[This post seems like it’s rambling, because it is. Homesteading isn’t always linear. Sometimes it’s not cyclic either. Sometimes it’s just random shit happening when it happens.]
External events forced my hand and I’m in homestead maintenance mode. I’ve gone from my default “make food so if the dipshits in DC starve us all I can smugly eat bacon” to “repair stuff on a budget of not much using whatever scrap materials I can scrounge”. Frankly, I needed a “maintenance year” anyway. I didn’t want to do it while society was mid-flush. I planned to ride it out a bit longer. I guess the universe had other plans.
I knew this was coming. I’ve been coasting a bit and have lost ground with maintenance. The extreme winter consumed my firewood supply, the wet spring did a job on planned tractor work, and “decline” (call it what you want, times ain’t normal) turned the dial to eleven with farm expenses.
This year it was also impossible to get feeder pigs. Well that’s not 100% true. I might, if I put forth extraordinary effort, track down a few rare and hard to find, bigger than normal, feeder pigs. They would cost triple or quadruple the normal price! Or, I could finance a Lamborghini. Both make about the same fiscal sense.
I won’t overpay for livestock! Coupled with “supply chain something something it’s definitely Putin’s fault” effects on the feed supply; I’d lose my shirt. Livestock must make sense. They’re not pets.
So that’s that; no pigs this year. Such a shame. I’d happily raise a bare minimum of family food even if it was at a small loss (just to make sure I’ve got a personal bacon supply) but there’s issues with that that might not be apparent if you haven’t tried it. Homesteading is inefficient anyway so there’s not much wiggle room. If you drop to a scale too small it has huge drawbacks. The labor of one pig (which would be a financial loss but tasty) is super inefficient compared to my usual run of 3-7 of them.
They’re social critters. It’s wise to take that into account. A handful of pigs will amuse themselves like Millennials browsing social media. A group of them under my benevolent care will sit around being happy without causing much fuss right until I promise them free college tuition and put them on a trailer bound for slaughter… also much like what has happened to Millennials.
One pig alone is a very different situation. A solo pig tends to think too much. Some get grumpy. Some become lovable pets that get in your way when you’re trying to mow the lawn. Some turn into Tom Sawyer and go exploring. The point is that one critter becomes a bigger hassle than a handful that will amuse themselves jointly.
Upon reflection I sense the root of modern society’s aversion to people who just want to be left alone. Not to sound too brutal but it’s a thing done in society to humans in recent times. A kid’s schooling now incorporates an endless succession of group projects. Everyone in the group gets a B. A kid’s schooling in the past often had a single kid working through a homework assignment or essay all on their own. One kid gets an A. Another kid gets a C.
Can you sense the kind of human that emerges from both paths? Which upbringing makes a human who’s more likely to get on a cattle car? Is it the same path that makes one human more likely to put another human on the cattle car? Remember 2020! The Government didn’t need to air drop Karen into the grocery store to monitor mask compliance. Karen was already there and trained to enjoy the role. Squawking about “other people’s behavior” filled a void that had been molded into her life. Same goes for the HR department that pushed the vaccine in ways only removed in scale but not direction from Nuremberg. “Get the shot or you’re fired”, that’s oddly construed as “voluntary consent” to a creature raised in a group project world.
Forgive me; one ponders the underbelly of humanity when they pay attention to the cycle of life. Sometimes society has a dark core but you only see after a lonely day of quietly shoveling pig shit.
Enough of that line of thinking. I might get banned for wrongthink!
Back to the subject matter, three pigs isn’t triple the work of one; it’s half. You heard it here first!
That’s just one little factoid in the world of experience that comes from walking the walk. Your average Mother Earth News reading / NPR listening hippie won’t know this truth because they’re more about signaling intent than accomplishing a goal. It’s why you should ignore dipshits fresh out of college that want to instruct about “sustainable living”. The world is filled with fuckers who’ve spent their whole life absorbing ideas from teachers instead of doing things in real life. Never listen to anyone tell you about homesteading unless they drive a truck and it has some rust on it.
I was uncertain what to do about the pig situation. Fate gave me a nudge. Thanks fate!
A barn collapsed. It collapsed across the pig fence. Mother nature isn’t subtle! I accepted the clue (that had been delivered with a sledge) and planned a year of construction.
Don’t freak out. I had naught but incredibly creaky infrastructure and I knew this day would come. What can I say? You don’t lightly drop big money on new barns just so a critter can shit on a freshly poured slab. Also homesteading is as unglamorous as being a medieval peasant but it works. I’ve been limping along as best I can. This year gravity won and therefore it’s time to fix stuff. Well played physics.
The good news is I’ve already done well. I’ve managed to produce considerable amounts of food over many years using infrastructure somewhere between “shack” and “hovel”. (They’re pigs and chickens, they don’t need a luxury accommodations.) The bad news is I’m out of the game in 2022. Meh, I’ve probably made more food for society than 99.8% of humanity in 2022. That’s not so bad.
I’m a little skittish counting on food from grocery stores but don’t worry, there’s always hunting and I’ll put in a small garden. Plus, I still have some chickens.
Also, I’m told that everything is fine with the food supply because we’ve got top men managing the economy. Any president who got the highest vote count in history surely can keep the grocery stores filled. After all, every single president before him had it well in hand. He can’t be worse than all of them. Right?
In the meantime, I’ve stacked a cord of wood!
