Hello everyone. Hopefully everyone is healthy. Earlier this year we added a vertical mixer and small hammer mill. We are now able to buy ingredients for our feed recipe in bulk and mix everything from scratch. We know without a doubt, what all is in our feed. I taste each batch of feed to help ensure consistency from one batch to the next. This includes taking whole corn down to a corn meal and whole oats down to oat flour. This is drastically reducing our cost for feed.
We added another duplex farrowing hut, 8 ft by 16 ft. It is partitioned down the middle with fencing in one corner so piglets can get away from mama.
We have had four litters this fall. It is the most litters we have had in a season on the farm so far. We had a total of 30 live piglets and deposits for nearly all of them. Daisy was bred with our boar Chalupa. Ayita had her first litter. She was bred with Chalupa. We brought CoCo out of retirement. She was bred with Chalupa. Penny was Artificially Inseminated with War Cry semen from Shaffer’s Goldrush in Indiana. We have had a few deposits for breeding pairs. Those pairs are coming out of CoCo and Penny. We are looking to keep a couple of gilts from Penny as possible replacement gilts.
We are very pleased with the way the piglets look. Lucy did not take with the breeding. We bred her again in September. If she took this time, she will give birth in January.
We bred CoCo and Ayita with Chalupa. We bred Daisy with Okie. We artificially inseminated Penny with War Cry semen from Shaffer’s Goldrush in Indiana. We did the same with Penny for our fall litters and got some really good looking piglets. All pigs were bred within a 10 day period. If all sows took, we should have piglets in the middle of March. Lucy is a wildcard. We bred her in September. If she took, she will have piglets the first week of January.
New pictures have been added to Piglets for Sale and updated pictures of Chalupa and Ayita on the Breeders Page. There are new pictures of the stages of building for the new duplex hut. There are also new pictures of our "new to us" vertical mixer and hammer mill on the About page.
