Big Pig Move

Sunday was moving day for the middle-sized pigs. For the past couple of months, I have been rotating them around a mixed grass permanent pasture, but it was time to move them onto the annual oats + rape pasture about 1,500 feet and a hedgerow away. For about four seconds, I considered walking the pigs from one field to the next. After four seconds of imagining pigs scattered all over the farm, I decided that the best thing to do would be to load them onto the trailer and drive them from one field to the next. With my two brothers visiting (Peter here for the month of July, Anthony here for our grandmother’s funeral), I had plenty of help.

I hooked the trailer up to the tractor and backed it up to the paddock with Peter and Anthony guiding me back. Once the trailer was backed up, we adjusted the electronet and opened the trailer door. Then I put the two feed troughs on the trailer and poured feed into them while the pigs watched. As soon as they saw the feed start pouring out, a few of the pigs hopped onto the trailer.

Peter stood behind the door, holding it open, ready to close it, while Anthony and I walked out into the paddock to “push” the pigs toward the trailer if necessary. There are three duroc barrows in the group that come from a different farm than the others and are quite skittish, so I was worried that they wouldn’t get on the trailer, but as it turns out, within a couple of minutes, they hopped right on. Unfortunately, about half of the rest of the group didn’t. A couple were wary of the trailer, and one monster has gotten so big so fast that he couldn’t really work out how to hop up on the trailer. So, rather than lose the group that was on the trailer, I told Peter to just close the door.

We drove those pigs over to their new paddock. Once they were inside, we watched them for a couple of minutes to make sure they would respect the paddock fence, which is a stranded fence rather than electronet. It was clear that they recognized the strands as electrified, so we went back over to the old paddock to load up the rest of the pigs. Unfortunately, that one big pig really couldn’t work out how to step up into the trailer, so after a few minutes we gave up. It was about 3pm and we hadn’t had lunch and we were all hungry, so we took a break.

After lunch, we went back out. I built a step for the big pig out of a pallet and a board to cover it, and he and the others used it to step right up. Anthony closed the door and we headed over to the new paddock. Because the other group of pigs was already in the new paddock, unloading the remaining pigs into the paddock was going to be complicated. If we opened the paddock to get the trailer in, the pigs that were already there would escape. The back of the trailer had two doors, one large door that runs across the whole back that can be swung open, and a half door that slides open. Since we couldn’t swing the big door open without opening the paddock, I backed the trailer up square to the fence. In my mind, I thought we would lift three of the four wires so that the pigs on the trailer could jump down to the ground. We wouldn’t lift the fourth, lowest, wire, which was below the level of the door, and which would keep the pigs that were in the paddock from escaping. What I actually said to Peter, however, was, “just lift the wires up so that the pigs on the trailer can get off after I slide the door open.” So Peter, following my instructions perfectly, just lifted all four wires up. Four of the pigs that were already in the paddock scooted out into the open field behind Peter as we watched the door for the other pigs to start coming out.

This is important: When pigs (or other livestock) escape, do not panic, especially when there are still more pigs inside the fence than outside. Livestock are herd animals. They want to be together. When one or two happen to escape it is almost always the case that all they want to do is get back inside the fence to be with the rest of the group, so all that you need to do is figure out a way to let them back in. When the whole gang gets loose, it is a little bit different, especially when they are in a new place that hasn’t yet imprinted on them as home. However, the reality is that even when a whole group of animals escape, they (usually) don’t go charging off, running for the hills. They pretty much stop at the first patch of good grass and start eating. All that you need to do is make the inside of the fence more attractive than the outside of the fence. Usually all that that takes is some grain.

