While Daisy’s calf hides, growing fatter by the minute, (not too fat we hope).. though at the moment I have quite given up hope on a calf at all, is it a fantasy calf? but there sure is milk! (larger breeds will calve up to 10 days later than the average table so being an Ayrshire, Daisy is obviously shooting for the later dates). 
Yesterday I received a call from the swine herd, who bred the late Charlotte and our deeply present Sheila.
“I have a gilt. Eight weeks. Bit of a runt. Can’t sell her for much. Do you want her? Are you milking yet? She needs the milk. I am going away tomorrow so best you collect her now.” (above is the kind of medium I used to work in.. sorry.. got all artsy on you). Of course I wanted her. Sheila needs company. I need another breeding gilt. I loaded up the car and off we went. She definitely is small but determined. She chugged about her box like a little fire engine all the way home.
By the time we got her home .. there was no light for photos for you. She cried and grunted about. Trying to get through the division to Sheila, who brought her offerings of alfalfa..whether to build a dam so the piglet could not get through or to try and improve her diet, I don’t know. Eventually they both went to bed on their own sides. 
You are a good feeder, the old swine herd had said, raising his ancient eyebrow. (Meaning I feed my pigs too much and they are fat) . Too much milk, eggs and alfalfa, I laughed. I asked him; how old do these pigs grow to? He said, I don’t know. After they have bred three times I sell them. They are getting very high returns. I told him about Sheila and he sighed with happiness. It was as though with one good pig who can live as long as she likes (I told him that you are helping out with the feed for Sheila by buying calendars and T shirts so he ordered one of each on the spot) this allowed him to love the pigs again. A pig who can live until she dies naturally is so rare here.. will she soon be the oldest pig in the midwest?
He told me terrible stories about factory raised pigs. Disease is rampant in the last twelve months. Pigs dying everywhere. Reports of six, seven, eight hundred piglets dead per farm per month!. Could this be true? Leading to high prices for pork and a shortage they say. No-one really talking about it. No-one wanting to admit that the pork factories might be imploding. Though prices aside this is a very unsettling development. Is this gossip? I need to find out.
Is there an epidemic running through factory raised pigs here in America. He told me that it is killing off millions of piglets. People like us who raise small numbers of free range pigs who have air and light and a vegetarian diet (there is plenty of protein in eggs and milk) can command a premium now, he said. You will remember that here in America it is NOT against the law to feed pigs pork products. They are feeding reconstituted pigs to pigs. In fact all the hog finisher feeds have animal protein on them. Make no mistake – it is pork fat. The fat makes them grow faster. So is it possible that the disease is being spread (among other things) through the feed. I need to do some more research, but it does not look good. Be very careful now.. know your farmer. If you are close by to me and want pork, buy a piglet and bring it out here to raise. This is serious stuff. We need to be vigilant about our food.
I shudder. And make sure not to wear my farm boots anywhere but on my clean farm and thank god that I mix my own feeds. 
Anyway our new wee Hereford gilt is very small and has no name, (other than The Runt) but let us watch and see if she pulls through first. She will find her name. And hopefully become vigorous as soon as Daisy starts the milking. Nanny Boo is of course immediately engaged. And spent the evening staring down any other animal or bird who came by to check out the newcomer.
I shall take some shots of Little Runt for you today.
I hope you all have a lovely day.
love your friend on the farmy
celi
The Kitchen's Garden 
56 responses to “The Runt”
what fun! a new piglet! and nanny boo is at work again. what will boo do when there are other new babies. herd them? i try to buy all of my meat locally. i hate the idea of factory farms.
Wonderful news about your new little one. And what a fantastic story bout the farmer who called you!
I have been hearing things about the factory pigs for a number of years now, and I don’t see how it won’t get worse. Laws definitely need to change as it seems industry will not voluntarily do what is right. Sigh.
You’re so awesome, C…can’t wait to meet the Baby Girl. I’d heard about the epidemic running through the giant pig operations. So glad we have three different local farmers we can buy from! If you were closer, I’d bring you a piggy to raise, for sure!
