How was your fourth of July weekend? Did you enjoy yourself? Put your feet up and relax with some friends and family? Well our’s was quite the opposite of that. I tell you this story not for pity, but because it is quite comical how wrong everything went. Even if the intricacies of farming don’t interest you, I hope you get a chuckle from this.
That Saturday we were going to move the pigs from the farm where they had been living to the new farm. I had a plan that would have us finished before supper time, I made a lane way with our portable netting from the middle rear portion of this property up to where our loading corral and trailer was setup. This went slower than I had hoped but we got it done and all ten hogs were in the corral. We put feed in a bucket in the trailer and two pigs would get on, then another three, and so on until we were down to just two.
Things start to go awry
Getting impatient and a bit cocky I suppose, I decided to try to coerce these two pigs into the trailer. The end result was one of them bursting through the loading corral and straight towards Highway 70, while the other luckily hopped up on the trailer. While I was securing the trailer with nine pigs already loaded, my wife was sprinting towards the highway to cut the pig off and send him back onto our long, narrow land. After twenty minutes of chasing and maneuvering, we got him to run back into that lane way from earlier and get ready to start the process again.
This time he slipped under the fence before he even gets to the corral and here we go again. He wasn’t so cooperative as to run back into our setup the second time so we eventually let him get settled down and I hastily erected a couple hundred feet of netting around him. We took the other nine pigs to the new farm, built them a paddock with food and water, and headed back to that one stubborn pig right before dark.
Things get worse
We set the trailer and corral back up as they were and, rushing to beat nightfall, connected the makeshift paddock to our loading area. Once again he slipped through the fence and we’re off to the races again. This time it is dark and we are back in a part of the property my wife is unfamiliar with so it’s pretty much me chasing him around. At one point he slipped through an old barbed wire fence onto the neighbor’s property, so I’m running around a stranger’s property in the dark chasing a pig for a while until I eventually get him back onto our land. After some more close calls we decide to let him fall asleep, put a fence around him, and comeback with daylight and help.
We still have ten pigs
The next morning a good friend of ours and two of his children come over and with a lot of hands get this pig loaded, but not without another breakout and dead sprint towards a busy Highway 70. Once that was finished and he was on the new farm, my wife and I had a nice, long breakfast. My workday was far from over but at that point it didn’t matter.
I hope you have enjoyed laughing at our misfortune. If you want to stay up to date with everything happening on our farm and new products (like pork!) when they become available, sign up for our email list below.
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