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Food

The Pig to Table Project: Off to a happy start

By Tamar Haspel,July 17, 2012

View Photo Gallery - : Pork: From field to plate: Tamar Haspel and her husband take on the sometimes-daunting…

Editor’s note:

This is the first of a three-part series that over the next five months will chronicle the author’s effort to understand our relationship to the animals we eat. It will be at times unflinching, yet enlightening.

Four years ago, when my husband and I began trying to hunt, gather and grow as much of our own food as possible, we instituted a barnyard rule of one new species per year. Year one, naturally, was chickens — everyone’s introductory livestock. The next year was turkeys. Year three, buoyed by our success with chickens and turkeys, we made an exception and got both ducks and bees.

This year, humbled by trouble with ducks and bees, we’re back to one. Our fondness for bacon, coupled with our aversion to daily milking, made pigs the obvious choice. We’re not alone. Although backyard pigs fly under the USDA radar, and there are no statistics, anecdotal evidence indicates that home sties are on the rise. Walter Jeffries, proprietor of Sugar Mountain Farm in Vermont, sells pasture-raised piglets and reports an uptick in business. “With the recent recession we have seen an increase in the number of people interested in raising a summer pig,” he says.

One summer pig wasn’t enough for us, though. We wanted three — one for us and two for friends — because pigs shouldn’t be alone, and we wanted ours to have both a playmate and a spare, in case disease or mishap cost us one. The decision to add what was going to become 750 pounds of pig flesh to our homestead was tough. Not because of the pigs themselves: We like pigs, we like pork, we have enough land. It’s the fencing that gave us pause. Because pigs are large, they thrive on having plenty of space. And, also because pigs are large, the fences that enclose that space must be sturdy.

Enclosing a large space with a sturdy fence is an expensive undertaking. Which would be fine if we thought we’d have pigs every year from now until we decide to give it all up for a gated community in Florida, but we’re not at all sure this isn’t a one-off. For all we know, we’ll hate having pigs. Or they’ll hate being here. Or an escapee will terrorize the neighbors and we’ll be run out of town on a rail.

Setting up a home

The less committed you are to having pigs, the more important it is that you keep your fencing costs under control. The more committed you are to keeping your fencing costs under control, the more difficult it is to build a sturdy fence.

Because my father was a varsity fencer at MIT back in the ’50s, I was hoping that a keen ability to solve this problem was my genetic endowment. It turns out that my husband, Kevin, is much better at it than I am. He knows all kinds of mysterious things that weren’t part of my education, like what stainless-steel strapping tape is and how you can use it to attach something to a tree. He has an arsenal of power tools that, for him, drill, nail and cut things straight and true. (For me, results vary. Wildly.) He is very strong, has a high pain threshold and doesn’t mind getting dirty.

Basically, Kevin is a varsity fencer.

We built our pen with hog panels, prefab lengths of heavy-gauge wire fence that are 32 inches tall and 16 feet long. Because pigs like shade and rooting, we put the pen in the woods — so called because it is an area with many trees. If you have trees, we reasoned, you don’t need fence posts.

Unfortunately, trees have an inconvenient habit of being 17 feet apart. They also don’t care to be in a straight line, or to be precisely vertical. Although trees excel at carbon sequestration, they make distinctly sub-optimal fence posts.

Kevin was undaunted. It took him only a few days, with a little help from me, to turn 13 hog panels into what we hope to be a pig-proof fence. We used the trees as posts where we could and improvised where we couldn’t. We used cut branches to brace the fence to nearby trees, and lumber to bridge gaps where the panels didn’t quite meet. We shored up any weak spots by laying logs outside the base, and made a gate from some lengths of PVC.

Total price tag: $300. Total area fenced: 2,000 square feet.

But we still needed a shelter.

Everything we read about pig shelters (and how did we ever do anything before the Internet?) said they need be nothing elaborate, particularly if they don’t have to see pigs through the winter. They need to be sturdy, and the right size to capitalize on pigs’ tendency not to poop where they sleep. If the shelter’s too big, one side of it could seem like it’s far enough away to be the bathroom.

The problem is that a just-weaned pig is only about 25 or 30 pounds but a slaughter-size pig is almost 10 times that size. A shelter that’s the right size for three grown pigs is cavernous to three weaner pigs.

So our shelter had to be not just cheap — and sturdy — but adjustable.