Earnest Shields is quick to say he’s no farmer, but he does like to raise a few hogs.
While he might not consider himself a farmer, his roots run deep in the Ozarks and the farming way of life. Earnest and his wife, Dixie, both grew up on small family farms in rural Laclede County, Mo.
“After we got married, I worked construction for a while, then I worked in the milk plant in Kansas City, Mo., for a while and we have just farmed a little ever since; nothing very big,” Earnest said.
Earnest and his son, Steve, started in the “hog business” after seeing a local demand for feeder pigs.
“It got to where we couldn’t find any pigs for ourselves, so we decided to get us a couple of gilts and start raising our own,” Earnest said. The purchase of the gilts, about a decade ago, was the start of E&S Feeder Pigs.
“I do enjoy doing it; it gives me something to do since I retired,” Earnest said. “When we started with the feeder pigs, we were getting more orders than we could fill, but then people started keeping back their gilts and breeding; now you can get them pretty cheap.”
Steve and Earnest prefer to keep their operation small, raising a few of their gilts as replacements and selling other offspring as feeder pigs or finished hogs.
“It was getting harder to sell feeder pigs, and we had some sows that weren’t doing very well, so we culled them,” Earnest explained. “We’ve sold finished hogs to people who say they will never eat store-bought meat again.”
Earnest and Steve built all of the swine barns and facilities on the rural Conway, Mo., farm, using their small sawmill to make a boards and doing the labor themselves. They have also constructed a small, indoor farrowing facility that can house two sows and their litters.
Sows and their litters are kept inside the farrowing house until the litter is about a week and a half old, depending on the weather, then turned out into paddocks. While in the farrowing facility, sows are not constantly confined to their crates and are turned out at least three times a day, a practice that Earnest insists upon. At 3 and 10 days of age, piglets are given iron shots. At weaning, which is at about 8 weeks of age, boars are castrated and all pigs are wormed.
Earnest prefers Yorkshire as his base breed, crossing with other breeds, such as Duroc, Hampshire and Spotted Poland-cross. The Shields are now utilizing a Hereford boar.
“I like them pretty good,” he said of the Hereford-cross pigs. “I don’t know if it is any better than a York, but these gilts that we have now are a cross between a York and a Duroc and their litters are out of that Hereford. I like a long-bodied hog and I would like to get some Landrace cross, if I could find them.”
Gilts are bred the first time when they reach about 6 or 7 months of age, depending on their size, and are kept in the production cycle as long as they are productive and as long their temperament allows. He prefers a litter average of 10 or more.
“We don’t always get it and we’ve had sows to have 18, but it’s hard for them to raise that many,” he said.
Being a small producer, Earnest said finding a boar can be a little difficult because of the cost factor and AI is out of the question.
“We have actually bought several out of the sale barn at Lebanon (Mo.),” Earnest said. “We would just happen to be there and one would come through that we liked.”
Earnest told of the first boar they purchased a number of years ago – sight unseen.
“Boy, we really got hooked with him,” he said with a laugh. “A guy told me he would find me a boar and he called one day and said he had found one close to the Arkansas line. I called the guy and he said he had a really good hog. I told him to bring him on up, and we’d take him. He got him up here and that was the hardest looking little thing; he had a nose that looked long enough to drink out of a pop bottle. I learned not to buy a boar over the phone. He was colored like a Hamp, but I’m just sure he was an Arkansas razorback… I almost told him to take him back home, but I told him I would take him, so I did. We didn’t get very good pigs out of him and it didn’t take me long to find another one and get rid of him.”
Meeting the nutritional needs of sows and young pigs is important to Earnest, and protein levels are monitored closely thought feed rations.
“We get ground corn, then add bean meal and a hog mineral,” Earnest explained. “One mix will have enough bean meal to make it 10 percent protein, then we will get another mixes that will be 12 percent, 14 and 17 percent. We will start our smaller pigs out at 17 percent protein then, when they get bigger, we cut it down. They seem to do pretty well with it.”
The farrow to finish time for the Shields is about six months for a weight of 260 to 280 pounds.
Profit isn’t the reason why the Shields began their swine venture.
“Raising hogs, it’s really just a hobby,” he said. “I’m not in it to make any money, and there isn’t any money to be made in it. What we have made has went right back into the pigs. We’ve got just about the same amount in the bank that we started with, but we’ve got more stuff around to work hogs now.”
