My Oh My

What a wonderful day. Plenty of sunshine and all that jazz.

Seriously, it was an absolutely gorgeous day here in our part of northwest Alberta. Actually, it was an even nicer day two days ago until a strong wind came up and made it kind of miserable. But no such wind today thankfully, just sunshine and a mild temperature.

It wasn't even marred by having my leg gnawed on for awhile by 2 young sows. Nor was it really disrupted by the nasty business that caused my leg to receive the gnawing. The managing factor of our little family farm is not to be discouraged from the necessity of castrating boar pigs meant for slaughter, in order to avoid "boar taint" in the meat, so today was the day to get started. Thank goodness we only have the two young boars.

For those who don't know what I mean, there is a long standing thought that male pig, or boar, meat is not really fit for consumption due to a strong and unpleasant flavor. As such, boars meant to be meat are generally castrated before they reach sexual maturity. But this is a rather barbaric and distasteful action, pretty much the least favorite job for any farmer. So over time, breeding has reduced the occurrence of "boar taint" to the point where many feel castration is unnecessary. There is an excellent post on the Sugar Mountain Farm blog which discusses this topic in more detail. I highly recommend both the post and the blog itself.

But, on our farm, the barbarism continues for now. And with this batch of pigs I think that might actually have been necessary as there is a good chance that these young swine contain wild boar genetics as recently as their father (either that or their grandfather). I know the the boar we operated on today smelled quite strong and it would certainly be bad to have the meat ruined. Luckily, all went as well as possible and the young fellow went right to eating and seems to be recovering well in his spacious and newly constructed pen. Tomorrow or the next day, his pen mate will be done as well and in a week they'll have forgotten the whole affair.

But back to the more pleasant topic, I'm hoping that we'll all have more of this lovely weather to enjoy as it is allowing us to catch up on a lot of little jobs. Usually we have a foot of snow by now and we'd be settling into the winter routine. But this can last until after Christmas as far as I am concerned!

As always, peace and comfort to all.