I’ve not always been a journalist. Twice I was a hog farmer.
My first experience with hogs came when I was in junior FFA at Fair Grove, Mo. I needed a project, so Dad bought me a weanling Hampshire/Poland China gilt from Lowell Dean Stoops. We carried her home from his place just down the road in a burlap feed bag. For the next several months I raised her in an old school bus body next to the barn, and in the spring I moved her to a pen in the corner of our woods — first a hog wire enclosure and later a larger electric fence pen. For two years I fed and befriended that black gilt, expecting I would raise a litter of my own. I never did, since we didn’t have a boar.
Dad ultimately took her to the Union Stockyards in Springfield, Mo. She had grown to 300 pounds on grass, acorns and the same dairy feed we gave the cows. I think she brought around $45, a good price at the time. Dad got back the $6 he paid Lowell Dean for the pig and I got a new Bronson fishing reel out of the deal. Dad figured he had the rest coming for feed and the trip to the stockyards. That was my second lesson in agricultural economics.
My first was in 1957 when Dad sold the 50 fryers I had raised from chicks. After a good bit of whining, I got $5 out of that deal.
In the late summer and fall of 1966, I was back in the hog business, but not my own. Laid off from my job as a carpenter’s helper (aka, go-fer) for Rex Price, I went to work building A-frame farrowing houses for the Genetically Controlled Prize Swine Producers, Inc., at Charity. Up until the start of college classes for Burnie Snodgrass – my Elkland neighbor and cohort in hog house construction – I was kept busy with a radial arm saw, my hammer and galvanized 16-penny nails dipped in axle grease to make them easier to drive in seasoned oak.
As summer turned to fall, though, I found myself employed in a litany of hog-tending tasks. It was a year before I could start college, but I got an education, nonetheless. I never raised a litter of pigs of my own, but I sure clipped needle teeth and notched the ears of plenty of GCPSP piglets.
I also fed and watered the sows and chased ‘em back to the pens if they escaped into the cornfields or woods. Come time for working the feeders pigs, I also snatched dozens of them from mommas and tossed them into a trailers, toothsome jaws snapping at my heels. It was a wonder none of us were ever mauled. That was nigh 60 years ago – no such thing as OSHA to save us from ourselves.
I wasn’t long at the hog farm, but I formed friendships with a few folks I still see around Buffalo today, and I came away with a priceless trove of experiences – too many to relate in this small space.
Just 18 years old at the time, I was of particular interest to Uncle Sam in 1966. He put an end to my hog farm days in October when I was called to Kansas City for my G.I. physical. As it worked out, I was not to be drafted until January 1971. In the meantime, I traded farrowing pens for water line ditches, college classrooms and a steak house kitchen, punching my ticket to a newsroom with every paycheck.
But twice, not just once in my life, I was a hog farmer, and once considered it again – until I found mine was not the only vote in the house.
Copyright 2024, James E. Hamilton; email [email protected]. Read more of his works in Ozarks RFD 2010-2015, available online from Amazon, Barnes & Noble or from the author.
