Tag Archives: Small-farm economics

Keeping Her Place

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Each ewe marked with a blue crayon streak down her back holds a membership among the select. One day last week we moved the marked group of seven ewes into a separate pen before turning the rest of the flock out onto the summer grass. Later that afternoon we took the chosen seven to a graded sheep auction in Athens, Tennessee. At auction, they might be sold to another sheep farmer or someone looking to start their own flock. Then again, they might be bought as part of a larger lot and head to a processor. You never know who will be buying on any given day.

Ginger

Ewes are culled for practical reasons. Some are at the end of their productive life, others have given birth to lambs that grew out unsatisfactorily, and some have proven to be unthrifty or especially susceptible to parasites. Every ewe culled has been known to us and valued, and the vast majority have been born on this land.

Farming livestock involves a daily exertion of power over life and death. A flock of chickens only needs so many roosters, with the excess going into the pot. The cock that rules the roost remains for a couple of years, at which time he makes way for a younger, more virile replacement and becomes the flavoring for a savory gumbo. A sow that doesn’t produce satisfactorily becomes whole hog sausage. Her weanlings grow and grow and are then loaded in a trailer and sent to the butcher. Extra bull calves are banded and fattened as steers—again, whatever the livestock, one male only is needed for breeding.

Our Red Wattle sow, named Ginger for her coloring, had been chosen for culling. Her date with Morgan’s Meat Processing was booked and noted on the calendar. I bought Ginger in remote Hancock County, a rural county nestled right against the Kentucky border, at a homestead set back in a deep no-light “holler” in the spring of last year. She is a very personable, very docile sow, a lovely specimen of her heritage breed.

Ginger had her first litter in January—a disappointing four piglets, of which only two survived. We would have been content with six but prefer 8-12. We decided to give her another chance and breed her once again to a Berkshire boar. When the farrowing date at the first of August passed with no piglets, it was with real sadness that we scheduled her slaughter. That she would make that final trip with her two market-weight offspring was of no comfort.

On a small farm we have some latitude for keeping animals. Because ours is a modest economic model of a peculiarly non-industrial bent, choices are often made as much for personal reasons as for financial. Still, keeping a two-time loser on the payroll truly doesn’t make sense. We are not that kind of place, neither a petting zoo nor an animal rescue. Ours is a working, producing farm, and here everything is expected to earn its keep.

Yet … last week we were at our friends’ farm picking up three weanling piglets to grow out for ourselves and customers. They were from the same litter that we had helped castrate just a couple of weeks earlier, and we were buying them now because Ginger’s failure to farrow had left us with a gap in our pork production schedule (not to mention that a 500-pound non-producing hog eats the same massive amount of feed that a 500-pound producing hog requires).

While it is still not certain if the failure to farrow was the fault of our sow, when our friend mentioned while loading the barrows that she would be happy to help us artificially inseminate Ginger, I did an uncharacteristic clutch at the offer. I wanted Ginger to work out, did not want to take her to market, at least before she had lived out her productive life.

For those who don’t farm, my attitude towards culling may strike you as callous and unfeeling. Practical decisions often do. Which is why so many tough decisions in life are “farmed out” to others. But, not here on our farm, while livestock is in our care, we treat them well; we give them plenty of room, feed, and attention. Yet there is an end, as indeed there is for each of us.

However, when I fed Ginger last evening—watching her tuck into her trough, then galumph around the pasture—I felt at peace with this very uneconomic decision to give her another chance and allow her to keep her place.

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My book, Kayaking with Lambs, is now available from Amazon and Barnes & Noble (as well as Front Porch Republic Books).

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Reading this past week: both Tom Sawyer and Life on the Mississippi (M. Twain) and select essays from The Burden of Southern History (C.V. Woodward).

Small-Farm Economics

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Apologies to my most sensitive readers, but this is another piece that deals frankly with the life cycle on a farm. You have been warned.

With 625 pounds of freshly butchered pork cut into quarters, beer in the fridge and pizza ready for the oven, sharp knives and meat saws on the tables, we went to work.

It can surely be said that the small farmer is more intimately involved with life’s cycles than the average citizen. The observations of birth, life, death, all harvested into good meals from countless livestock, leaves the practitioner with no illusion of his permanence on this green land.

We bought a sow back in February of this year. She arrived in the usual manner, from another farmer who had gotten in over her head with pigs. The owner couldn’t sell what the breeding stock produced, and she couldn’t afford to keep and feed their offspring. For the small farmer, raising out hogs is a chancy business. Unlike for cattle, there is no real market at the stockyard, so if the animals are sent that route, they bring a pittance for the substantial investment of time, money, and effort. Pork, on the small farm, is all about the direct marketing of the meat to a customer.

This particular sow arrived pregnant, due within the month. The seller had become desperate at the prospect of 6-12 new piglets arriving even before the last litter had been sold. This is often where we find the margin to make a small profit on our farm; it’s the classic adage of buy low and sell high. We paid $100 for this sow and picked her up from a small acreage on the Cumberland Plateau.

Mere weeks after her arrival, she gave birth to six piglets. Eight weeks later, we sold three of the weanlings to two customers to raise out for their own freezers. Those three brought in $120, which covered our initial expense. Between the sow’s temperament and her conformation, we chose not to keep her. Instead, we took her to the abattoir and had her ground into sausage, much of which we then sold — one of the many clear-eyed decisions a farmer has to make daily.

The first of November, nine months after their birth, our three hogs were sold as pork to customers. The average hanging weight of each hog was 275 pounds. We trailered them to the packinghouse on a Tuesday and picked up the packaged meat on Friday. The customers drove to the farm, then paid for and left with their pork by late afternoon.

Last week the friends/customers who had bought two weanlings from us in the spring had them slaughtered. Those few extra weeks of feeding boosted the hanging weights to a 312.5-pound average, which, circle back around to the reason newcomers get into trouble with pigs: they just keep growing and eating until they go in the freezer.

Our friends elected to save money and do the final processing of the carcasses into cuts. Now, that is a lot of meat to process! They asked for assistance and we were happy to oblige. Mind you, none of us is a skilled butcher, but we do have a working knowledge of the parts and various cuts of the carcass, and within four hours we had a tidy pile of loins, tenderloins, ribs, assorted roasts, and ham steaks; two hams and four sides for curing; lots of trimmings for grinding into sausage; and vast quantities of bones, fatback, and leaf lard. We paused only once, for the pizza and beer, before finishing up and heading home.

The small-farm return on investment is simple, in this instance: One sow produced enough meat for approximately 12 families to eat well for one year. And there, my friends, is a crash course in small-farm economics — food produced at scale for a knowable audience.

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Reading this weekend: Irish Journals (W. Berry)