Our family was privileged to attend this year’s American Pastured Poultry Producer’s Association Conference in Dallas. It was three days of wonderful networking and sharpening of farming minds. If you’re a farmer type, we highly recommend attending. If you’re a beginner, it’s an ocean of information to drink in as fast as you can. If you’re a middle-experience farmer, it’s an opportunity to gain the knowledge you need to break through to the next level. And if you’re experienced, it’s the pep talk you need to keep the fire burning year after year. So beneficial. A few of our readers are farmers, so here’s my plug to attend APPPA next year!

But there’s much more to this article than what is only relevant to farmers.

This year’s theme was Leadership and we heard from the CEO of a successful teen summer camp as well as a former Navy Seal. They each shared their wisdom of managing their teams to get the hard work done. It was enlightening and helpful and we look forward to implementing some new mindset themes to give our farm the longevity we desire.

There were also many discussions of more concrete concepts, like production, efficiency, and marketing. 

Marketing is always a big discussion among farmers because it always feels like we need more customers or more sales to be successful. But so many farmers (like us) feel unequipped to reach the “right” people with the right message at the right time. Marketing is hard!

So as Artificial Intelligence has emerged as a promising new ticket to easy marketing,  naturally, farmers who would rather pluck a chicken with their teeth than have to design a website… are gravitating toward AI to solve the problem of “how to market.” They must make sales. Their current marketing (which is often nearly non-existent according to the many farmers that I have talked to about it) isn’t working. AI can do it cheap and fast. The farmer feels he doesn’t have time or knowledge. It makes sense to use AI to solve this part of the puzzle, and leave him more time to do the actual farming. Right?

That is the question for 2025. And so I sat in on a couple of talks about using AI for marketing. I tried to get to all of them, but alas, carting 6 kiddos to a 3 day conference is no small task, so I was not able to make it to all the talks I wished to attend. I wanted to see what all the hype was about. Because I’m about to let you in on my unpopular opinion… 

I am against AI. 

Well. I guess I’m not wholly against it. I mean, what is the definition of AI, exactly? Is it something like me Googling where is the nearest gas station on my route that does not require a left turn? Can AI spit out the average low temperature in East Texas in January for me? Or convert Celsius to Fahrenheit? I’ll take it. Is AI offering to clean the shower or fold my laundry? Yes, please! But if AI is crawling the internet “borrowing” information from human writers, putting it in a metaphorical blender, and spitting back out “original” content without giving proper credit to authors… or as Matt described his “bottom line” objection–are businesses using AI to create a false personality where no personality really exists… Take it to the extreme and you start hearing stories about the AI girlfriend. How are these good things when what we all really want is authentic connections to actual people? 

If AI were to replace all composition today, creativity would be forever stifled because there could be no new ideas. Only reconfigured versions of the old ones. You may say, “Well, people won’t stop writing so there will always be new content added to the mix.” But are those people consenting to the use of their content? I know I certainly haven’t and will not. I work hard to write the content I create. I know “there is nothing new under the sun.” I don’t claim to be the most original or most creative. But it is my work, a unique conglomeration of my experience and study. I don’t mind sharing it if someone asks. But I don’t like being stolen from. 

Even if all the writers consent “for the good of the many,” is AI really what consumers want? 

This is where I really push back. You marketing teams out there… hear this: 

I DO NOT WANT ARTIFICIALLY COMPOSED MARKETING BLABBER. 

Especially from small businesses. When you buy from mega giant corporations, sure. You expect highly aloof, impersonal messages at all times. “We appreciate your business.” “We are committed to the highest quality blah blah blah.” There is no personality. That is expected. In fact, it would be ultra creepy if the biggest companies in the world started interacting with us as if they were a person… but they weren’t. Wouldn’t it? Why would we tolerate that behavior from a small company? Does anyone believe Alexa or Siri really exist?

I remember the very first vinyl sign I ever had printed for our farm. I was very new to graphic design. But I managed to use our own photos to come up with a large backdrop sign to hang up in our farmers market booth. We hadn’t gathered as a farm family to discuss logo, colors, slogans, anything. All we had was our farm name and a few homemade cliparts. 

I found a cool font and made a pretty, farmy brown sign with white and blue trim. I added our farm name and city (it’s a famous small town, plus we planned to attend a farmers market out of state and we wanted shoppers to know where we were from), and then I wanted to come up with a slogan. Not too wordy. Personal. Truthful. It was a big purchase for us back then and we were brand-new to farming. I didn’t want to mess it up by putting on some statement that might change.

