Pigs are a new venture for Kinne Brook Farm; for 30 years the Lake family never had pigs.  We decided to try them out, not because of the great demand for pork, but because we had read in a Joel Salatin book about using them to compost a winter’s worth of manure without the use of machinery.  In the winter of 2011-12, we dutifully distributed whole corn and barley in the cow shed every time we added bedding, and then brought in two young pigs to root the grain out when the cows left in the spring.  Well.  It turned out that they really liked having food brought to them daily, and didn’t want to work for their corn.

While the experiment was not a great success, we were hooked on having pigs around.  We buy them at roughly 8 weeks from Big Pig Farm in Williamstown, MA, and they are a Duroc/Pietran/Yorkshire mix that provides a nice balance of length (for bacon) and chunkiness (for everything else).  We feed them organically certified pig feed, scraps from our table, and any and all weeds, excess veggies, and other tidbits that we collect around the farm.  And they root up anything they can get from the pasture, including impressively large rocks.  They relish them all.  Well, maybe not the rocks.