Categories
adventure agh hogs pigs

New addition: American Guinea Hogs

On Saturday, we went down to Cascade Meadows Farm and collected two American Guinea Hogs to add to our farm. This is a 4 month old breeding pair that should provide us with pigs this fall around September, if all goes well.

So far pigs are the most entertaining farm animal we’ve had. I love watching and interacting with these guys. They are a bit skittish as they have recently had a slew of tests and probes to make sure they are healthy as they were slated to go to Hawaii. The process didn’t work out, so we are now trying to tame them down a bit.

I’ve been feeding them kitchen scraps, as available, as well as an expired bread/milk/All Stock mix twice a day, mostly to tame them down. They love the bread and milk, they love the kitchen scraps, and they like the All Stock grain mix. I also make sure they have an abundance of dry hay to bed in, and I put out a high quality flake of second cut timothy every day or so that they eat quite a bit of.

We’re housing them in a very large dogloo that I had bought for our dogs long ago and they would never use. I don’t recall the exact size, but I’ve had two 115lb+ dogs inside one after throwing a particularly tasty treat inside and both of them wanting it pretty badly. They were able to turn around and get out with a minimal amount of growling and scrambling (the dogs). The pigs have made a nest in the dogloo with all the hay and don’t appear to be soiling it at all yet.

We also have a pallet shelter to provide them with somewhere to go during inclement weather, which is more often than not in western Washington state.

Cascades Contender is not happy to be left out of the bread and milk sessions:

He’ll stand there until after all the bread and milk is gone. Poor guy, we fed him some bread when he first got here to get him used to us, but we stopped that long ago. (Contender is in a large pasture – he looks like he’s in a cage because we have the pigs inside a set of hog panels that are inside a quarter acre holding paddock until they get used to us.)

Categories
butcher cattle slaughter

Second Farm Slaughter

After waiting for 7 months, we finally got our two bulls slaughtered. It took us 7 months from the time we scheduled, to the time we could get them into the butcher. All the butcher shops around here are booked up for months. If you need to use a butcher, get it on their schedule ASAP.

We had an 11 year old bull and a 22 month old steer butchered. The 22 month old steer was steered 4 months ago, due to concerns with behavior, and recovered well. The bull dressed at 744 lbs and the steer was 446 lbs. Those are great weights for grass fed dexter animals.

The slaughter company that came out was A & L Slaughter. These guys were very professional and skilled. They had both animals in the truck in an hour.

We saved all the entrails, hide, head, and anything that wasn’t edible to compost.