MORE PIG STUFF

Today was another good day at the hog farm. This morning I got to help load the 25-day-old piglets onto the semi for transportation over to the nursery barn. I had a blast herding 500 piglets down the hallway and up the semi ramp. They hop when they run and their ears flop all over the place. They are really cute and fun to watch. I also got to worm the pregnant pigs that are close to giving birth, and vaccinate the piglets we pulled off the sows for weaning. Only downside of today was that the Storage King bin outside the building ran out of feed. The feeders run on an automatic system that fills tubes with feed at a specific time each day. A tube comes down from the ceiling and hangs above each pigs feed trough, so at feeding time, all we have to do is walk by and hit the release latch that lets the premeasured feed fall into the troughs. Rooms 24 through 16 had feed in the tubes, but we had to go through rooms 1 through 15 and fill the feeders by hand with huge carts full of feed. There are 24 pigs in each room, so we had to hand-feed about 360 pigs. I still thought it was fun though. Barn work definitely suits me. Tomorrow I will be with Kevin, the barn manager, and he will be showing me how to enter information on all the pigs into the computer system. When I start doing my data entry, I hope I can still help out in the barn. I am glad that we only have to enter the information on the pigs in Hexagon (the barn I work in) and not all the barns. Hexagon has close to 6,000 pigs. The entire farm had about 40,000 pigs. The barns are at different locations and each barn is set up for different stages of the pigs. In Hexagon, we artificially inseminate the sows, take care of them while they are pregnant, then move them to farrowing stalls when they are 5 days away from giving birth, help the sows deliver if needed and watch over the piglets while they are tiny, we take care of the piglets and then wean them when the are 17 days old, and once they are 25-days-old, a semi comes over and we load the piglets up where they are moved down the road to the nursery barns. There is a lot of stuff to be done in between that needs to be taken care of too, so it really keeps you moving. I am finally having fun at a job that really doesn't feel like a job to me.