You don't know what you've got till it's gone

I grew up on a hog farm. Initially we were upwind of the place, but that also put us a sixth of a mile from the road, which would have been awful for making the bus. So when my folks built their house, it ended up downwind of the hogs. Dad called it the smell of money.

They're transitioning away from hogs now, since ethanol and whatnot have driven the price of corn so high you make more money selling corn than feeding it to hogs. I didn't actually intend to write about that, though. It's about manure.

I think I've mentioned since we bought the house that I'm looking at gardening. Specifically French intensive gardening. It involves deep beds and loose soil - and, preferably, a lot of manure.

I've got 1200 square feet of garden space to work with if I'm doing my math right, and a French intensive bed really only needs 100 square feet. But of course I've got all that space, and I only want to have to mow so much. Initially I was thinking four beds, but then I got to thinking about how long that would take to dig, how much time I have, and how much digging putting in rabbit fence is going to be. So now I'm thinking maybe two, on the left side of the concrete walk. For the rest of the yard... well, maybe strawberries.

That's still going to require 200 square feet's worth of manure, and I'm not sure on the depth. I've seen recommendations of 2 inches, or 1 inch for bagged, dry manure. But for the kind of gardening I'm doing, that seems kind of thin.

Fresh manure is almost completely out of the question - not because I would mind using fresh manure, especially since it's advertised free on Craigslist. It's getting the manure to the garden.

Firstly, what do you transport the manure in? I've got a little Honda Fit, which, with the seats folded down, has a ton of cargo space. But putting 30 to 60 cubic feet of horse manure in the back of my car would still have technical complications - what to line the car with, how to load it - and would result in unmistakable and probably clinging odors. Sure, we have horses on campus, but I think coming to work smelling like a horse barn every day would probably fray some nerves, or at least some noses.

Another option if I did go with fresh manure would be renting a truck from Home Depot, but then you're taking free manure and turning into the cost of probably a 3-4 hour truck rental.

The second difficulty: if I did manage to get fresh manure into a vehicle and to the house, I'd have to get it from the vehicle to the garden. There's no way to back a vehicle right up to our garden; it's completely hemmed in by the garage, the patio, and the neighbors' fences. It would have to be schlepped back between the garage and patio in wheelbarrow loads.

Actually, that's the two main difficulties, and they're both basically about hauling manure. Unfortunately, if the transport can't be worked out, there's no way to use it.

The second option is bagged manure, which I gathered from all the random Google searching has about half the volume of the equivalent wet manure. Bagged manure would be easy to transport in my car, and I wouldn't have to worry about the kind of odors I'd get with the fresh stuff. The main downside to the bagged manure is that I'd have to pay for it. Realistically, though, I'm looking at either a truck rental or buying bagged manure, and I think the one that's going to win is bags - it'll save the most time.

That's where the hogs come in. I grew up on a hog farm, where manure was produced in such quantities that you always had plenty for fertilizing fields. Manure was an ubiquitous... I was going to say flavor, but that's just wrong. An ubiquitous aspect of my youth. And now I'm looking to buy it.

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?