Here’s what I came up with in my rookie year of marketing:

“From our family to yours.” 

Ug. If ever there were a hijacked phrase, it’s that one. You hear it so often these days that you don’t even hear it at all. In fact, I’m pretty sure I’ve seen that on several major grocery store billboards in years since. Was it Kroger? I can’t remember now. So much for being original. And to think if I had hired a marketing agency to come up with that slogan it would have run me upwards of $10,000! For a handful of meaningless words. Not because I didn’t mean them. But because giant corporations were trying to make it sound like they were still a mom and pop just like the mom and pop in your neighborhood. 

(Now there’s nothing inherently virtuous about a mom and pop business just like there’s nothing inherently evil about being a large corporation. Different topic entirely, so let’s try to stick to the main point here, which is: Marketing should NOT be about making a company into something it isn’t.)

That phrase was 100% true when I printed it on that sign. It was our family there at market, week in and week out, selling to other families. Even today, our shoppers have all met at least one family member, if not nearly all of them! I’ve never met a family member of Kroger’s CEO that I know of. It is that kind of misleading use of such a phrase that makes it sound so wishy-washy when I use the exact same phrase with such genuine intentions. Today’s marketing is awash with empty phrases just like that. I guess I thought that’s how it is supposed to be done. I have learned better since then what people are really looking for. At least our kind of people!

I would have done better to choose some meaningful practice descriptors, or perhaps just a summary of the products we grow. Maybe even just a nice photo of our family with the cows. Forget the empty slogan! People need to know who you are. YOU.

There’s just something different about buying from a small business. A cupcake company, a coffee shop, a farm… Somehow, ESPECIALLY a farm… 

You want to hear from the FARMER, don’t you? The farmer (or his wife/son/daughter/dad/mom/uncle) needs to be composing the copy for his farm. However raw and riddled with typos it may be. Hopefully it’s reasonably legible. Farmers are smart people. And they probably have a family member or two that can proofread a few paragraphs in a hurry. We’re always in a hurry. But we always get the critters fed. One takeaway from the conference was, “You make sure those animals are fed and watered everyday, don’t you? You need to treat your marketing the same way.” 

I had a couple of fellow farmers approach me during the conference, either suggesting that I try outsource marketing to AI, or stating that they were considering doing so since they really felt they didn’t have the skills to do all that writing themselves. I may have shocked them with my response, but I told them all what I’m telling you. Customers, at least those bold enough to exit the supermarket model of eating, want authentic communication as much as they want authentic food. AI can never do that for you. Sure, let it write code or come up with a synonym so you don’t have to walk to the bookshelf to crack open that dusty old thesaurus (make sure you check the real definition of the words before you use them!). But don’t let it try to make a personality for your farm. Your words need a voice. Unlike my dumb Kroger slogan.

I have given seminars on how to get started and I’d be glad to help you if you’re a farmer struggling with how to get started. I can’t do it for you. Just like I can’t build your fences or deliver your orders or feed your chickens. But if you’re a farmer, you’ve got it in you to find a way. 

And since most of you reading aren’t farmers, now you know our stance on the latest ethical dilemma of our time. Hope you like the fact that it means you’ll get sporadic, rambling newsletters that are punctuated with interruptions by phone calls, homeschool questions, and random minor farm disasters, hah! I do try to read back through my jabberings to make sure the dots are mostly connected…

Now that my soapbox is getting weary from all the stomping… I have a question for you: 

*** (End of completely optional background story for the in-a-hurry-readers.)

Am I crazy? Am I the old-fashioned stick-in-the-mud poo-pooing the newest technology? I’d like to hear from our CUSTOMERS on your thoughts on AI generated content coming from our farm. And no… I think it’s safe to say, just as we are committed to grass-finishing our cattle and rotating our chickens on pasture… I am committed to writing 100% of my own content (or at least using actual consenting and participating human writers–perhaps my children someday, or a guest writer here and there? Matt even occasionally dictates an article for me!). I feel the authenticity of content is part and parcel to authentic farming. 