When Peter saw the pigs getting out, he started to freak out. I told him to not to worry about, to just let go of the bottom wire to hold the rest of the pigs in and just get the pigs off the trailer into the paddock. Even though the wire was down, a couple more pigs scooted out to be with the escapees, but at the same time, six new pigs hopped out of the trailer into the paddock. Once they were out of the trailer, Peter let go of the rest of the wires. As soon as the escapees heard the trailer pigs in the paddock, they started to run along the fence line trying to find a way back in to greet their friends. All that we had to do was lift the wires back up and they ran right in. Once they were back inside, I waved to Anthony, who was 800 feet away at the other end of the pasture and waiting for me to signal him to turn the fence charger back on. Peter and I stood inside the paddock with the pigs for a couple of minutes. One or two got shocked and that was it. The strands were reestablished as the painful boundary line and the pigs no longer got too close. I waved to Anthony again. He turned the fence off, and Peter and I stepped out of the paddock. I waved to Anthony once more and the pigs were secure.

Peter and Anthony had done as much as they could do. The rest of the pig move was tractor work. I had to move the shelter. However, the middle pigs had outgrown their shelter, so I needed to swap their shelter for the shelter that the little pigs were using, which is about 40 square feet bigger, and is also set up to have an awning attached that doubles the size of the shelter. I knew that this was going to take a long time because I had to drive down the road to the neighbor’s to use his driveway to get into the field where the little pigs were, and I would need to go very slowly with the little pigs’ shelter because I built it heavy and huge. It is portable, but just. I nearly racked it apart when I moved it the first time. There was a rut going across the path that I hadn’t seen and the corner of the left skid caught it. I heard a great creaking sound over the sound of the tractor engine and immediately stopped. I looked back and the shelter was all cockeyed. Luckily as soon as I eased the tension, it went back square, if a bit less tight than it had been.

I started moving the shelters at 6:30pm and I finished just about 8:30pm. Part of the reason it took so long was that while I was moving the shelters, I also shifted the little pigs into a new paddock. They were ready to move anyway, and I thought it would be easier to deal with moving the shelters if I could move the them without needing to get in and out of a paddock with pigs in it.

Peter came over to help me get the shelter into the middle pigs’ paddock. He fed them at one end of the paddock and stood with them, while I opened up the paddock on the other end and towed the shelter into place.

After that, I checked on the sheep and closed the chicken coop, and we finally had dinner at about 9:30pm, which my cousin Zach, who was also visiting, cooked for us.

 

Maggots (Flystrike)

If suffering is the guiding principle on the farm, I failed badly to meet the demands of it the last few days. Yesterday I discovered that Jason the Icelandic ram was suffering badly from “flystrike,” an infestation — in his case horrific — of fly maggots. Flystike can happen anywhere on a sheep’s body, but is most common around the tail, especially undocked tails, due to the collection of feces, but also anywhere on a sheep there is an open wound, or where it is warm and moist and stinky. Jason’s infestation is around his horns and down the top of his neck. There were thousands of them, and they had spread over a large portion of his head and neck. The flies lay so many eggs and the larvae hatch so quickly and the maggots are so horrifically voracious that I have no idea how long he was being eaten alive by them. It could have been a week, or only a couple of days. I know only that it must have been utterly horrible for him to feel thousands of maggots squirming about burrowing ever deeper into his flesh, especially because it was in a place that he could not scratch.

About three days ago, I noticed that the wool around Jason’s neck had become soiled. He is white, and the wool around his neck had become brown. I didn’t really think anything of it. There is a wood pile in the paddock that I had seen him scratching his head in, and I assumed that maybe he had rubbed his head and neck in the ashes that were on the ground from the last time we burned the pile. Of course, he was desperately trying to scratch at the maggots, not just simply scratching an itch. And, of course, it wasn’t ashes that had made his neck wool dirty. It was blood and excrement — from the thousands of maggots devouring his flesh.

The day before yesterday, Jason wasn’t quite himself. He seemed a bit apathetic, but, still, I made no connection between the dirty neck wool and his condition. I just made a mental note to keep an eye on him. Throughout the day I saw him alternately up and grazing, but still a bit off. Yesterday morning while doing my round of chores before leaving for the farmers market, he was off laying by himself, well away from the rest of the flock. He was clearly in trouble. At first, because of the position of his body and how far away he was, I thought he was dead, but as I approached him, he raised his head, and then he lumbered to his feet and started to walk away. I walked after him and after a  few feet he stopped and I took a hold of his horns. There were a few green metallic flies buzzing about his head and a couple had alighted on the wool on the back of his head. There was a bit of blood between his horns. That is when, finally, it registered…flystrike. I didn’t take a closer look. There was nothing I could do about it as I had to get to the farmer’s market, and it wasn’t going to kill him in the next few hours, so I just let him go. To be perfectly honest, I didn’t want to know at that moment just how bad it was.

