Will Farrow

If you look carefully you will notice that the above photo is not actually a mirror image. We had four bred sows (gilts actually) that we have been expecting to farrow sometime this month. Yesterday afternoon the first one started and ended up having six pigs, five white and one black. I thought that the second one would go later that night, and when I checked on her at 3 she also had five white ones and one black one. That one ended up having two more black ones for a total of eight. So far they have both been good mothers and haven't sat on any.

"Dark Age Technology" or "Cattle Panels are Garbage"

This fall when I moved the cows into the Cow Shed East that we built last winter I opted to take the quick and easy option of buying cattle panels to use as fencing. I am sure that the cattle panel company would have offered a warning that these panels need a little more in the way of support than I was offering them, but we had abused them in the past with pretty good results. And since I was short on time and not absolutely broke I figured even at $38 dollars a piece that the panels were the way to go. Somewhere along the line though they decided to stop bothering to really weld them together, and a few short months after installing them I realized it was going to be money not well spent.





So last week I went back to using dark age technology (with a few modern twists) and cut a bunch of wooden poles out of the woods, which I attached to the shed posts with pieces of angle iron with steel loops welded to them to hold the poles.