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Columbia City, Indiana | I raise cattle now, but when I was a kid Dad and I had about 30 sows and farrowed on pasture. Dad never did farm full-time, and since he worked in a factory, 3rd shift most of the time, I had to carry a lot of the responsiblity even when I was a kid. I wouldn't trade that for anything now, looking back, lol. I remember feeding baby pigs with a scooper in the evenings, (Dad was on 2nd then) and I was too small to carry a 5 gallon bucket of ground feed, so I was about 6 or 7 but thought I was big stuff! Dad would carry the buckets down by the feeder and set them outside the pen and I would scoop the feed over into the feeder. He never wanted to dump it in the top of the feeder, always just the actual holes where they ate, and I never asked why because I was taught kids don't question adults. I still don't know to this day, lol, maybe I'll ask him next time I see him. Anyway, my story about losing sleep due to livestock happened when I was about 12 or so. Dad had to go to work and there was a sow getting ready to have pigs. Luckily it was a Friday night and my cousin (not a farm kid) was spending the night. We went out and checked her every hour, not as much Tecmo Bowl got played that night! I remember since we didn't use crates (most of the sows farrowed in huts on the pasture- this one had laid down in the barn for some reason) she was laying with her back next to the wall the newborn piglets kept wiggling around and getting between their mother and the wall. I kept picking them up and moving them back around to her underline. This was a weird situation because she had only had 3 pigs and had even passed some afterbirth (which my cousin thought looked like a grocery store cheese pizza for some reason). I called a my grandpa's friend Bill, a local guy who got us started on hogs and he came over and gave her a shot of oxytocin and looked her over and declared that 3 was it, she was done. I remember thinking she was still laying there acting like she was laboring, but with the afterbirth and Bill's opinion (he had about 60 or 80 sows, which was a lot back then) and again the thing about questioning adults, my cousin and I went to bed. This was about 3 am as I recall. When my dad got home from work in the morning, she had had 2 more pigs for a total of 5, and I think she ended up with 8 or 9 and raised all but 1! And this was about 1989 or 1990.
Edited by NEIndiana 12/13/2012 07:00
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another night of lost sleep