Over the past month of nearly non-stop rain, I have been worried about flystrike, but not in the Icelandics. I have been worried about the half of the Texel-Cheviot ewes that have undocked tails. Their rear ends are soiled with manure and a bunch of them have quite a few “dags,” clumps of manure and wool dangling from their back ends. That is the classic conditions for flystrike and the very reason that farmers dock the tails of long-tailed wool sheep. It is also the reason for the horrific practice of mulesing common in Australian merino sheep. Mulesing is the practice of cutting away the wool and skin of a sheep around its tail to prevent manure build up. To increase wool production, the naturally occurring folds of skin in Merino sheep have been increased through selective breeding practices. More folds means more surface area means more wool means more money — but it also means a higher incidence of flystrike. Mulesing is done without anesthetic and is a very bloody, and so obviously quite painful, practice. So far, the Texel-Cheviots have not been subject to flystrike, although now I feel the need to take a closer look to make sure.

Jason, as do all Icelandics, have naturally short tails, which is one of the reasons I chose Icelandics as I wanted to avoid tail docking. However, while Jason does not have a long tail, he has large curly horns that grow close to his head. As the wool on his head grew, it filled in the space between his skull and his horns. Then a month’s worth of nearly constant rain kept it constantly damp, and because the horns are a major site of heat exhange, those damp pockets were also nice and warm. It is likely that Jason scratched his head on the wood pile because the wet wool itched, and one of the sticks broke the skin causing an open wound right in an area that happens to be the absolutely perfect environment for fly maggots to live in, warm and damp. The environmental conditions in those pockets were so perfect that it is possible that Jason didn’t even need to have cut himself to start the strike. The flies might have chosen that site anyway.

Regardless, the strike started and I just twiddled my thumbs. My inexperience and shortcomings really shine when there is a problem. At this point I pick up on the fact that something is wrong, but I still just sit there, partly because I hope it will resolve itself, and partly because I am overwhelmed by the anxiety of ignorance and fear that I won’t have the skills to take care of whatever the problem is. The likelihood that all new farmers make similar mistakes and suffer the pains of traveling along the learning curve affords little comfort whenever the image of the writhing mass of maggots half buried in Jason’s flesh pops into my head.

On my way out the door to the farmers market I left my brother a note letting him know that Jason was not well and that we would need to take care of him when I got back. When I got back, I explained to him what I thought the problem was.

“Maggots? I don’t deal well with maggots,” Peter said sort of rhetorically as we walked down to the barn to get a lead rope. I didn’t respond. I needed to take care of the sheep and I needed Peter’s help, maggots or no.

As soon as I looped the lead rope around Jason’s neck, I could see the maggots beneath the wool. His skin was crawling with them. We led him out of the paddock and over to the barnyard where I had the shears set up. Peter held the lead rope while I sheared the wool off. At the first clear site of the maggots, I had to fight the urge to be sick. There is something about the site of a writhing mass of maggots that turns the stomach. It seems universal enough that it serves some purpose, perhaps making sure we don’t eat rotten meat, even if we are starving. Even a starving person loses their hunger when their stomach turns. When the wool fell away it released the stench of rotten flesh, and I think I even groaned as I held back the urge to throw up. Peter was struggling as bad as I was, but he stayed focused and held the rope. Luckily,  Jason is both very tame, and was feeling very sick, so he pretty much just stood there.

