Rehoboth Farm

When Kim and I were dating as teenagers we used to go with her parents every night to walk in a local park. We would usually stay until near dark and then return home. Once when we were about to leave, we were sitting on a picnic table when I felt something hit my back and slide down to my beltline, something like a large bug. I sat up and felt around but couldnÂ’t find anything. "WhatÂ’s the matter?" Kim asked. "I donÂ’t know, I could swear that something went into my pants, but maybe not", I said. Kim laughed and said that I would know if that happened, and then soon after we left. On the way home I still had the feeling that all was not right.

After we had been back at her house for about 30 minutes I sat down on the couch and thatÂ’s when something began to move. I jumped up from the couch and began to shake my legs, Kim was saying "What?, what?, what are you doing?! I was yelling, "SomethingÂ’s in there!!", as I jumped and shook all over her living room. Just then I could feel it move into one pants leg and so I started shaking that once with violence. Finally, out of the end of one jeans leg came a huge cockroach that hit the floor and then scurried away to disappear near a wall.

Kim fell back on the couch in hysterics as I stood there huffing and puffing, my 80Â’s hair all in a tussle. She had discovered my inherent fear of insects.

Fast forward eighteen years to 2002. Our one year old son, Gabriel had developed allergies to just about everything including the Christmas tree. We had read that eating local raw honey might enable you to develop resistance to local allergens so we decided to try it. We had bought a small jar of honey recently from a local farm fair and on it was the phone number of the beekeeper, a Mr. Harris, so we gave him a call. He invited us to come over and get as much as we needed.

Mr. Harris is 79 years old but doesnÂ’t look a day over 65. Until he began beekeeping he suffered from arthritis, but it quickly went away, along with most of his other problems. His doctor is so impressed with his health compared to other men his age that he has become somewhat of an expert on the health benefits of honey. He even comes to speak at our local beekeepers meetings of which Mr. Harris is president. We began replacing much of our sugar usage with honey and soon we were buying Mr. Harris out of his supply. He suggested that we get a hive of our own.

In October of 2003, we were building our home on our new land and were anxious to start the ‘homestead’ lifestyle once again after being out of it for three and a half years. One day I told Kim that I really wanted to have some honeybees, and I even bought ‘Beekeeping, A Practical Guide’ by Richard Bonney. After I read the book, I told her about how simple beekeeping sounded and all of the benefits that you gain from it. She said, "But honey, don’t you have a fear of flying insects, especially ones that sting?" The park incident immediately came to mind. She agreed that bees would be wonderful, if, I could get past the ‘bug’ aspect.

Well, determination took over. We found, via the Market Bulletin, a man about 150 miles from us who sold entire hives with bees, his name was Mr. Pluta. We made arrangements to come over and get a hive on one Saturday. Kim asked me where we would put the bees for the return trip home; I had not really thought about it until then. I asked Mr. Pluta and he said that he would plug the entrance to the hive, so inside the car should be fine (as long as we drove carefully). The mental image of 30,000 bees loose inside our car made me pass on this choice. I settled on renting a U-Haul trailer and we were on our way.

Mr. PlutaÂ’s house was surrounded by more than 100 bee hives, covering about three acres. Bees could be seen everywhere moving at great speed and the sound of buzzing filled the air. Mr. Pluta himself reminded me of a bee, he moved from hive, to hive, to roadside stand almost non-stop and at a fast clip. We basically had to stand in one spot and talk to him as he passed by. I finally figured out the trick and ran along beside him as he made his rounds and explained who I was and why I was there. Just when he would start picking out a hive for us, a car would pull up to his stand and he was off. After a few minutes he would return and we would be on the move again. After a while things calmed down and we got the hive loaded up. He told us about how he put hives on crops in South Georgia like peaches, strawberries and even cotton. He had honey from these crops that actually tasted like peaches, strawberries and yes, cotton. His honey was wonderful, we bought gallons.

