Pigs

A colleague was recently given an article by one of our faculty members, about raising hogs in Iowa outside of the high-density commercial operations and the specialty meats produced from some of them. (The article is "The State of Pork: Pigs, Iowa, Corn, and Pasture," by Edward Behr, in The Art of Eating; the New York Times had an article about the same prosciutto makers about a year ago.)

I really shouldn't read articles like that, because it makes me want to raise pigs.

Some of that desire is probably nostalgia; I grew up on a hog farm, and I've got these "grow your own food" instincts (that I mostly fail at - I'm pretty good at killing plants) that crop up from time to time. Luckily I live inside city limits, or I probably would have sunk money into chickens or something by now.

I've thought about it before, but reading the article reminded me of it. Not that it's a realistic possibility right now - it would require owning some ground, and we rent in a duplex right now with backyard soil so sandy all my gardening attempts involve containers and buying dirt. But I've spent probably way too much time in the past twenty-four hours poking around in Wikipedia and Google looking at hog breeds and how much a pig eats a day and all of that.

I like red pigs. When I was a kid, Durocs were my favorite. When my family (my grandfather, father, and uncles) rebuilt their hog herd, they went with (I think, based on color & conformation) Hampshire boars and Yorkshire sows. So we didn't have the red or the dappled gray pigs anymore.

But the whole "buy fifteen or twenty acres with a house and a barn on it" fantasy recurs from time to time, and I wonder if having a handful of livestock on it would be feasible with full-time jobs elsewhere. (Perhaps more feasible than a grain operation, which gets crazy busy at certain times of the year.)

And then I start thinking about - would the pigs eat too much corn for growing that too to be too much work, or would it be better to just buy feed corn? And - if we were going to have a couple pigs, would a milk cow be too much? (I don't know anything about taking care of cows, though. I have small bits of hog care knowledge from living on a farm for eighteen years, but cows? They were off in the back pasture and I never really dealt with them aside from occasionally being another body helping move them between pastures.) And chickens... how much work would chickens be?