Piglets on the Farm
We have been raising bunnies on our farm now for several years. Over the years we have met fellow hobby farmers as they come out to our homestead and pick out their new rabbits. Sometimes they have to drive several hours to reach us. Other times, they come from the local area. In one case, we had a visit from a couple who lived in the same area as where I grew up. They had a new hobby farm just 6 miles or so from my childhood home. Only about a 20 minute drive from our own bunny farm. As they packed up their buns to take them home, we got to talking about what sort of critters they had. Turns out that they had some horses, a few more rabbits, some fowl, and....pigs. Like, several litters of them and a few adults. But not just any pigs, Mangalista. Manga -what?? I'd never heard of them. You would call them hair pigs. As they have an actual pelt of hair instead of just bare pink skin. They LOVE the cold. They are extremely hardy, and could live completely off of foraging. They actually do eat hay. Took me a bit to wrap my head around on that one. I mean, pigs are omnivores, but I had never seen one eat hay. At least not on purpose. But these oinkers DO. And, they like it. I found their descriptions of the breed pretty interesting. So we made plans to visit their farm and see for ourselves.
Now, I am not a pig-person. Pigs are tasty. Yep. Raised a few as a kid -always ate them once fall arrived. Pigs were food. (tasty tasty food...) Pigs were not high on my list of animals to keep around. Kinda messy, smelly, HUGE in size compared to me as kid. Just not something I would pick for my 'choice of animal.' But what I saw that day was different. Sure, the adults were pretty good sized, about 300 pounds or so. There was some rutting and wallows, but it didn't smell like... well, like a pig pen. The piglets were striped and spotted like you would see on feral swine. The adults were either blonde or black with long belly stripes. And HAIRY. So. Much. Hair. Something else caught my attention. The boar was kept in the pen with the sows AND the piglets. Without issues. I know from experience that you do not do this with other breeds. You have to keep the males away from the females. Unless you want dead pigs, and uncontrolled litters.
After a bit of chit chat and such, we came to a deal. We didn't have the room to raise a piglet to adult size on our farm. (YET...) but they had it all in place. So we did some trading and struck a deal for one pig. It would be a bit of a wait for it to grow up. Mangalista are a slow growth piggy. We were looking at about 12 months out before we could collect it. Soon enough though, the date came up for us to go pick it up. But there was a problem, our piggy got preggo. They asked if we would allow it to farrow, and split the litter. (free piglets too????) Heck ya! We only had room for 3 piglets, so we let them sell the rest of her litter. So we had a total of 4 pigs from a deal for just 1. Not too bad. We harvested the sow, she came out at 220 pounds, hanging. (gutted, skinned, -feet/head) I have yet to taste any pork this good. O MY Garsh, tasty. Turns out that Mangalista are like....premium meat pigs. We can vouch for that!
When we first got the piglets, they were only slightly bigger than large tom cat. About maybe 30 pounds or less. Of course, as pigs do...they got out of the pen that first night and disapeared. Poof, gone! Except for the itty bitty piggy foot prints EVERYwhere. Everywhere except IN THE SILLY PIG PEN where they belonged. We spent the next 2 weeks with traps and old fishing nets, catching them one at a time. And putting them back in the pen. They settled down after that first month. We feed them a custom mix of grains and corn. And they get a slop bucket of kitchen scraps each day too.
They are now about 6 months old and right around the 120 to 140 pound mark. Because the genetics of the adults they were sired from were soooo good, we opted to leave one male intact. So that gave us one feeder/butcher piglet. And 2 brood stock. We plan to let the 2 breed a couple of litters. Normally you do not allow siblings to mate -UNLESS you are deliberately trying to lock specific traits into your stock. And that is exactly what we are doing in this case. From the new litters, we will hold back 2 new gilts and grow them into new sows. We will then either harvest our current boar, or, hopefully, trade him off for a new guy. That new boar will then take up the sire work for our future stock.
Do you remember the story of the 3 little pigs? Meet Sticks (black male), Bricks (striped black female) , and Straw (cut male):
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