We got our hive home and set it up. Mr. Harris came out and inspected it and gave us the thumbs up. Bees are actually fascinating to sit and watch. As long as the temperature is above about 60 degrees, there will be some type of activity going on. I bought a veil and a smoker from Brushy Mountain Bee Supply and the first time I opened up the hive I was nervous as a cat. The smoker makes a huge difference, and I was bold enough to pull out a frame to look at. Bees started covering the veil, and the fact of having 30 or 40 stinging insects within an inch or two of your face is somewhat intimidating, at first.

Actually once you get stung the first couple of times, the fear goes away and it just becomes a nuisance. Once I got too bold and used a bare hand instead of a gloved one. I happened to pull out the very frame the queen was on and, of course, about 10 guard bees pounced on that particular hand. I got seven stings from the wrist up to my fingers and my hand swelled up for two days, then went back to normal. These types of incidences have lowered my fear of insects, somewhat.

While we were building, our builder told us about a bee hive on one of their other job sites. He asked if we could remove it. I got with Mr. Harris and we went over to take a look. On the way over Mr. Harris said that it was likely a wasp or hornetÂ’s nest because honeybees in the wild are extremely rare. When we got there Mr. Harris smiled and said he couldnÂ’t believe it; on the side of a tree was a large honey bee hive with a good deal of bees working it. He and I and Mike spent a couple of hours removing the comb and placing it in a wooden hive. Kim took pictures of the operation, and Mr. Harris later used them at a Georgia Beekeepers Convention at the University of Georgia. The pictures won first prize for the photo contest that they hold each year. (see below).

Taking care of bees is much harder than it used to be, it seems that everything is out to get them; Varroa and Tracheal mites, Wax Moths, Foulbrood and now the Small Hive Beetle. Not to mention having to feed them syrup over the winter and constantly check on their levels of brood, pollen and honey stores. All of this is forgotten, however, the first time that you extract. When you see your honey supers starting to fill up it is a great feeling, the whole hive even takes on a distinct honey smell. Once you have those heavy supers in the house, and each frame is capped completely over in a neat wall of white wax, thatÂ’s when the real fun begins. There is something almost Biblical about uncapping a frame and seeing all of that golden honey that your bees have produced for you. It just makes you thank the Lord for his creation. Honey extracting should always be a family affair, even if you, the children and the kitchen get completely sticky in the process, to the children thatÂ’s half the fun.

We had been used to seeing honey in small quantities until we had our own. The first time we extracted we got nearly four gallons of honey, which looked more like 40. Then we planted a half an acre of white clover. Last year we got over eight gallons of honey from just our one hive, which is pretty good for being in the country where there are not a lot of flowers growing wild. This year we hope to expand to additional hives, but first we have to get the Small Hive Beetles under control. They have killed off two of our hives and we are now on our third, and not giving up. We tried to go organic on the first two with no parasite control, but have resigned ourselves to the fact that we have to do something to keep the hive viable.

The market for honey is growing as mainstream folks have figured out the wide benefits of it as well. We put all of our honey in small Mason jars because we feel like it looks best that way. I bring them to work and sell them for $5 per half-pint right off my desk. This works out to about $80 per gallon, but people are willing to pay it for a high quality product that looks like it came straight off the pantry shelf in a real farm house...which , of course, it did.

Y2K came and went with no problems. We had run into problems, however, with the renting of our farm. We have been landlords and we have been renters and I can tell you that neither of them is very much fun. For various reasons by early 2000 we were looking for new accommodations. Having to leave 40 acres of pastures, woods and barns is not an easy thing to do, especially for our family. Kim was expecting Gabriel and so there was some advantage to moving closer to the city. A builder friend of ours recommended a house that he had recently finished on a golf course in a rural area close to town.

Our gut reaction was to reject it on principle alone. We had just spent 2 and a half years preparing for Y2K, learning the homestead life and practicing being self-sufficient farmers. We had come to reject the lure of affluence and the collection of status symbols. Of course we were also about to be without a place to live, expecting a baby, and the six of us had just spent nine months living in a smelly, dark and leaky, 900 square foot frame house. Walking into a bright and spacious new home and smelling the new carpet, new paint, new everything was a very tempting experience. We moved in immediately.

