At Home With Pigs
LIVING WITH PIGS: EVERYTHING YOU NEED TO KNOW
TO RAISE YOUR OWN PORKERS
By Chuck Wooster, with photographs by Geoff Hansen
Lyons Press, Guilford, Connecticut, 2008
Reviewed by W. A. Schaffer
I recently started my own hobby chicken farm and accumulated a library of six poultry books before I felt that I understood what I was getting into. I am planning to add pigs next year and have been acquiring reference books on the subject, including Living with Pigs.
I started my reading with The River Cottage Cookbook by Hugh Fearnly-Whittingstall (required reading for localvores in any country), and the chapter on "pigs and pork" piqued my interest but did not give me enough detail to proceed. Then I moved on to some older books, including Starting with Pigs by Andy Case and Pig Rearing and Health by Russell Lyon. I think that if I had started with Living with Pigs, I could have declared my pig project library complete.
Vermont-based author Chuck Wooster is an experienced farmer. He started his farming career when he apprenticed for a year at Caretaker Farm in Williamstown, Massachusetts, one of the first CSAs in the United States. By the time the harvest was over, Wooster was smitten. In 2000, he started the Sunrise Farm CSA in Hartford, which offers meat, eggs and maple syrup, as well as vegetable crops. Wooster is also an associate editor at Northern Woodlands, the editor of The Outside Story: Local Writers Explore the Nature of New Hampshire and Vermont and the author of Living with Sheep.
This book is part personal adventure, part documentary and a pig owner's manual. It is also a fun three-evening read. The photographs by Vermont photographer Geoff Hansen are very instructive and several rise to the level of animal portraiture. The book is organized as you would intuitively approach the topic: I like pigs, so I think I will grow my own — what does it take? A very accessible and brief history of pigs opens the book. Then we learn how to buy piglets, how to keep them alive the first few weeks and how to feed them. Very important to the project is how to build pig houses and, even more important, how to fence them. It is all much easier to accomplish than you might think. I found myself collecting wooden pallets from the Williston recycling station to build my pig dwelling. I learned that pigs don't like electricity, so even small electrified sheep netting will contain them. I learned that it is safe to eat pork cooked pink, and that pigs like vodka-soaked grain (more on that later).
Which brings me to one of the most articulate and helpful sections of the book: slaughtering your pigs. Wooster, in the same spirit as the River Cottage Farm is personally involved, respectful and grateful for the animal's life. He offers options using an abattoir or slaughtering at home, which is where the pig's vodka breakfast comes in; he uses it to sedate the pigs before he starts. I am now prepared to follow his methods, and then take the pork to my butcher for processing, an idea I would never have otherwise considered. The financial summaries of pig raising are simple and make the project even more attractive.
A friend of mine, a native Vermonter, tells me that she is glad that she married another native Vermonter. She says that by the time locals grow up they have gotten animal farming out of their system, and the resulting freedom from pigs and chickens allows them to take longer vacations. I am not a native. I helped with my grandparents' pigs as a child, and I want to have them again. This book will get me started. You may not choose to own pigs, but after reading Living with Pigs, you will have a greater understanding of the local food on your plate.
W.A. Schaffer is a hobby chicken farmer in Williston who is awaiting a crop of blue eggs from this year's flock of Arucanas.
— Edible Green Mountains, Winter 2009