I want to prove it to other farmers if I’m right (or prove it to myself if I’m wrong… and then perhaps I will hang up my writer’s hat for good… or not!). Will you, my loyal customer, take a few minutes to participate in this survey? With the results, I plan to reconstruct this article and present it to the APPPA bimonthly magazine for publication so other farmers can hear from real farm customers about what they really want and expect. I haven’t seen survey results like it yet (although I haven’t really looked). I’ll be interested in reading your feedback. 

We want your opinion! Do YOU want Artificial Intelligence to aid in farm marketing and communication? Please take our brief survey here. It should take 6-10 minutes or less. It’s all yes/no questions. No essays required 🙂

Farm life is lots of things. Most folks know and reaffirm to us, “Farm life is so busy!” Yep! 100%!

It’s also very cyclical. Certain things happen alongside the seasons, and it really is so interesting to witness the ebb and flow from year to year. Sometimes we change things to better mesh with seasonal changes. And sometimes we find a groove that we really like, and we try to stick with it.

One of the “grooves” is how we manage our laying hen flocks. Chickens don’t lay eggs forever, so it’s helpful to track ages and keep adding young hens so that egg production doesn’t fall off. We tried a variety of strategies to manage this in our early years. It took, oh, almost a decade probably, to finally land on what we think will be our go-to procedure for the foreseeable future, and that is, every April, we order in new little day-old fluff-ball chicks, then they grow up and around September or October, they start laying eggs. Once they’re really up and going, we then retire the old flock by rehoming the old girls as backyard pets. They are, after all, only 18 months old, so actually not “old” at all.

But we find that at that age, these older hens really begin laying pretty gigantic eggs, but not as often—we may only get an egg every 2 or 3 days, versus just about every day. And it’s a whopper—jumbo or even a super jumbo, meaning it might be the equivalent weight of 1 and a half “regular” size eggs! And we have to use special cartons to be able to fit those in. And because Mrs. Hen will eat the same amount of feed over the 3 days, we have to charge more for those massive eggs. Most folks just want plain ol’ large or even extra-large eggs, not so much jumbos. At that age, they make lovely backyard birds and now that we have been doing this for a handful of years, we have lots of repeat customers looking for these pretty little hens.

So it works. But it isn’t easy. You see, just as old hens lay giant eggs, young hens lay little tiny eggs, and so for about a month or two, as the new girls begin shifting to producing normal size eggs and we hang on to the older girls so we don’t end up with a giant gap in egg production, we end up with a LOT of weird overlap in sizes. I won’t bore you with all the technical considerations, but here’s how we finally figured out how to manage it. We mix sizes! And we weigh the cartons to ensure the minimum carton weight meets the standard for “Large” eggs: 24 oz per carton.

The funny thing is that we’ve actually been doing this for a while, but only with a single older flock, so you probably didn’t notice because their eggs didn’t vary in size so much. Ever since springtime, our “Large” carton has really had an average weight closer to or even over the “Extra Large” standard. We changed to a mixed size standard then to help manage the craziness that is egg inventory. And we figured that we’re ok with our customers getting a great deal (extra large eggs for the price of large!!) if it means we have one less “inventory item” to track and deal with.

But now you’ll notice a bit more variation in size within the carton, and the overall egg size may drop just a touch as we switch over to this younger flock, but it will still meet a net minimum of 24 oz per carton. But don’t worry. Farming is cyclical, remember? When the weather gets cool, hens need more calories to stay warm. So they tend to consume more feed, which means they take in more protein overall. More protein means… bigger eggs!

Our goal is to supply minimum “Large” equivalent eggs for $5.50/dz. We’ll keep an eye on that carton weight to make sure it’s happening. If here through the autumn we see a drop, we may downgrade carton size to medium if needed, but if this year is like other years in the past… those girls will probably be up and running here in no time.

This is the first year we’re going to attempt sticking with “large” all the way through the transition period from flock to flock, and we plan to accomplish this by keeping the older girls a bit longer than usual. But this means you may notice a bit more size variation within the carton than normal. You might find it a rather enjoyable experience, though, because different size eggs make jobs in the kitchen more customizable. A smaller-size boiled egg for a snack. A larger-size egg for omelets. A middle-size egg for baking.

Welcome to the ebb and flow journey of natural farming! We hope you enjoy the eggs!!

