Catwalks

So I was thinking about the Evansville stockyards on my drive into work this morning.

When I was a kid, sometimes Grampa would take us with him when he took hogs into town to the stockyards.  These trips are among my earliest memories; we were still living in the trailer, and we moved out of the trailer when I was three.  I'm realizing that most of my earliest memories are tied to one geographic location, which is more or less where the trailer stood.

Anyway, the stockyards.  I don't remember the stockyards themselves, rather than just Grampa's old red truck with the high-sided back that he used for hauling hogs into town, until I'm maybe six or so.  The stockyards had loading docks for trucks to back up to, then a series of interconnected holding pens to move the hogs up to the scales as they became available, as well as some walkways.  Over the pens, up in the rafters, there were catwalks.

We (us kids) didn't always go up in the catwalks.  I think it depended how long Grampa had to wait for the hogs to get to the scales and get paid.  I don't even remember how us going up in the catwalks got started, but we weren't sneaking around, just keeping busy.  You could wander over most of the stockyards via the catwalks, which I think were accessed by stairs from the scales office.  It was a bit of a maze, and we got kind of lost over the cattle half of the stockyards once, prior to which it hadn't occurred to me that the stockyards were for more than hogs.  Sometimes to keep going you had to jump a gap of a few feet, which seemed quite far when you're six or eight.

A lot of random memories are tied into the stockyard trips.  The vending machine at one of the feed stores that had grape soda of a brand no one else carried.  Stopping at a gas station (now closed) for candy based partly on how much Grampa had gotten for the hogs.  Spilling a whole package of Sixlets in the truck.

The stockyards closed sometime in the 1990s, a victim of the city having grown up around it, the declining local livestock economy, and probably other factors that I wasn't aware of at the time.  Grampa died in 1998, about five months before I met my now-husband and graduated from high school.  Experiences like this probably fed into various parts of my personality, but at this point in time what I'm wondering most is, who's going to take my niece exploring, and where?

Storm damage

Not our place, my folks:



They had hurricane-force wind gusts Tuesday night; their power will be out for a while. The barn is about 150 years old. It's mostly a hay/straw-barn, although while they had hogs (there are a few left, but they're mostly gone), the pens along the east side were hog pens. The place has been a hog farm for a long time.

That picture looks east-to-west at the buildings below. (Not a live Google maps link, just a screen capture.)



Fascinatingly, Google's using the USDA Farm Service Agency maps. I say fascinatingly because transcribing field data on these maps at the local office was part of my first paid job. (Up and to the right of the building on the far left, you can see the cows. The picture is several years old, because the white cow has been dead a couple years now.)

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?