Hat tip to Daily Timewaster for the inspiring image. My firewood is in a shitty little shed. It looks nothing like this glorious photo. But it doesn’t matter. It’ll heat my house just as well and I did the stacking myself. That’s what it’s all about!
7 pigs is a large amount of pigmeat. We used to have a pig for three of us and were quite happy when the freezer was eventually empty.
Oh heck, seven pigs is huge! You could feed an army with seven. Most years I keep one (or in extreme situations two) and sell the rest.
So true about this current crop of college edumacted idiots. I went to college I know more then you, shut up and listen… My stock go to question is, have you ever shoveled livestock shit at 2am in freezing rain because your hired man didn’t show up for work that day? I grew up on a farm, went into nursing, shit, I am an expert at…
Living in a city environment, raising pigs is not an option. So what I have found is putting a second refrigerator in my insulated and drywalled garage. Both units are large. This allows me to store extra whatever and buy items in bulk. This definately works for us city folks along the Colorado River..
Your point about the work needed to care for one vs. several is a good point. My Uncle had a herd of red brangus beef cattle, about 40 head, only two of which were bulls. The offspring were sold and were the money makers. He was required to go out at least once a week to be sure the windmill was pumping water, the fence tight and supplemental feeding if drought was occurring. Took about an hour and a half. Medical care was minimail.
My wife has a small pasture with two cows, no bulls and a donkey (to eat shrubs the cows won’t touch). Our duties are visiting the pasture about twice – three times a week and checking the fence. That takes about 45 minutes.
But the person STILL has to go and check to see to the welfare of the animals. That work does not change. My wife wouldn’t mind more animals but is only 2 1/2 acres so three is about as much as she wants to feed supplementally. Otherwise, you are bleeding $$ paying for hay and time to feed them.
jrg
My usual was 3 at a time. 2 were sold which covered the purchase, feed, & butcher. The 3rd was ours to eat. Named Bacon, Ham, & Sausage. Or Larry, Daryl & Darrel. Recycle the names
That’s my preferred ratio too. Sell 2 keep 1 is just about break even.
Glad I stopped by. The title drew me in. Now, I have firerwood to cut this spring/summer. The trees have been felled for over a year and are stacked in one spot for me to chainsaw away. My question to you, and I think I already know the answer. Do you use a hydraulic splitter or do you still use a maul? At 56, it pains me to swing a heavy maul anymore. I’ll whack kindling all day but sheech!
Hydraulic all the way! Manually splitting wood with a maul is just too hard. Humans age and at some point we aren’t meant for that kind of abuse. I also don’t recommend renting a splitter. When I rented one I’d work myself too hard trying to get it all done during the short rental period.
Buy yourself a splitter (don’t try to find used, the used splitter market is junk). It’s a “luxury” you need and deserve. Then split wood with it slow and steady. An hour here and hour there as time permits. It’s the best way and it’s more fulfilling that way too.
Incidentally, I “hot rodded” my splitter for highway towing. That’s not necessary but it’s very handy if there’s “free” firewood to be had somewhere off your land. The story is below:
How To Nearly Destroy A Woodsplitter And Then Rebuild It To A Higher Level Of AwesomeDarn, I can’t copy the links! Look under “Notable Sagas” in the menu bar at the top of the blog and scroll down to “How To Nearly Destroy A Woodsplitter And Then Rebuild It To A Higher Level Of Awesome”.
Btw: my modifications have withstood the test of time too!
We just got our first-ever pullets, half a dozen little fluffballs of three different breeds (all egg-oriented). Currently getting settled in, in a bunny cage on the hearth (we have a bigger cage for them, but at this point its bars are just a little too far apart).
So now I have a construction project: by the time they’re old enough to live outdoors, I gotta build a henhouse and a fenced-and-covered run to keep chickens in and eagles out. I don’t think I’ll get real fancy with the henhouse, though: no Slavic-styled chicken dacha on R. Crumb “Keep on truckin'” feet. An idea from a different era….
The Victory Garden is fairly well underway, and this year I’ll be putting in a rudimentary drip system so I can (a) put watering on a timer and (b) not water the weeds. Alas, there are still many weeds to be dealt with, including some dagnab Johnson grass. Planned crops include lots of chicken-feed ingredients as well as people food.
Been lugging around a backpack sprayer around fencelines and suchlike places, poisoning various brush and other weeds now so they won’t become a bigger problem later.
Always chores… and someday I hope to find time for some tech projects (farm-scale sensor network; many-channel networked, solar-powered sprinkler controller; and so on).
I don’t understand how some people manage to be bored.
There’s always more to do on a homestead. The good news is that you’re in it for yourself. If the chicken shed looks like a scrapheap the chickens might not care. Nobody can say a clean neat orderly homestead is inherently more productive than a ramshackle one.
I was cutting firewood this weekend. There’s never a day when you’ve “nothing to do” when you heat with your own wood.
Never raised less than 3, sometimes as many as 6.
Depending on prices.
But this year, we were priced out of the piglet market.
$150/weaner is crazy.
Especially since I found a family that raises 20-30 culls from hog barns a year…so pinkies, not quite as tasty as say a Berkshire, but, raised on pasture with grain supplement is still better than store bought watery pork…and the bonus?
$300 at time of pickup.
We pickup the full grown hog (our boy last year topped 450lbs!) bring it home, shoot it as it gets of the trailer, then cut and wrap ourselves.
Not quite as good as doing it all ourselves, but definitely more economical.
So I concentrate on poultry for the freezer…chicken, ducks, turkey…