It seems the 13-year mark of small business is when all your equipment decides to break down, especially if most of it was already almost a decade old when you started (but of course we didn’t own much “new” stuff. We like our equipment already “broken in,” ha!). We’ve had to do a boat-load of repairs this year. Matt says we can start calling him Jack, as in Jack of All Trades, Master of None. Thankfully he’s super handy and this last decade-plus has taught him a whole bunch about fixin’ stuff, and fixing it fast! He’s a pretty useful fella these days… Guess I’ll keep him. 🙂

It all started during our July delivery to Longview and Marshall. On the way to Longview, we heard some rather icky noises coming from the undercarriage of the Hambulance (our farm delivery vehicle which is a 21-year-old retired Red Cross food distribution truck). He pulled over several times to check things and try to identify where the noise was coming from. Thankfully we try to budget extra time into our delivery days for just such occasions as these when our old farm vehicles are feeling needy.

Matt determined it was non-critical and coming from the e-brake, so he temporarily disabled it and we managed to get through our drops and get back home. One funny excerpt from the day was when Matt said, “Well, it seems my speedometer has suddenly stopped working!” Trifles! Ha!

Now that happened to be our last delivery of July, leaving a full 2 weeks to investigate, order parts, and make repairs. Driving older vehicles has certain advantages. Things are still mostly mechanical and so can be repaired without much extra technology. But the downside is that at some point the parts become obsolete and hard to find. One of the main parts was on backorder, but amazingly was able to ship out ahead of schedule. Whew!

Matt diligently went to work as often as he could to get the ambulance drive shaft taken apart, busted parts removed (turns out it was a toasted transmission-mounted e-brake bearing… two of them, actually), and new parts ordered. But he had plenty of other stuff to do as well, including rounding up a bunch of turkeys for processing on Monday morning of our “off week” of July. That happened the same Sunday night when I noticed our egg cooler was not quite down to normal temp when I stopped in to grab some eggs for the next morning’s breakfast. It would not have been unusual except that Sundays there is no in-and-out of the egg cooler like the rest of the week, and so no reason the temp should have risen at all.

As a precaution, we moved the most thermally fragile products out and Matt checked out the unit and made some adjustments. Again, thankfully Matt has learned so much through these years of shoestring business ownership. Our local refrigeration expert finally retired a few years ago (in his 70s???) but had mentored Matt along the way to help him be able to do many of his own maintenance things on refrigeration.

Monday morning the temp had not recovered, but still was in the safe range, and we had to switch gears and deal with turkey processing, which would take most of the day. We took the whole family down with us and everyone did a stellar job. Forty more gorgeous turkeys in the freezer! We’ll be releasing these into inventory soon….

Meanwhile I had posted info about our farm store job opening, so we were getting all sorts of calls and emails about that. Eeek! Emails and messages were piling up and I was busy bagging turkeys! And Matt was due to receive 1600 baby broiler chicks on Wednesday morning and still had a brooder house to prep for that. But out of nowhere, our hatchery called and asked if they could delay this batch until Monday of the following week. YES PLEASE!

Monday evening we decided to move everything out of the egg cooler, so we stuffed eggs into every refrigerated space we could find on the farm. Here’s how you fit 3 cases of eggs into a single fridge shelf:

I was getting nervous because I had placed a big order with Azure Standard, our main dairy supplier, and had about 350 pounds of delicious cheese and butter headed to me on an 18-wheeler with no way to cancel or postpone it, and I only had about 48 hours to figure out what to do with it all with no big walk-in cooler. I’m going over options in my head. Could I rent temporary cooler space in a local restaurant? Do I need to find a commercial cold storage place in a bigger city like Shreveport or Tyler? Should I go to Lowe’s and buy a couple more refrigerators? Even then, how would I get them home? Our ambulance was still down for repairs, and of course Matt was busy trying to repair the egg cooler and it didn’t make sense to stop to drive to town to buy fridges or move product off site. We even considered routing some freezer air into the cooler, but any stop-gap solution only stole time from getting the real solution accomplished. We would proceed with the repair.

Matt got the parts picked up Tuesday morning and started repairs. By Tuesday afternoon he had everything installed and was ready to test it. Now it was a wait-and-see game. I packed up my frozen orders that would be going to Tyler that week (it was a relief to know the freezer was still working after June’s fiasco!). I wondered how we would pull that off—our only other delivery-worthy vehicle was the 15 passenger van, but a normal Tyler order collection simply wouldn’t fit in there unless we removed a couple rows of seats (more time away from the solution!). The ambulance repair was close, and the remaining parts arrived Saturday and Monday, but now Matt was busy dealing with this even-more-urgent egg cooler issue.

