The “Piglet Explosion,” as we so lovingly called it, is what happened back in 2019 when we made a planning error and accidentally had 3 pigs deliver in the same week.
It was a challenging (ahem, stressful) situation, but it made us wise up and learn to be meticulous in our pregnancy spacing going forward.
We’ve gone almost 2 years with near perfect delivery schedules since then. But, all good things must come to an end. And the end is very near now because coming up very soon, we don’t have 3 pigs due the same week…
We have 3 sows due the same exact day! And then a few more due in the following weeks giving us a grand total of 6 sows due within 4 weeks.
Since we usually average about 1 or 2 pig deliveries a month, this has been looming quite large in our minds. I’ll let Greg explain how it all came about….
While a little distracted with preparations for Thanksgiving, I noticed that our younger boar, Benji, mated with our sows Angelica and Peggy, as planned.
Pig pregnancies usually stick every time, so I assumed they were bred and on their way to being pregnant.
A couple of weeks later, I added another sow, Eliza, into the herd with Angelica, Peggy and Benji. Unfortunately, though, Angelica and Peggy had NOT gotten pregnant on the first try.
This meant that all 3 sows went back into heat at the same exact time. And being together as a group, they were bred on the same day. And all 3 the pregnancies stuck!
To make matters worse, earlier on when I was still thinking the Angelica, Peggy and Eliza (the Schuyler Sisters) were pregnant, I decided to sequentially introduce our sows Cassie, Domino, and Ruby to our older boar Bernardo. And as luck would have it, all 3 of these pregnancies stuck, too.
All this is to say that we’ve got the most monstrous Piglet Explosion ever, coming up soon. And it’s why this week, we’ve been working hard to prepare. Oh and to make life a little more interesting…we also bought a cow!
Your Farmers,
Jenney & Greg
PS – We’ll share the whole story about the cow next week, but we wanted to let you know that we’ll have a full supply of grass-fed beef coming in very soon! If you enjoy this blog and want to know more, we encourage you to subscribe to our newsletter here where you can get weekly updates about our farm, our animals, our lives, and get access to the online store!