Yeah another baby on the farm! Like you I have been hearing stories about the problems with the factory bred pigs! There is no way I would even touch bacon from a source I didn’t know – and I love bacon (well at least the English kind LOL). Talking of bacon, you will be surprised how many people tell me they don’t eat pork, and forget that the bacon and sausages they are wolfing down also come from a pig! It is so worrying that the general public has no idea what is happening to their ‘food’ before they get it on their plate. All they seem to care about is buying it cheaply. And even boast about how they bought a whole chicken for less than $3! That scares the heck out of me.
That Boo is extraordinary ..looking forward to seeing the little pig
Will Sheila be kind to the new little one, do you think? Have been meaning to ask if Minty is definitely not hiding a lamb? This is just a little diversion Daisy – we are still waiting … 🙂 Laura
Could not get to sleep so just had to see whether [yes, I know the watched pot never boils!] Daisy had decided it was time . . . well ‘no’, but what great news! Boo is a fully fledged Nanny again! Hope she [refuse to call her by ‘that’ name!] does alright – twixt Sheila and Boo [and you] I am sure she will . . . . ni ni – at the moment a very sleepy Eha needs her beauty sleep: off to town tomorrow . . .
Okay, now I want to buy a piglet to raise at your farmy!!! Don’t you think Sheila would appreciate a couple little piglets running around? 🙂
That’s mighty scary stuff and I despair at farming practices these days. I do try to buy organic or free range, and, thank goodness, my family is small enough that I can mostly afford to do that. Speaking of living closer, you know what I have been thinking about lately? I would love to have some urban chickens in my garden…it’s just a city garden, but it’s organic and full of lovely stuff… and we’re allowed to have up to ten urban chickens. I travel too much to do it myself, but what if someone would like to share the chickens and share the work? That might work out. 🙂 So looking forward to seeing TR tomorrow.
wehada outbreak of the desease here in Ontario Canada, because it does not kill adutts but carriers, and the fools put adult butchers pig blood plasma from the usa into the pig food, suddenly pig factory farm after farm had the disease coming up and piglets dying, sigh.. yes, us small farm are going to do well because of it, ps Miss Piggy does breed but she is like your girl, I have no plans on butcher, she’s four currently, my grandfather had sows that lives and breed past ten, I hope she will be the same
That is really alarming, I wonder if the same is true for Canada?
Canada does the same thing. In fact, it is Canada where mares are abused to make Premarin, the synthetic estrogen. Premarin stands for PREgnant MARes URine. Google it and you will horrified.
Seems like the US has an outbreak of Porcine Epidemic Diarrhea virus. Perhaps time for full bio-security measures? All visitors through a boot wash or given disinfected overshoes; visitors’ vehicles left well outside the confines of the farm – especially as Sheila goes on walks with you (presumably sometimes down the roadway); your own vehicles through a disinfectant gate bath or the tyres hosed down and disinfected each return trip, etc. Also, you need to find out which disinfectants are proven against the virus.
Here we’re still very ‘raw’ about foot and mouth disease so, if I kept pigs in the States, that would be my instinctive reaction > action. Overkill? Maybe but with 27 States affected…
Sounds like we are headed for an epidemic of a piggy equivalent to BSE (Bovine spongiform encephalopathy) that can be transmitter to humans by eating the contaminated food and is known in humans as new variant Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease.
Lucky little piglet to become part of your cast of characters. She will have her best chance there, I’m sure.
Hee, hee … I’m looking in the garden for the first sign of daisies as well as here to see if your Daisy is going to give us a spring equinox surprise. This must be the most anticipated baby birth since the British royal birth of Prince George!
Welcome to your new wee one – I hope she and Sheila hit it off and that she thrives under Naqnny Boo’s watchful eyes. The interactions of all of the animals is so fascinating. Introducing a new animal having that ripple effect of dropping a prbble into a pond. I’d never have thought that they would be curious about one another – you can tell that I’m a city slicker 🙂
What a lovely story about the pig farmer and his pride in his pigs. But how sad to read about the factory farm pigs. We’ve had our share of horror stories here in Europe and it’s truly terrifying. One reason I became a total vegetarian was the serious outbreak of BSE soon after I moved to Europe and the extraordinary lengths governments and farmer federations went to in order to hide the truth. Last year’s scandals with horse meat being dyed and sold as fillet beef, Vietnamese freshwater fish labelled as North Atlantic cod etc just confirms that we are being systematically lied to. I wait for the day when it all implodes.