Suddenly I had an idea! I could split up our Tyler drops and drop off Granary’s order a day early. This would solve both the issue of not having a large enough running delivery vehicle, and it would offload 10 cases of eggs, freeing up just about the exact amount of refrigerator space I would need for my Azure order. I contacted the manager there to make sure that was ok, then I loaded up the kids and we did it all in one big loop—dropped off Granary, and headed to Marshall to pick up our order from Azure. Matt stayed home to continue monitoring the cooler. I stopped in to say goodbye to him and he looked a little frightened when he saw me, and asked, “What??” I said, “I came to tell you goodbye!” He sighed, “Oh, I thought you were going to tell me something was wrong with the van!” Poor guy is a little shell-shocked, I guess!

Off we went and Matt finished up his repairs. The cooler temperature was finally dropping! When I got home, I did my employee interviews and hired Kathryn!

The next day we drove to Tyler again to meet up with our customers. It was kind of neat because we got to take all the kids with us in the van and make a bit of a family day of it. The really neat thing about this business is that it does involve the whole family, and our hope is that the children will grow up and become your farmers, too, right alongside us, and then continue carrying the torch with their own families someday if they so choose that path.

What was wrong with the egg cooler? Well, actually, this particular condenser/evaporator setup was given to us (it needed some fixing up), so it was already a little old. (Fits right in with the rest of the equipment, I suppose…) Matt replaced all the replaceables and was able to identify where the malfunction was, although it was rather puzzling. Turns out that the previous owner had it sort of “throttled down” by using two methods of restriction, rather than the usual one. Matt was amazed that he was able to find it. Just this little tiny thing called a restrictor. Looks like a fat copper washer. The cause of all the trouble. I guess the heat and age finally just got to the whole system and caused a breakdown!

We are praising God for watching over all these details this week as He always does. So that’s a little glimpse of what it’s like around here. Might help explain why we sleep so soundly at nighttime. God’s got this all worked out. We just keep putting one foot in front of the other!

Sometimes our life here at the farm feels like an experiment of epic proportions. I think it’s partly that because we are a family-run farm, things change every day because WE change every day. The kids are growing to be more and more a part of farm happenings. They seem to love every minute of it and are always listening for Matt to come in and say, “Would you like to come with me?” The answer is always yes!

So we feel extremely blessed, that though the work is hard and seems to sometimes move at a snail’s pace, making the end of the to-do list so far away that you hardly believe it’s even there (maybe it’s not, ha!), what a joy it is to share this life with our kiddos, teaching them the skills they need to succeed, whether in the future of this farm, or some other venture of their own.

Part of involving them is trying to take a little time to just enjoy the space we are in. That usually looks like Sunday afternoon walks. We go exploring different areas on the farm—sometimes the pond, sometimes the cow paddock, sometimes the woods. This time we took an old trail that we haven’t explored in a while. There were neat old grapevines struggling to reach the sunshine on the other side of a very tall canopy of pines and holly trees. No grapes, sadly. But there was an interesting old gorge and lots of American beauty berry. I didn’t take many pictures because at first it felt like a same-old walk in the woods. Enjoyable for us, but not that interesting for blog material. But I did snap a few photos of the kids monkeying around.

It was an ordinary, peaceful evening walk. Until…

We had finished our frolic and started back up the hill toward home. We took a slightly different path—why, who knows. There really weren’t any paths, actually, just the occasional passage through the brush, so you pick the one of least resistance. Suddenly, there on the ground was a huge pile of feathers. Very clearly chicken feathers. OUR chickens’ feathers, and it certainly seemed to be from more than one bird. The light-red feathers of our young layer flock were here located over a quarter mile from where the chickens were SUPPOSED to be.

Matt had suspected some predation was going on, and recently got a skunk that had invaded the chicken pen. But this was the work of no skunk. It was a larger animal, something capable of carrying its prey a long distance. We have our ideas of what it might be. But the main goal instantly became: secure chicken pen. We headed that way next.

We have been long-time advocates of keeping a livestock guardian dog in with pastured hens. There are so many different chicken predators in Texas that a nice mellow breed like Great Pyrenees, though it is super rare that they ever actually have to FIGHT a predator, their imposing presence is great insurance against attacks. And their favorite activity is to stay up all night and bark at the darkness, as any Pyrenees owner will affirm. Haha!