It didnÂ’t take long to remember why we didnÂ’t like subdivision life. One neighborÂ’s driveway was only 20 feet away, fortunately he was friendly, although he did think we were a pretty curious bunch. Our other neighbor was further from our house, but he proved to be quite a squeaky wheel, and never approved of much that we did, much less of our animals. He was the typical American family; one child, Mom worked, and Dad was an avid golfer. We didnÂ’t have much in common and although we never pressed the point, he usually did in some fashion or another. After a year or so it took a privacy fence at $4000 to resolve the issues. Ah, the good life.

Well you can take the homestead family out of the country, but taking the country out of us proved to be much harder. We saw our arrangements as temporary, although we knew we would live there for at least a couple of years. During that time Mike began reading about hunting dogs, and then he read ‘Where the Red Fern Grows’. For months, wherever he went he had a Bible in one pocket and that book in the other. By this time (early 2002), we had eliminated most of our animals due to our neighbor, but now we felt that he should have his own dog and a family pet. Mike suggested a Redbone Coonhound.

The nearest breeder that had puppies was in North Carolina, so we loaded up the van and set off. As it turned out it was pretty far into North Carolina, about an hour north of Charlotte, up in the foothills of the Appalachians. We met the breeder, Mr. Davis, at a store parking lot and then followed him several miles back into the hills. On a steep wooded slope off of a country road he had about 10 pens full of barking hound-dogs. All of them had deep reddish-brown coats and were as healthy as hogs. When they saw Mr. Davis, many of them started baying and howling; long, low and loud. He laughed and said that they thought that he was here to take them hunting, and they were ready to go. We asked if they really liked to hunt, he smiled and said "Can’t you hear ‘em?, it’s what they live for".

He took us to one pen and called into the hutch. A momma dog came prancing out, followed quickly by several little red puppies. The children sat and played with them, while Kim and I talked with Mr. Davis. Dressed in big blue overalls, he looked and talked like a simple country man who loved his dogs, and I guess he was. We found out that he also happened to be an executive officer at the local bank.

We picked out our pup and drove home. Mike decided to call her Virginia Lee after Robert E. Lee. ‘Ginny Lee’ quickly became a part of the family. This was the first hound-dog we had ever owned and certainly the first coon hound. Owning a dog that is bred for scent and speed is a unique experience, especially if you live in a subdivision. We read books on coon hunting and learned about how to train a dog properly. Everything we read was in favor of using real coon-tails for training. The next time we saw a dead raccoon on the side of the road Mike begged me to stop and get the tail. I reluctantly agreed and got out with a pocket-knife in one hand and a plastic bag in the other. What I thought was going to be a quick snip turned out to be major surgery. I struggled to get the tail off while cars were passing by at 60mph. After much tugging and cutting and gagging I got the tail into the bag and we continued on home.

Once home, Mike took over and tied one end of the tail to a long piece of string. He had the rest of us hold Ginny Lee and cover her eyes while he dragged the tail in a maze pattern across the back yard. He finally stopped next to a tree, where he tied the tail up to the first branch, about 6 feet off the ground. We then turned her loose. Mike called her and she started running across the yard. About half-way across it looked like she ran into an invisible wall; she stopped cold and immediately put her nose to the ground. Barking and howling she perfectly followed the trail that Mike had left, she was running faster and faster. The faster she ran the more she barked until she finally came to the tree. She stopped and ran around the tree several times barking and howling, and then finally stopped and stood, barking up into the tree. Mike was as proud as a peacock, and he and his sisters played this game with Ginny several more times before finally giving her the tail. By morning it was just a little white nub.

