A few years ago I visited a well-known farmer and heard him say, “If you have livestock, you have dead stock, too.” Clever. Harhar, right? Well, sort of.
Such sayings lose their luster and dull in the face of reality. This summer has been particularly tough. It all started with Tammy and Iseesyavontrelle (Pronounced I-sees-ya-Vontrell).
We bought these Tamworths a year and a half ago from a fella in Kentucky and they really took off. They looked fantastic. Then, we put them in the field with other, larger sows. I knew it would be a struggle for them to find their place at the trough, but everyone has to leave the nest sooner or later.
Tammy did alright and I could tell that she was bred by the boar they were now shacked up with, but Iseesyavontrell didn’t. Eventually Tammy farrowed a nice litter of 8 or 9 pigs, and Iseesyavontrell never changed.
Tammy started losing body condition and hair. She looked like she had mange and worms. So, we did our all-natural doctoring, but it had little effect. As soon as she’d weaned her piglets, we put her in the field, the cleanest place on the farm. And she slowly, very slowly, improved. After about a month, her hair was growing back and she’d definitely put on weight.
Iseesyavontrell was still with a large group of pigs that needed to move to a new area, so we took them over to a new, wooded paddock. Tammy followed two days later. The next morning, they were both dead as a doornail. No warning, just dead.
It was so hot at 8 am when we found them that our vet said an autopsy was already impossible. In less than 15 hours, decomposition was already roaring along. I have a handful of suspicions about their demise, but nothing concrete.
Then there was a black sow, in the same multi-acre, wooded paddock as Tammy and Iseesyavontrell. We were walking the woods one morning, two weeks later, looking for a missing pig (not her) and there she was – dead as a doornail. She had given us no signs of illness. She didn’t appear wormy. She’d been born on our farm, had been dead less than 12 hours, but was in a spot impossible to get to with any implement large enough to lift her. So, the vet was out and we had to inspect her. We think maybe this was a problem with a pregnancy.
Finally, early last week, I saw buzzards circling near the barn. We have some boars and large barrows (castrated boars) in a field adjacent to the barn and I hadn’t seen a young boar in that group come up that morning. I sent Wright to look for him, and he found him. The buzzards were gone that afternoon, so I thought nothing else about it. But there was this horrid smell. It kept wafting over from the very field I’ve already mentioned. Since we had processed chickens Monday and dumped the offal (guts, etc) in the field for said boars, we thought they just hadn’t eaten it all and it was rotting, slowly.
But we had forgotten about Reggie. He was an Old Spot boar we’d bought from a neighbor and castrated. We had planned to make him into barbecue. Sadly, we discovered that he was the smell. We found him in the pond on Friday morning. I don’t know what happened. Just like the other pigs, the frustration of the mystery remains. And I have to ask myself what I’m doing wrong to be mysteriously losing so many pigs. At this point, I’ve become my own vet and swine mortician.
I was really down, standing there on the edge of the pond, trying to figure out how to handle the mess of Reggie when a duck walked by, with a duckling I’d never seen before. And it hit me – Life is not gone. There is a delicate balance here, on this farm, that I will never understand. I live in the middle of it. I think, often, but wrongly, that I control it, but I only play a part. I am just a creature, too, but not without hope. Here is death, in all of its horror staring me in the face and life is still marching, still bravely waddling along, multiplying beauty, and quacking loudly.