Now, the thing about the livestock guardian dogs is that they mostly only protect the chickens INSIDE the pen. Sometimes our hens get to feeling extra-adventurous and literally “fly the coop!” Oh, they stick around. All the good stuff is inside the pen—the food, the water, the shade, plus 600 of your closest friends… I think maybe they just get excited and flap around and suddenly find themselves on the outside, trying to get back in! When we arrived, sure enough, there were two little red hens hanging around on the outside of the fence. Come dusk, they’d be some coyote’s chicken-dinner-for-two, so we have learned a little trick for this situation, too. Our two oldest sons each grabbed one of the escaped chickens. The oldest pulled out his Swiss army knife and trimmed down her flight feathers on one side. This is 100% painless—just like cutting your fingernails! And the hen can still use her wings to land and coast. It just keeps her from being able to completely lift off and get over the fence.

Back into the paddock after her little haircut, and hopefully she’ll learn to remain safely inside the fence where she belongs, even after her feathers grow back in. I don’t know that she left a tip for her stylist, though. 😉 

As for the predators that are daring enough to cross the fence themselves, well it just so happens that we have a rather goofy but very large and intimidating Pyrenees named Long John Slobber. Named, well, because he slobbers, but also because he is HUGE, with a super long tail to match. You’ll have met him if you’ve come out to the farm store within the past few months. He used to guard a different flock of hens until they retired last spring, and he’s been out of a job since.

Long John is pretty shy and only has a slight enjoyment of patting. Our oldest son, the resident animal whisperer, was able to get a collar on him, but Pyrs don’t like leashes so much. And he’s well over 100 lb, so carrying him to the chicken pen wasn’t an option, either.

But Long John had to go back in with those hens. Predators never decrease unless conditions change. Things looked pretty grim if we didn’t take some kind of action. Word would surely get out that there’s a free chicken buffet located at Shady Grove Ranch, and we’d soon be lacking a very important flock of chickens! 

The two farm dogs, Shadow and Long John, enjoy following us around on our walks, so they followed us down near the hens. Matt tried unsuccessfully to grab Long John’s collar, and away he went. So we tried a different method—Matt opened up the chicken fence and set it up around the two dogs (and us). Then he carried Long John into the middle of the chicken paddock while Shevi and I reinstalled the fence.

I didn’t get the memo that the still-standing portion of the electric fence was still energized, so when I took the “cold” fence and tried to attach it to the other, I got quite the zap! Whoops! Matt then demonstrated how to reconnect them without getting shocked. “You just touch it between pulses!” He lives for a thrill, ha! I’ll pass and stick to writing stories about other people playing with electric fences!

We stayed for a bit longer while Long John settled in, watching the kids play hide-and-seek in the tall grass. Tevka volunteered to be “it,” so the other four went to hide. They were shockingly hard to find, until Danny sneezed, and then the grass around him started wiggling. I laughed and laughed as Tevka ran over and tagged him, and then he resumed cruising around his yellow dump truck while she proceeded to find the others.

The next morning, all seemed well. Long John seemed content with his new employment. Hopefully that’s the last pile of feathers we find for a while! The experiment continues…

The coyotes had pork for breakfast this week—and a feast it was, too!

Before your heart starts a-racing in fear for your bacon supply… I’m glad to tell you that the coyotes don’t amount to much of a threat on that front. Actually, it’s PIGS that are our pigs’ greatest threat! Pirate pigs! Wild, barbarian pigs with no manners nor decency, trying to woo our sows and gilts (that’s the girls) away from all the comforts of home. It’s the classic story of the good-for-nothing bachelor slinking his way into the courtyard of the king during the dark of night, and trying to wile away the hand of the princess (or in this case… a bunch of princesses. Hairy ones that love to roll in the mud and stick their noses in the dirt).

via GIPHY

Wild hogs. They’ve been called the bane of Texas wildlife. Why more people don’t make use of this “free food,” I don’t know (or maybe after this experience… I do). We generally don’t have too many issues with them. We’re blessed to have a neighbor that traps them as a big-time hobby. And much of our big-little farm is fenced well enough to keep the stragglers out. But not all. It takes a lot of time and money to build a truly hog-proof fence.  We’re getting there, and many of our boundaries are impenetrable by anything bigger than a skunk, but we’re not arrived yet.

