HERE COMES MAMA!

Guess who just moved back to the neighborhood?

Many of you may remember the pig that @smailer donated to our homestead. As our lives have transitioned and things have changed, we let one of our friends take her to their place. He had wanted to get into pig farming, and since she was pregnant, we thought it would get him off to a great start. However, his work situation shifted to where he will be gone travelling a lot, so he was no longer going to be able to take care of animals.

Another neighbor wants to use some hogs to help make a pond, so when the opportunity came up, he was very excited. Because we have some experience with pigs in general, and more experience with this particular pig, my neighbor wanted my advice and help.

BUILD THE PEN

Step one was building the pen and preparing the place. Since I had extra hog panels lying around, and since he is letting our heifer hang out with his cattle, I offered up the fencing to him. We soon were hard at work constructing a 16 foot by 32 foot pen.

Much like @papa-pepper my neighbor has come children available, so soon we had a work crew hard at work on the task. It sure makes things like this go a lot more quickly when there are a lot of helpers. Cattle panels would work well for hogs too, but the larger spaces near the bottom of the fence allows the little piglets to escape, so hog panels were definitely the correct ones for the job this time.

After pounding in the T-posts and securing the hog panels to them, step one was completed and the pen was ready. Next step: go and get the mama pig.

GO GET MAMA!

I got a few of the @little-peppers ready to help with the task, and we waited for our ride. Soon the van with the trailer picked us up and we were on our way!

When we got there, mama had already had her babies, so we had to be careful. Too often mamas that large accidentally crush their tiny babies to death. The first step of this part of the process was to remove the babies without irritating the mama hog.

This was easy enough, as this pig had always been friendly with us. She was a lot larger though, and definitely a force to be reckoned with if she became irritated.

Soon I had carefully removed all these little ones. The next step was trying to convince the mama pig to get in the trailer. This is normally an easy task if the pig is hungry. However, this mama was sitting with a large pile of whole corn in her pen and had no interest in doing anything for food.

Unlike these tiny babies, which could be picked up and placed where we wanted them, a sow weighing in at over 300 pounds with an uncooperative attitude is another deal completely. While I won't even go into details about the amount of effort or time it took us to get the job done, in the end it did require a lot of brute strength to get her loaded, but we did it. She is now happily settled in at her new home. Stay tuned for some cute photos of the piglets!