Animal dumps and cute piglets

PSA: don’t dump animals you find on the road at a farm

Here at BOTL Farm, we run a pretty tight ship around biosecurity. Some might say we’re a little fussy, others say “what is biosecurity?” Cheers. We have a biosecurity plan (of course we have a plan), we don’t offer tours, we have on-farm clothes/boots and off-farm clothes/shoes that we keep separate, and when we occasionally need to buy in new breeding stock we quarantine them for 30 days. We avoid common animal diseases by keeping our animals isolated from outsiders. 

So, we were horrified when we got a social media message this month saying that someone, unknown to us, had dropped a pig off on our farm. Really?!? This person, who we will refer to as Dumper, thought they were a hero. They had found a pig on the side of the road about 5 miles from us, rescued it from the danger of the road, and put it in their car. Dumper then Googled “pig farms near me,” picked the only result in the eastern side of Connecticut (darn search engine optimization!), drove past multiple other pig farms (did we mention there are over 100 farms in our town) to BOTL Farm and discovered we weren’t home. Thinking they were doing the right thing they proceeded to come onto our property, open up our farm gates, and let the pig ‘back’ onto the ‘safety’ of its ‘home’. Dumper is a hero!

From our perspective, Dumper is not a hero. When we located the strange (male!) pig on our farm, he was nose-to-nose with two of our 650 lb sows (pig-moms) who have little piglets they were about to, uh, let’s say, ‘bodily defend.’ The strange pig didn’t know what electric fences are and since all our fences are electric, he was confused and touched the fences repeatedly, getting shocked each time. He was stressed out and getting shocked, our sows were threatened and defensive, we were horrified, and no one was having a good time. We convinced Dumper to return and take the pig somewhere else. Unfortunately we were not able to ascertain the medical history of the strange pig, so we’ll just have to wait and see if any of our pigs were exposed to disease.

So, we get it: livestock found on the side of a road, especially at night, are not safe and should be moved to safety. But, work with animal control (if they support farms, our town’s does not), animal rescue agencies, shelters, the town pound, or nearby consenting farmers – do not dump them on a farm without the farmers’ permission and imagine they are safe.

The red fox jumps over the white fence

Everyone who raises chickens knows that humans are not the only ones who think chickens are delicious: so do hawks, eagles, weasels, foxes (don’t worry, we checked Miriam-Webster, foxes is the correct plural), fisher cats, bobcats, and coyotes. Our bomb-proof perimeter farm fence keeps out large animals, but we struggle to protect our flock against aerial predators. Even smaller predators like foxes can shove through gate areas in our perimeter fence, but we keep electric netting around our chickens. Usually this stops most foxes since they have prominent, wet noses: they sniff the fence to see what it is, get shocked, and turn around. 

That is, of course, until this month. We were having an unusual amount of predation that appeared to be from a fox, but we couldn’t figure out where it was getting through the electric fence. We set up a trail cam and discovered the next day that the fox was not going through the fence – it was jumping over it. We didn’t know that foxes could jump that well? Has anyone else seen this? It’s not a short fence at 42” tall. But we clearly saw on the camera that it was jumping the fence in and out several times over the night, wreaking havoc in its wake.

Once we knew what we were up against, we no longer focused on keeping the bottom of the fence tight to the ground. Instead, we added a second electric netting fence around the first, about a foot apart, so that the fox would encounter the second fence while jumping the first. We’re happy to report that for now, we’re outsmarting our foxy foe with this change.

Our latest batch of especially cute piglets

We typically raise pigs, over and over, that are all the same mix of breeds that we affectionately call our ‘meat mutts.’ Over the years we’ve identified this as the ideal mix of hardiness, pasture foraging, docile-enough temperament, meat taste, and fat quality (mmmm). Our meat mutts are all black, have large floppy ears, and grow long torsos (mmmm more bacon). Once in a while we have a breeding deviation from norm (ha, that’s a story) and this month a sow farrowed (farmer jargon for ‘pig mom gave birth’) a litter that is missing one of the breeds in our normal meat mutt, Large Black. This group of piglets is a mix of tan-stripe-y and white-and-black spots. They’re adorable. When they were first born, their noses were so big it looked like the piglets were about 80% nose by body weight. They’re slowly growing into their prominent proboscises, and the sow is very calm and practical with them. We can’t quite imagine what it must be like to be a 600 lb animal, in labor, and then there are a large number of tiny 2 lb snorting, squiggling, mewling monsters all over you as you lay there calmly. Go pig moms! 

Organic animal feed: soon stocking olive oil layer

Last year, New Country Organics introduced a new line of chicken feeds made with olive oil. Or maybe it was two years ago? The older we get, the worse we are at remembering timeframes. Back to the NCO feed – this is a line of chicken feed that replaces seed oils with olive oil. Since it was a new product, we weren’t regularly stocking it in our farm store, but we ordered it when people asked for it. Over the past few months, we’ve had some folks routinely ordering it, so we decided to make it easier for everyone involved and we’ll now be keeping the NCO olive oil layer in stock (okay, we don’t actually have any right now, but in two weeks we will). If you want the olive oil grower or olive oil starter feed, that’ll still be special order, but no special request necessary for the olive oil layer. 

As always, we recommend placing an online order to make sure we have the feed you want before you drive out. Huzzah.

Find us this month

On farm store: Tuesdays noon - 2pm, Saturdays 1 - 3pm. Pre-order

On farm self pickup: Everyday 8am - 8pm. Pre-order only

Wooster Square, New Haven CT: Every Saturday from 9am - 1pm until the end of November. Dates we’ll be there in June: June 07, June 21. Pre-order

Assawaga Farm Market, Putnam CT: Every Saturday 9am - noon from May 17 until the Saturday before Thanksgiving. Dates we’ll be there in June: June 14, June 28. Pre-order

Sturbridge Farmers Market, Sturbridge MA: Every Sunday 9am - 1pm from June until October. Dates we’ll be there in June: June 01, June 08, June 15, June 22, June 29. Pre-order

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