Once in a while a boar will show up, hungry for love. It’s pretty easy to spot fresh sign on the ground. It’s even easier to tell the difference between wild pigs and our plump domestic ones. Matt started noticing some sign on the ground around mid-September and began to up his alert status.

Then one morning around 7, Matt was on the phone with a friend from college who is venturing into farming, hoping to wean himself away from an engineering desk job. They happened to be talking pigs, and Chuck (the friend) was asking Matt’s advice about attending an upcoming pig seminar put on by Joel Salatin of Polyface Farm in Virginia. Oh the irony of it all… Matt was encouraging Chuck to consider it, but cautioned him on one big difference between Virginia and Texas when it comes to pastured pigs, and that is that Texas has a thriving feral hog population, and once in a while you’ll have attempted break-ins. As the words left Matt’s mouth, around the corner walks a wild boar! Matt propped the phone on his shoulder and pulled out his 9mm and took a couple of shots! Missed!

Matt returned from morning rounds and managed to talk me into buying a hog trap. We thought the matter would be fairly cut and dry, and even lined up a friend to come get the pig when we got him. But this boar is different. He won’t go near the trap. But he still comes to visit the girls. So the stalking continues.

Matt began to make it his habit to do his rounds with his Russian Mosin Nagant rifle in hand. One morning, he can hear some porcine flirting happening on the far side of the paddock (and these paddocks are pretty big!). So Matt spends the next hour army-crawling in a covert op to try to sneak up on him. Meanwhile the boar moseys right past Matt’s previous sniper position! Now the boar was between Matt and our own pigs, and according the Gun Safety rules (and common sense), Matt couldn’t take a shot without putting our own pigs at risk. Matt crawled behind a big bushy patch of goatweed and waited. Apparently the boar caught the human scent because when Matt peeped up over the bush, the boar was looking his way. The boar was in range, but there was no way to reposition the rifle without alerting the pig! So Matt quietly pulled out the 9mm again and waited for the boar to come around the corner. Sadly, the pig walked off at an angle and by the time Matt peeped again, he was out of range. The pig gets away again!

This can only mean one thing… WAR!

Matt began stalking the pig daily with his rifle. He also began to be concerned that his rifle wasn’t sighted in properly. The Mosin was a mass-produced rifle and was equipped with a very steep trigger pull of 10 pounds, which makes it rather inaccurate. Matt brought in an expert—another college buddy and fellow gun collector, who happens to be a retired Marine. Titus loaned Matt his souped-up Mosin with archangel stock and custom trigger. They did some target practice, and sure enough, with these minor equipment improvements, Matt could indeed hit a bullseye—who knew! 😉

Over the next days, the boar was spotted and Matt had him in sight, but at the long distances he was positioned from, Matt couldn’t positively identify him against our own pigs. It’d be a shame to kill one of our own pigs that had escaped from their paddock by some weird accident!

Normally, killing a boar is fairly cut and dry. He might get in, hang around like one of the gang, then at feeding time, Matt would pop him off with little trouble at all. But this boar is different. He is one wary dude.

October arrived and we thought our lives were never going to be rid of this pesky wild pig. It was an ever-present fear because at any moment, that pig could clobber our electric fences and take the whole herd with him, creating one major bacon shortage. Talk about stress!

One Sunday morning, Matt went out at dawn to hunt, again. When he arrived, he heard pigs in the woods out to right of the paddock—weird… Had an entire herd of wild pigs invaded? Then he spotted a big pig in front of him—that’s not a wild pig… that’s ours! Now the covert op is off—it’s rescue mission time! The best way to recapture a domestic pig is to play it cool, so Matt nonchalantly went into breakfast-time mode. Every one of our 25 pigs was out, so Matt spent the next who-knows-how-long getting them all back in. Thankfully it worked and it was time to finish feeding everyone. He walked up on one of our sows laying down, and just on the other side of her was a black, scraggly ear sticking up—the boar!

Matt drew his pistol and took a shot. But the boar RAN OFF! How???

Matt returned, frustrated and tired. He determined that he must take this pig out, once and for all, and it would have to be under cover of night.  We did manage to get to church that morning, but Matt was brooding over the worry of his pigs escaping any moment. When we returned home, Matt headed out to Academy Sports to buy a night vision scope. The gun personnel mounted it to his rifle, and he returned to the ranch just as the sun set. Another day lost to this pig.

