Transporting new piglets has always seemed to come with a story afterwards. And the most recent group to arrive on the farm was no different.
We just added a few new Tamworth piglets to our farm from Kingbird Farm in Berkshire, NY. The drive down to Kingbird Farm is over just over 2 hrs, so I decided to take our Prius instead of our truck to save on gas.
When I pulled up at the farm to get our piglets, Karma (the owner) said to me, “These piglets are pretty big. I’m not sure you’re going to be able to get them in there.” The interior of a Prius has always proven bigger than it appears and having used it in the past to transport little pigs, I was confident I could make it work.
It took some effort to re-locate these healthy and strong piglets into my car, but we succeeded. The pigs were settled in the Prius and looked entirely comfortable- two in the back seat and two in the rear. I was feeling pretty good about myself until I was about 15 minutes into the return trip and realized that my partner-in-crime (my dear wife Jenney) was working late and that she would not be available to help me unload said piglets.
Unloading the pigs from the back seat into our mobile pig pen went smoothly. Low stress, no escapes. The rear of the car? Not so much. One pig tried to escape over the side of the car and while I wrangled it in, the other pig jumped off the car, rolled around and squirmed underneath the Prius. It was a first for me: we had a pig on the loose!
After securing the other piglets, I watched as the escapee wandered her way into the tree line. This little meandering piglet made her way through our thick tree line, across our neighbor’s driveway, through another neighbors lawn, wondering uncomfortably close to the road and into a third neighbor’s back yard. She then settled down in the trees in the backyard of our neighbor, Jim, who miraculously grew up around livestock and was more than happy to help out this panicked farmer!
The story ends well. We quickly set up some portable fencing to corral the piglet, and managed to hoist her up between the two of us and carry her back to Stonecrop.
I learned three important lessons from this experience:
1. Carefully plan piglet unloading 2. Our neighbors are the absolute best 3. A quarter mile is a long way to go while carrying am energetic piglet.
Heres to a whole new set of adventures in our second season! Stay tuned for upcoming news about our plans for 2017.
As always, you can find us at the Brighton Farmers Market every Sunday with a full selection of meat and eggs, and/or on the farm by appointment.
All the best,
Greg & Jenney