I’ve never thought about what this could really mean to a farmer. Last year, when north Georgia had an unusually late freeze around Easter, the news had story after story about farmers who were looking at 80 – 100% crop failures on peaches, pecans, blueberries, and apples. They showed videos of dead frost-bitten tree limbs being sawed off and burned. Of course I thought it must be devastating to those poor farmers, but when the story was over the thoughts left my mind. Well, Tim and I are amidst a total crop failure and I am all too close to a reality that no one should ever have to bear.

We farm livestock, not plants, but the concept is the same. We procure or produce young animals like a crop farmer buys or saves seeds. We give them everything they need to grow big and strong – tending to them each day and always worrying about their health, just like a crop farmer would for their plants. For all of us, the end result is food and our payment comes from selling that food. It’s this payment that allows us to live and to continue to farm the next crop. Well, what happens when something goes terribly wrong? When that crop which you were depending on fails? It’s like heading into work one day to find out that your company has closed. The future which you were depending on is no longer there. There will be no pay check.

We have made many investments on the farm and one is an investment in animals. People often ask us what it takes to get into farming the way we have and one thing that is often overlooked is the price of the animals. The animals are your pay check. Pure breeds will cost top dollar. For breeding stock, we have bought 6 Berkshire gilts and one Berkshire boar. We also bought 4 Ossabaw gilts and one Ossabaw boar. We have been waiting months for them to breed and the next step in the plan is finally here. We had 6 successful breedings with the Berkshires – all have been obviously pregnant for over a month now. The Ossabaws are much harder to tell. Their bodies don’t take on the same shape and their udders don’t “belly down” or fill up with milk in such an obvious manner so we have had trouble telling if they are bred or not. These expected piglets are our crop and our livelihood. We are already lining up customers who would be interested in buying pork at the end of this year. We were expecting around 60 hogs to be ready in Dec./Jan. That’s a LOT of food!

Well, all of our Berkshires have finished farrowing and the result has been 12 live piglets. Not 60, not even 30…at the current time there are just 12. That’s like 80% crop failure. And it is still very early. Some piglets are less than a week old. There could be more casualties along the way. What is the real reality of this? Remember that passing thought of showing up to work one day and the company has closed? That’s the reality.

What a horrible week last week was. We had two Berkshires who looked ready to deliver. On Thursday when we went to check on them we walked up on dead piglets in the woods. They were scattered about everywhere. Some live piglets were running around as well, but we didn’t see any mothers laying down or attending to their piglets. We didn’t even know who belonged to who. We have put the puzzle pieces together as best we can and figure that three Berkshires delivered all at the same time early that morning. One seemed to have delivered prematurely – all of her piglets were too weak to survive. The other two seemed to have a few successful live births, but neither had mothering instincts. They kept walking away from the babies and had not even built a nest. We took all of the piglets to try to raise ourselves. Later that afternoon we found Ossabaw piglets in their paddock and the same thing – no mother to claim them! To this day we’re not even sure who the mother was. There were 3 live piglets that we took from there giving us 10 piglets to bottle feed from 4 sows. We spent days trying to nurse these weak piglets attending to feedings every hour, but by Sunday there were no survivors.

Since then, the last Berkshire has delivered and did the same thing. She was walking away from her young and would not lie down to let them nurse. We penned her up with them to force the bond. Now 4 are alive and apparently doing well. What went wrong? In our opinion, it was young inexperienced mothers. For starters, I believe they were bred too young. The breeders that we got them from told us they could breed at 5 months. I think that giving them some more time to mature would have been better. It’s like a 13 year old having a baby, panicking, and not knowing what to do with them. These were also all first time mothers – things were bound to be difficult. However, we have confidence that our pigs can be great mothers in time. One older Berkshire (Birdie) has done a fabulous job! We will give them all another chance to breed and hope for another “crop” in the future.

The realities of crop failure can be devastating and it’s not something that you recover from by the time the news story has ended. We will carry the burden until the next crop begins to flourish. This means trying to save as many of the living piglets as we can so that we can have some pork to sell this winter. Even into this fall we will be remembering this failure as we explain to customers that we have a limited amount of food for them. But luckily for us, a pig’s gestation cycle is short – less than 4 months – so once they begin to breed again, we can be optimistic for more piglets in the pretty near future. The peach farmers who only get one crop per year have much longer to wait.

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