This changed our way of looking at road-kill. When normal people see road-kill they squint up their nose and say ugh, but we have never been normal. Now whenever we were out and saw a dead animal on the side of the road, the children would rise up in their seats and say, Is it? Is it? Yes! ItÂ’s a raccoon! Stop! Stop! I would have to pull over and separate the coon from his striped attachment, and I actually got pretty good at it. Ginny got pretty good at scenting too, and would anticipate where the trail was going and skip ahead to save time. She could now find the tail in seconds instead of minutes. This, however, sparked her instincts and hunting became her life, golf-course or not. Surrounding our neighborhood were the greens of the course and surrounding those were hundreds of acres of nothing but woods. Each night she would jump the fence in the back of the yard, where it was short, and take off into the darkness. For hours you could hear her barking and howling at a distance as she followed the scent of deer, coons and any other nocturnal creatures.

She would even go hunting in the daytime sometimes, and I could just imagine some golfer about to hit his ball when a red-streak would come flying out of the woods, nose to the ground, and howling, there she would cut straight across the green and into the woods on the other side before he could figure out what was going on. Mike wanted to take her hunting and I made the mistake of agreeing one night. We put a long leash on her and let her go. We were dragged through about a quarter of a mile of brambles and bushes at top speed before we gave up and let her go. As we walked back to the house huffing and puffing we could hear her voice trailing off into the night.

Taking her for walks was a special treat; we would follow the golf cart trails through the woods after the course had closed for the evening. She would start out by our side until the first scent trail came along and then she was off. Every once in a while she would come tearing past us, with what looked like a grin on her face, and then disappear back into the bushes. It was if she was just coming by to check on us before going back to play.

Mike always worried when she would leave, for fear that she wouldnÂ’t come back. Trying to go find her was nearly impossible, although we tried. Then one day we found the one thing that she was afraid of; thunderstorms. We had to go into town for the whole day once and so we wanted to pen her up while we were gone. Unfortunately she bolted out of the yard and went hunting just as we were about to leave. For nearly an hour we drove around calling her. Just then, thunder started rumbling and soon lightning was flashing around us. One of the children said "There she is!", and a red streak came flying out of the woods and made a bee-line for the house. Coming home we found her cowering on the back porch, where Mike quickly penned her up. From then on whenever a storm came up, if she was hunting, she would always come straight home immediately.

Once she showed up at the house with a small creature in her mouth. She dropped it at our feet and just stood there, looking up at us. We could tell that it was a baby rabbit. A few minutes later she returned with another one, her mouth was trembling as she tried not to bite down on it and hurt it. Again she plopped it down and stood there. Mike asked her to show him where she was getting them from and she turned around and took off, barking. We chased along behind her and she kept looking back to see if we were still with her. She took us straight to a small hole, not far from the road. The mother rabbit had either left or been hit by a car and the ants were starting to get to the babies. We took care of the living ones for a few days but were unable to bring any of them through. Each day the children would show Ginny the babies and she would whine and sniff them, like a concerned mother.

If you donÂ’t own a dog and are considering getting one, or if you live in a rural area and want a great companion, get a hound dog. They are great watch-dogs as well as hunters and are about as loyal as any dog we have ever had. If you have a son who is looking for his first dog and true companion, get him a Redbone Coonhound, especially if you have acreage where the two of them can hunt together as friends. You will never regret the investment.

In May of 2003 we purchased 22 acres that was the culmination of years of searching for a piece of land from which to live, to homestead, and to pass on to our children. We finished building our house in December of 2003 and moved in. Unfortunately this was too late in the season to buy any pigs for raising like we had done back in 1999/2000. We live in Georgia and so we like to raise our pigs from September to February to keep them from suffering through our very hot summers. We anxiously waited for September of 2004 to come around, and when it did we bought two piglets from Mr. Floyd and got started.

By December of 2004 the pigs were big enough to be in the obnoxious stage and their enclosure of metal panels was beginning to interest them. It was during this time that our family of eight began to come down with a stomach virus that hit us one by one. I was the last one to get it. I soon found myself laying in bed unable to move and praying that no-one would make the bed move either. Kim took all of the children, except for Mike, into town to do some grocery shopping. As I was laying there it dawned on me that I had not fed the pigs that morning and it was now after noon.

