When Farrowing Goes Wrong: Lessons Learned from an Unexpected Butchering Experience

Unfortunately many of the first generation farmers you will meet will tell you that there are a lot of hard lessons learned from the process of beginning farming. Between learning the importance of the correct fencing, correct feeds, time management, herd health programs, operating heavy equipment, learning how to get all the stains out of laundry, reusing, repurposing, the list goes on… There’s a learning curve. Theres a level of understanding and appreciation that you can only truly obtain by starting from the bottom and rising up, despite how many times you get knocked down. Theres an unspeakable kind of heartache that comes from experiences like the one we had last thursday night.

A newborn piglet unexpectedly running through the field led us to examine the pigs more closely, which is when we discovered a gilt farrowing a breech piglet. Willie and I tried every intervention and maneuver we could think of, but ultimately, the piglet did not survive. While The following piglet also got stuck breech, and appeared to have already aspirated in the birth canal, and while extraordinary efforts were attempted it proved to not be enough. We had our 2 year old and 4 year old with us during this "experience" and we sent them around he fence line to look for more piglets as we continued to try to assist the mama pig the best we could. As luck would have it, they found another gilt farrowing about 30 yards away. We went back and forth and had the kids holding onto the first piglet to distract them from the other farrowing.

We got the mama pig into a farrowing hut and since she did not seem to be progressing, we checked her which as soon as I put my hand in, it was clear that this next piglet was also not correctly positioned. After attempts to manipulate it was clear the animal was in an incredible amount of pain, we ultimately made the difficult decision to cull her. I then delivered the next two babies via c-section. The three surviving orphan piglets were given the opportunity to nurse off of her for the next hour with assistance.

Our work was cut out for us, as we had a whole hog to butcher and three piglets to syringe feed every 1-2 hours. Sadly by the end of the weekend, all 3 piglets ended up passing.

far from all of the meat we got just a picture of the roasts

Friday, we took our previous knowledge of butchering, a.youtube video, and a textbook and broke the Kune Kune down into primals and subprimals, marinating, sealing, and freezing the cuts. The rest of the weekend was spent making sausage, rendering lard, and doing everything we could to make sure that all of the pig went to nourish our family and did not go to waste. We learned an incredible amount about butchering, the health benefits of lard, new piglet care, and farrowing. The other mom is doing well and we are hoping that the next farrowing on the ranch has a better outcome.