He managed to sight the gun in and then after night fell, he headed down for what he hoped would be the final hunt. Sure enough, there’s the boar. Matt shoots! He MISSES AGAIN! He discovered that the worker at Academy had not mounted the scope correctly. It had come loose and was no longer calibrated. “If you want something done right…” Back to square one!

Scope fixed and sighted in, Matt continued to check the paddock, armed, 3-4 times per day. The boar had obviously grown bolder and danger of herd escape was imminent.

The Mosin he had borrowed, though accurate, is heavy and ideal for shooting long range from the prone position, not so much for freestanding short-range shots. So during his routine check this past Tuesday, opportunity arose when the pig happened to walk right in front of Matt. He fired from the standing position.  But the pig ran off! Matt had missed AGAIN! Whatever aspirations Matt may have had in life, it seems ending as a famous sniper is not one of them. The long battle would continue…

The next day, there was no sign on the ground, and no sighting.

Wednesday Matt went out again before dawn with the night scope, hoping to end it once and for all. Too many hours had already been spent. He was tired. I was tired. It was a frustrating experience with no clear ending.

While watching, Matt heard some coyotes in the forest nearby. They were louder than usual—it sounded like they were fighting. Fighting over something.

There was still no pig.

I had started to think we’d be battling this pig forever. It had been over a month. So many hours. And still no clear path forward. Such is the farm life. Sometimes we face insurmountable odds. Sometimes it’s exhausting, both bodily and emotionally! During one of Matt’s long days out, and it seemed like every spare moment was spent trying to get rid of this pest, the kids and I prayed for some confirmation that the pig was no more, that the battle would end and not carry on forever.

Thursday we did our Longview and Marshall deliveries, and Matt knew it’d be tight timing with a hunt before our departure, so he went ahead and put his “town clothes” on under his hunting attire early that morning.

Matt and I were still both tense about the situation. I asked over and over if it was possible if he had hit the pig. But there wasn’t blood. Could it be the aim was that off? It didn’t seem to add up. Matt went to check on the pigs for maybe the hundredth time since this all occurred, and this time he decided to track that coyote activity to see exactly what it was they were fighting over.

Sure enough, the coyote-breakfast was pork, fresh-killed by a souped-up Russian rifle. Matt had gotten to know this boar quite well over the past month, and was able to unmistakably identify what was left of the carcass, only 50 yards from where he had taken the hit on Tuesday. Boars are tough. Super tough. Matt’s previous experience had taught him that it’s not uncommon for a boar to have smoke coming out of the bullet wound while he’s still going full speed, even with a high-powered rifle like a Mosin! In this case, he only made it far enough to elude us one more day. But not far enough that we couldn’t get some closure.

A fitting end, we think. Coyotes don’t bother us too much so long as we keep them out of our chicken paddocks. Especially when they clean up after us!

Life returns to normal… for now!

We hope you’ll come meet the now-safe SGR pigs in person at our final farm tour of the year. It’s only 2 weeks away on Saturday, October 27! Sign up here.

–Jerica, the Farmer’s Wife

If you care to see the remains of the pig, including his giant tusks, keep scrolling down. 

You asked for it… so here it is: 

One last farm tour for 2018!

We’d love to have you join us for an adventure in learning about where your food could come from: HOW we do this crazy fringe thing of actually raising animals OUTDOORS on green, living grass; and WHY we’ve chosen to go against the grains in so many ways in order to bring you the best food we know how, right here in East Texas! 

This is a consumer-friendly farm tour geared toward getting you excited about supporting a small, local, family farm dedicated to doing things without “-cides,” soy, GMOs, and junk. Farm-wannabes are welcome, too, but you definitely don’t need to have farming aspirations to attend. 🙂

We have had special requests to visit the pigs on this tour, which are pretty far away, so get your walkin’ boots on and trek with us across our big-little farm in Jefferson. We’ll also visit the laying chickens, the last batch of broiler chickens of the year, and the cattle herd. We get GREAT feedback about the tours. Will you join us? Order your tickets today! 

Order tickets here. 

Paid admission gets you 10% off your purchase that day, excepting stuff that’s already-on-sale, bulk deals, and special orders (like turkeys). We’ll have a market table set up after the tour, or you can skip the line and order early online. For this latter option, choose “On Farm” pickup, and mention in the comments during checkout that you plan to attend the tour and we’ll apply the 10% discount to all eligible items in your order. Call with questions! 903-665-7076.