These Little Piggies Went To Market

Sunny and 15

Well, it's done. The pigs are gone. I (Red) confess that loading livestock in and out is always the most stressful aspect for me. I've had some bad experiences. In the learn-from-experience category, the first time I ever tried to load pigs onto a trailer ended in sheer disaster, with tears, bruises, frustration, and no pigs anywhere near the trailer. One time when loading up a heifer, I was nearly crushed. So I tend to think about proper loading bofore I even GET my livestock. Still, I get anxious.

Today went pretty well, all told, even though we've never loaded out of this barn before and it was basically a trial run. Curt was a real trooper and a great help. Karen did her part of luring them onto the trailer with her cakes and yes, marshmallows!

So now we all need to just call in our cutting orders, and await our fresh, home-grown chops and hams and sausages to be prepared.

The facilities at Lake Geneva are very nice. They have a scale for weighing the animals as they get off the trailer, and holy smokes! Our pigs went quite a bit higher than we thought! I engaged Curt in my favorite game of "How much do you think that one weighs?" and we were both off! Curt was closer than I was...he's been raising pigs for 30 years or so. Those pigs averaged 300 lbs, instead of the 250 I was thinking. Not that we could have brought them in at 250 if we'd wanted to - when we contacted the butcher in November, this was the first date we could get for them. In more alarming news, they are completely booked for beef for 2009 already! It's only January, and they are full for the rest of the year. Wow.

In fact, it's getting harder and harder for people like us to find butchers to process their hogs or steers for them. Don't even mention chicken processors, those are as scarce as hen's teeth, though we are fortunate to have one not too far away from us. As the regulations stiffen and require more and more expensive equipment or accomodations or materials, and the families running these small, local plants retire, they close up shop and producers who want to take a few hogs or beeves in for custom processing have to look further and further.

This is due to a combination that kills the small family-run butcher shop: more and more regulation and taxing by government (both local and federal), and Monsanto. Or Cargill. Or Purdue. These megaliths have rolled over and turned under thousands of family-run agriculture-related businesses over the last 30 years. They come through, buy up every packer and distributor, and then they incorporate the producers. In fact, in the pork and chicken end of things, they have all but wiped out any independant producers in the entire country. The only folks hanging on and not tied to a contract for one of the big AG Corporations are the littlest of guys, the guys like us. Grass-fed, Organic, Humanely raised, Natural.....Independent producers who don't ever want the security of a contract from a big company, because we know it's blood money. Or, simply, because we know what they produce is bad stuff. It's bad for people to eat, it's bad for the environement, it's bad for the economy.

As long as I'm here on this soapbox, let me point out that it's us wee little guys out here, on our own land, producing crops, vegetables, and raising animals the way we think it should be done, that may very well some day be called upon to save our country and society. If some catastrophic disease outbreak should hit on our soil, such as the foot-and-mouth disease outbreak of Europe in the mid-nineties, Our food supply could be greatly compromised. Just think about it. In the last several decades, American agricultuer had become more and more centralized, and vertically integrated so that fewer farms are procuding more of our food. Every scientist out there knows this is not so good as far as longevity of a system is concerned. Sooner or later, if you crowd enough things into one spce, a breakdown such as a disease will occur. It could wipe out everything connected to it. And in this day and age, these corporations are all connected by truckers and packers and buyers and even growers and seedsmen.

Little guys like us provide a safety net, a backup plan. If feedlot cattle are beset with devastating losses, our only hope for being able to supply our people with vitamins and protein again will be held in the small, relatively isolated gardens and herds of small farmers across the country. Those of us who dont have commercial traffic on our farms, those who raise heritage breeds or open pollinated vegetables. I deeply believe it's absolutely necessary to keep a diverse population of plants and animals thriving across the continent. Because I know that nature abhors mass-production as much as she abhors a vacuum.

Support your local farmer, and support the future of our country.