Free Range Pork

So, I forgot to tell all of you that the other night we had some truly free range pork here at Red Rooster.  Friday night our good friends, Frank and Mandy, and their kids came over to visit and have dinner.  I got kind of a late start fixing dinner because we had had a long morning of butchering chickens here and then I had to run the chicken plucker I borrowed back to some fellow poultry graziers up in Milan.  Frank rode along with me to take the plucker back to Round Rock Farm and we chatted about the struggles of turning a pasture based, soil-enhancing, farmette into something profitable instead of just something romantic and idealistic.  When we got up to Milan, I thanked Luke for letting me borrow the plucker and offered myself and Becky as extra help the next time that he and his wife, Mary, butchered broilers.  After, talking pastured poultry and chicken processing for a few moments, I thanked Luke again, and Frank and I headed home.  When we got home I got the chili started that we were planning on eating.  A few minutes into cutting up peppers and onions and garlic for the pot I walked past the kitchen window and looked out at our pigs.  Only problem was they were standing on the wrong side of the fence.  AAAGGGGHHHHH!!!!! Code Red!  Calling all available units!!  We all scrambled outside to the pigs and eased up to them trying not to spook them.  One pig went inside of a small portion of the barn and Frank closed the door behind it.  One down.  Meanwhile, Becky grabbed a bucket of water and lured the other pig over to her and then led it with the water bucket back inside the fence.  Now, back to the one Frank has trapped in the outside portion of the barn.  Well, genius me, not thinking how easy it was for Becky to lure the first one back in with the bucket of water, thought "oh good, we've got this one trapped I'll simply straddle it's back and guide it back into the pig yard."  WRONG!!!!!!  That pig squealed and screamed and kicked and bucked.  The harder I tried to hold her the more wild she got.  She got loose from me and walked over to the garden to nibble some cucumber vines.  I went on one side of her and she nervously walked away from me and in the general direction of the road, which, for those of you who know what road I live on know that was not an option to let her get onto RT. 250.  I got out in front of her and she turned and made her way into the old abandoned milk house.  I got over there with Frank right behind me and together we tried to grab hold of 150 lbs of solid muscle.  Again, she threw a fit and Frank and I both ended up on the ground as she broke free from our grasp.  She moseyed over towards Becky, who got the bucket of water and guided her back in where she belonged.  Wow, that was easy!  It was right about then that I realized we also had about twenty laying hens out.  No problem, chickens are easy.  Within a few more minutes I had all of the chickens back in the yard too.  How did they all get out?  Well, the pigs had started digging under the fence to get some sod that was on the other side and then eventually loosened up the fence from the posts and had it dug out and loosened up enough that they could squeeze under it.  We fixed the fence in the places that it had been torn away from the posts and reinforced some areas temporarily with cinder blocks, but I'm going to get some heavy guardrail posts to reinforce permanently all the way around the fence.  Oh the excitement that city folks don't get to enjoy, like catching a couple of pigs who got loose and are ready to go hog wild.