Considering this is the dead of winter, we have been extremely busy here at Hand Hewn Farm. There are the obvious chores that require daily attention. And some seasonal maintenance considerations, like keeping water from freezing long enough that the animals can actually drink it. Also, we are continually repurposing or upgrading infrastructure. This week, for example, I finally got around to relocating half a ton of scrap parts and pieces that were used in the now defunct silo operation. And the next day, I continued the heavy lift of transforming a pole barn that once housed an RV into (what will be) the woodshop. I also applied heat tape to water lines in the pump house that I built on the cistern this past Fall, leveled the refrigerator in the soon-to-be butcher shop so the door will seal properly, helped Kathy remove and replace a dump truck worth of bedding from the chicken coop, ground over a hundred pounds of sausage meat and renderable fat from this past weekend’s butcher workshop, and spent at least an hour trying to find whatever died or was drug to the haymow and is now blanketing the entire area with the stench of death. And it’s onlyWednesday morning!
In addition to the aforementioned tedium of farm life, this coming weekend will be the first in a month that we aren’t attending or offering an on-farm butcher workshop. It will be nice to get a break (before getting back at it the last two weekends of the month). I was hoping to offer some highlights about the past workshops, but honestly, I don’t even know where to begin. The thing that keeps coming to mind, aside from the incredible shared experience we have with the farmer, is how huge these pigs have been!
Most people probably don’t know this, but a pig will just keep growing. Obviously there may be breed exceptions to this, but generally, with a steady supply of food and water and time, just about any pig can easily go north of 1,000lbs. But the return on the hog farmers’ investment begins to diminish after the pig reaches 250. This is a because the meat:fat ratio turns into a fat:meat ratio. In other words, instead of 3 lbs of feed converting to 1 lbs of muscle, with some fat in there…after that 250 mark, 3 lbs of feed disproportionately converts to fat, with some muscle in there. And since our culture has tragically replaced lard with Crisco, it is not in the hog farmers’ interest to raise fat pigs. (This if folly, but will be addressed elsewhere.)
So, that’s why most pigs are “finished” in the 250lbs range. But here’s what’s crazy, both of the pigs at the Woller (Aspen Rd) Farm were in the neighborhood of 400lbs each. They were Large Black/Gloucestershire Old Spot cross. Both of those breeds are considered a lardier pig. And lard is what they got (all told they will end up with almost 20 gallons of rendered lard!).
The pig at Mike and Jennifer Farmers homestead, on the other hand, was an anomaly, and enormous! He was an uncastrated boar with sharp, prodigious tusks. And this dude was about 7 feet long and weighed around 600 lbs! And when I say he was all muscle, I mean he was All muscle. What little fat he did have wasn’t even usable, as it had begun to harden into armor plating (I know, that sounds insane, but look it up, it’s legit). So while the Farmer family didn’t end up with much lard, their trade-off was the thickest, meatiest belly (bacon) I have ever seen in my life! It is difficult to describe the size of their boar without the use of hyperbole. I can say however that both of the Aspen Rd hogs, while large and lardy (150 lbs over and above market weight!), still dropped into our 55 gal. drum for the scald. For perspective, and without hyperbole, this is the situation we found ourselves in with the boar,
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