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Cleaning the byre
When the boys get home from school I allow them 45 minutes to get changed, play or read. After that, they’re booted outside to help me with a few chores before going back in to do their homework. On...
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Mantled with snow
As I walked through to the back door at 6am, I noticed the house felt appreciably colder than it has for the past few mornings so I wasn’t surprised when I looked out the window and saw a light...
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Delilah is lame
While feeding Delilah, one of our Berkshire sows, and her litter last night I noticed she was limping slightly on her right front leg. I checked her over as she was eating, discovering she was slightly...
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Pig farmer makes the fashion pages
There’s hope for me yet. The Guardian’s Fashion Sections runs a regular Weekender feature, which this week features pig farmer Rob Leamon. Weekender: Rob Leamon, 56, pig farmer ”The best thing is being...
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A pig of a day
The sun is shining, the temperature is in the mid-20s and our Berkshire pigs need to cool off. Yes, it’s another job for Two-Legs. Once or twice a day I go out with the buckets and a watering can to...
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Where’s my piglets?
We took Delilah’s litter of eight-week-old Berkshire piglets away from her today. She wasn’t best pleased, pacing up and down, calling for piglets. But to no avail. No, not because we’d moved them far...
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Grim times as our boar goes lame
As I was feeding the pigs this evening, I noticed our Berkshire boar, Gus, had a slightly humped spine just above his hams. I spent some time watching Gus walking around, noting other indications that...
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Culling our Berkshire pigs
The combination of ever rising costs and customer expectations of ever falling prices means we’ve started culling our herd of Berkshire pigs. Prices were up again when I paid the bill at the feed...
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Death of a pig
I came home from a rugby coaching course at 3pm today. I went out for a quick check of the animals, all the pigs and all the poultry looked okay, so I went inside. At 5.30pm, I went out to feed the...
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Final batch of pigs leave the croft
We took our last two Berkshire pigs to the abattoir today, a job made more complicated by the death of one of the porkers, a last-minute change of abattoir and a last-minute change of butcher. Still,...
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