. And … there would be no pig swagger to teach us confidence. And there would be no bacon. And a world without bacon would just be wrong. Karen Schwaller brings “Table Talk” to The Land from her home near Milford, Iowa. She can be reached at kschwaller@evertek.net. v
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