Well, I haven't written since September 15th. My professional life kicks into high gear from September through late May and no writing is the result...
The pigs are growing well. Most of them at least... They came from two different litters and then ones who are a couple of weeks older have been much more aggressive at the feed trough and look huge compared to the younger ones, especially the one that has Hampshire markings. I tell them to eat up, they just will get harvested sooner. I'm in no hurry.
Feed waste has been much better than previous groups of pigs and they ate all the corn I grew except for some I saved as seed stock for next year.
Deep litter bedding is working OK. I have opened up the wooden floored older pig house for them to use as well and they keep dunging in there. Every week or so I go in and scrape the manure out of there and put it in the deep litter area. The smell is not too bad as long as I keep up on the scraping. Not exactly how I planned it... Daydreaming time is spent on how I am going to build the next variation of the hoop house.
The grain bin was filled about six weeks ago which has been nice to not worry about getting bags of feed. This should last me to the end. 5360 pounds of 14% pig feed delivered to the bin for 19.6 cents per pound ($392/ton). If it does hold true that I don't need to buy anymore feed that means I will have raised 10 pigs on 7210 pounds of feed plus the corn I grew and various other garden scraps. I would be very happy with that.
It has been freezing here. The automatic waters have frozen so I have been hauling buckets of water out to the pigs. Not ideal as sometimes when I am at work they don't have access when they want it right then, but they seem happy enough.
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| Hey, we are starting to get a little crowded in here! |
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| You should fill our bucket, again. That is the runty pig on the right. He looks downright miniscule compared to the bigger pigs. |
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| More Straw, please. |
