"One of the best books that I have read on the raising and care of animals."
— Clark Isaacs, Midwest Book Review
It's hard to know where to get started when talking about pigs. They're smart. They're funny. They're easy to raise. They're profitable. They're delicious.
They're also, in a sense, a contradiction.
No barnyard animal has a better nose, yet none smell worse. The pig has cloven hooves — an adaptation shared with flighty prey animals like sheep, deer, and antelope — yet no barnyard animal displays as much swagger or is less afraid. No animal is said to be smarter, yet pigs will stay out in the sun so long that they'll end up with second-degree sunburns.
The pig is the friendliest animal on the farm by far: always available for a scratch behind the ears, hardly ever moody, and quick with a grunt of delight. Yet the pig would also eat you for supper if the circumstances were right. Pigs are the only meat-eating animals that we, in turn, raise for meat.
The pig is synonymous with lard and fat and bacon, yet pork can be as fat-free as chicken or lean beef.
The pig is said to be the cleanest animal on the farm, yet every child knows that a pig will roll in a mud puddle at the first opportunity. Pigskin is one of the toughest and most useful of animal hides, yet it's sensitive to temperature and injury. Some breeds of pigs grow ferocious-looking tusks yet prefer to dine on roots and vegetables.
As if that's not enough, agriculture itself could scarcely have evolved eons ago without the versatile pig, yet fewer and fewer farmers raise even a single pig these days. In 1965, more than a million farms in the United States had pigs. Today that number is down to 75,000.
At the heart of these discrepancies is a relatively straightforward fact: The pig is an omnivore. No other livestock animal has such a wide-ranging and catholic appetite. Pigs will eat anything and everything on the farm, from grain and vegetable scraps to roots, shrubs, meat — even your lawn.
The pig is the original recycler, which is why pigs were the first animals to be domesticated back at the dawn of agriculture. Food that is no longer fit for consumption by people or other animals (spoiled hay, rancid milk, garden scraps) are all delights for the accommodating pig, who happily takes everyone else's castoffs and turns them into bacon, sausage, and ham.
Besides recycling, the pig is prized for its earthmoving abilities. Does a new pasture need stumping? Give it over to a drift of pigs, and their rooting and digging in search of tasty morsels will have shredded the small stumps by summer's end and made the larger ones easier to dig out. Too many weeds and weed seeds in the vegetable patch? A season's worth of pig digestion will help solve the problem. Have a daunting pile of winter manure in the barn that needs to be addressed? Drill some grain down into the bedding, turn the pigs in, and you'll have light, well-turned compost in a month or so.
But with most farm energy and fertilizer now being derived from fossil fuels, the pig's central role as recycler and earthmover has been eclipsed. This is a shame, because pigs are much easier to raise now than they once were, thanks to the invention of the electric fence.
These days, the lowly pig is making a major comeback. Part of it is the growing realization that fossil fuels have many hidden costs. Part of it is a renewed enthusiasm for local, fresh foods. But the biggest reason is simply the taste of fresh, pasture-raised pork. It's unbelievably good. The flavor explodes on your tongue. Even the most skeptical visitors to our house ("Isn't all pork the same?") come away amazed.
Before I'd tasted fresh, pasture pork, and before we'd purchased our first sounder of shoats (the technical term for a group of recently weaned piglets), I was reluctant to try raising pigs. I had the idea that pigs were unwieldy, smelly, and too smart by half. That their meat wasn't really that good for you. That trichinosis was lurking around the corner. That other animals were easier to raise.
I was wrong on all counts. Very wrong. With the zeal of the newly converted, I now see a place for pigs in most every backyard. As the local agriculture movement gathers momentum, the pig deserves to be at the very center of it. Here's the moment when I was truly smitten by living with pigs. It was near the end of our first summer raising them. My sister's wedding reception was to be held on our farm, and I was tidying things up and making a final pass with the lawn mower when, out of the corner of my eye, I saw unexpected movement. I looked up to see our three, 250-pound hogs casually sauntering across the lawn, headed straight for the party tent. They had somehow managed to unhinge the metal gate on their pen, cross an intervening pasture, and come over to get a leg up on the festivities.
Although my immediate concern was keeping the pigs separated from the hors d'oeuvres, I couldn't help but notice how those pigs carried themselves: confidently, with enthusiasm, heads held high, and ready for a night on the town. They all but had their party hats on. Here was an animal that knew how to enjoy life. I've been a big fan of pigs ever since.