After a few minutes, I had sheared the area as best I could. The maggots went from his horns halfway down the back of his neck towards his shoulder. They were clearly worse on one side of his head than the other. Now that there was a writhing mass of exposed maggots, we needed to get them off of him. I wanted to kill them with an insecticide, but I didn’t know what I could use and if I had it, and I didn’t know if killing all of those maggots in place would make things worse. I called Jen, who was up at the house, from my cellphone and asked her to check it out on the internet. Meanwhile, I decided that Peter and I should get to work getting the maggots off of Jason. Peter held Jason while I went into the barn looking for appropriate tools. I found the perfect one, an old file the farrier had left behind. The end of the file is a long blunt point, a perfect probe to slide along the folds of Jason’s skin where the maggots were concentrated.

At first, the maggots fell off in great squirming clumps because there were so many of them. It took about an hour to get the majority of them off. Periodically, Peter or I would need to turn away, but after a while we became pretty desensitized. By the end, we were picking the stragglers off by hand.

Jen had found some information on the internet, but I decided to call Dave Gessert my sheep shearer for his opinion. Not only does he know a thing or two about sheep, his wife Mary is a vet. Dave said to shear the area really well, wash the maggots off with water, then follow up by cleaning the area with a mild detergent, and then, most importantly, get the area as completely dry as possible. The maggots thrive in the damp. They do not do well in dry conditions. Peter and I did the best we could with a hose to wash the maggots off. We got nearly all of the large maggots, but the next generation, the tiny ones that were only a couple of millimeters long, of which there were hundreds if not thousands, were well protected from the water in the nooks and crannies of Jason’s skin. After using just water, I mixed a tablespoon of povidone iodine solution with about a gallon of water, which turns out to have been a bit of overkill, but it didn’t bother Jason. I could have just used a mild hand detergent. Peter very carefully applied the solution with a sponge, being especially careful to keep it out of Jason’s eyes. A few minutes later, just as carefully, we rinsed it off.

Then, after about three hours of standing almost perfectly still and never once making any real effort to get away, Jason cried. “He’s had it,” I said. “We’ve got to finish. Go grab those towels so we can start to get him dried off.” As Peter walked away to get the towels, I sort of relaxed my hold on Jason’s horn, and as soon as he felt just that tiny bit of “personal” space, he peed. I am pretty sure he cried out of discomfort because he needed to pee and didn’t feel comfortable doing it while we were poking and prodding him and hosing him down. He peed for a long time, so we waited for him to finish, and then when he was finished, we started to towel him off. After toweling him off, we used a blow drier to get him completely dry. I had worried about what would happen when we turned a blow drier on right next to Jason’s head, but he just stood there perfectly still until we were finished.

Then, finally, after nearly four hours, we put Jason in a stall in the barn. I gave him some hay and he immediately started eating. Then I gave him some water. Peter and I watched him for a few minutes and then went up to the house at about 8pm. Luckily the pizza shop down in town was open even though it was the Fourth of July because I was beat and I sure as hell wasn’t cooking dinner. I checked on Jason at 9:30pm and then went to bed.

At about 11:15pm my father called to tell me that my 97-year old grandmother had died. Today we’ve got to take care of Jason, build a chicken coop, pick up 100 four week old meat chickens from a friend, feed and water the animals, finish the pig pasture fence, and then move a group of pigs a quarter of a mile to another field, and during all of that I’ve got to figure out how to open myself up enough to let my grandmother in at least a little bit because right now I’m shut down as tight as a ship in a storm and I can’t hardly feel anything, but over the years I have found that one purpose of funerals is to pry open even hard cases like me.

 

Fratellino

My oldest younger brother, Peter, arrives today with his dog King to spend a month with us on the farm. I have a lonnngggg list of projects for us to work on! There are at least a half a dozen that have been languishing on my list for a year. They are the monotonous projects that I just can’t stand to do by myself, one of which is reclaiming about 1,000 feet of the back fence line, which has been gradually being swallowed by the woods for the past few years. Another big, monotonous project is to get the place shaped up — lots of weed whacking around trees and fence posts and in corners, trimming back limbs, and just general cleaning up; we’ll make more than a few trips to the dump and will burn more than a pile or two.

I have hardly seen Pete since we left Philadelphia (I have hardly seen any of my Philadelphia family). I am looking forward to spending some time with him.