Notorious P.I.G.

One of the people who used to be with my advisor’s group grew up on a pig farm; his family still runs it. He’s also one of the guys I’ve been working with over the past year—-he was on trips to New Zealand, Charleston, and Kansas City. So we all decided it would be a fun day trip to head out there for a tour.

I've actually been out on a pig farm before. I did a summer nerd camp in Iowa between sophomore and senior years in high school (BBIWAF); a friend of mine was from a family of pig farmers. Got to see a young pig get castrated (necessary to make the meat taste decent)--pretty traumatic for a high school city boy ("Man... they're only held in with... and you can use a razor blade to... gahhh..").

The first thing, of course, that anyone would notice is the smell. You get used to it, but putting that many animals in a space results in, well, a lot of shit. The way that this is dealt with in modern pig barns is to make the floor a grate (plastic at this farm--easier to pressure wash), and have a holding tank under the whole floor (~8' deep) to catch the effluent. The effluent is then periodically pumped out to a holding tank (lagoon?), pumped into tanker trucks, and spread on the farm as fertilizer for crops (which are then fed to the pigs)--pretty cool recycling, huh? The reason for storing the waste under the pig barns is to keep it from getting excessively diluted by rain--makes it less effective as fertilizer.

[Side note--I wonder if the undergrad Teps would want a bathroom set up like the pig barns here, with the grate floor? Nobody has to worry about 'missing' or leaving the seat up, right? Cleanup just involves a pressure washer. Plus, it makes fertilizer!]

There were about a dozen cats at the barns--rodent control, figuring all the animal feed they have lying around. There was one gray tabby that had some unusually matted hair--I wondered what she had fallen into. Then I saw her lie down next to the pig pens; the pigs came up and started licking her, through the bars. She seemed to like it--maybe she learned from an early age that was how she could get groomed. Wacky interspecies relationships.

There was another cat that, according to my host, went missing for a while--nobody could find her. Then, one day during a rainstorm, somebody looked out on the effluent holding tank, and saw something moving on a floating raft of... uh.. whatever. Yeah.. that cat was referred to as "shit cat" from then on.

The farmer was running an experiment, figuring out ideal ways to get rid of pig carcasses (occasionally they catch disease and die, grow old, etc). He had some rig for composting them with a whole lot of straw and some other tricks. It could reduce a ~300 lb sow to mostly skin and bones in a few months. Moral of the story--don't piss off pig farmers: they can get rid of the bodies.

Even though we were wearing coveralls and overshoes for the whole visit, after getting home, I noticed that my clothing was still permeated a bit with that distinct smell of the farm. Enh... laundry works fine, but I have a lot of respect for people who do that every day. A reminder that there are a lot of hard ways to make a living.