That was when I heard Mike at the door knocking quietly. "Dad", he said. "Uuuuuhhhh", I responded. "How are you feeling, can you move?" he asked. "Uuuuuhhhh" I said again. "IÂ’m only asking because thereÂ’s a problem". "What", I asked, "is the problem". "Um, the pigs are in the front yard by the house", he answered.

This is probably the worst possible thing that I could contemplate at that moment. I jumped to my feet and the room started to spin. I had chills and fever so I put on about three layers of old winter coats and a hat and then Mike and I headed outside. As we were walking slowly to the feed bin Mike said "You look terrible". "That describes how I feel", I said. He said I was white and ‘kinda green’ at the same time. We got some feed and went back to the pen. The hogs had started at a corner where two metal panels met and had actually broken the welds on the metal wire and gotten out, it was unbelieveable. We called for them and they came running, ears flapping and all. After about ten minutes we got them back into the pen; then Mike got me a chair to sit on while I repaired the panels. It was then that we had visitors.

The land we bought was actually 132 rural acres split up into six lots, and we were one of the first to buy and build on one of the lots. When we closed on our land the real estate agent asked if he could use our land as an example of what could be done with the other lots. At the time we said "Sure", but that was now a year and a half ago and he had never shown up. Well now he decided to, and he had an SUV full of prospective clients with him.

To be able to get to our hog-pen you would have to first drive past our house and then proceed back to a wood-line about 100 yards away, which is precisely the path that he took. Here I was sitting on an old green chair, dressed like a homeless person and looking like I belonged in the hospital, and all the while sitting alongside two big hogs that were munching in a feed trough in front of me. When he saw Mike and I he made a bee-line for us, and IÂ’m sure he was telling his potential buyers "And here folks could be your future next-door neighbors!". When he got about fifty feet away, he made a sudden u-turn and quickly headed back towards our driveway. Mike and I just looked at each other and shook our heads and went back to work.

We never saw him again after that and we noticed that it took a long time for the other lots to sell. Even now, none of the owners have decided to build next to us which I guess is just another benefit to raising your own pigs.

I admit, I never saw myself as a person who would have a big family. When you get married you tend to talk about having children in terms of pre-defined numbers. Kim and I talked about having three. First we had one, then two. Then we had three; but three became four when three became twins. Then four became five and five became six. Now six is becoming seven and numbers donÂ’t seem to mean that much anymore.

One major reason is that numbers turn into little people. As they grow they develop characteristics all their own, some of which are hilarious. Having a lot of other siblings must drive some of this because I was never as creative and funny as our children seem to be. Of course home-schooling and the lack of negative influences plays a major role as well. Just when Kim and I get down with the weight of the world, (du jour), one of them will do something that reminds you of why you have no answer when someone asks you, "So, are you done now?". (having children).

Take yesterday. The whole family was sitting in the den doing different things. Kim and I were perusing the internet by an open window that was allowing a very balmy breeze for early March to float in. Just then we heard two little high-pitched voices calling into the room from outside.

"This is your conscience speaking...", one voice said. Kim and I looked at each other, puzzled. "...You need to bake a cake...", said one voice, followed by another voice that said, "...With chocolate icing...", then the first voice said, "...And donÂ’t forget the ice cream!...".

Looking around the room we noticed that our twin girls, Emily and Ivey, were missing. All of the rest of us looked at each other and started laughing. Now the voices from below the open window were laughing as well, "...Listen to your conscience!!!, donÂ’t ignore it!!..bake a chocolate cake!!!"

Many people I work with have fond memories of college or even high-school and talk about their unique circle of friends and how they did everything together. For many of these people those were the best remembered times of their lives. Many even try to rebuild those types of comrade groups within the workplace, but they usually cannot recapture the good-ole-days. However, those same folks will ask me why we have so many children, and isnÂ’t it a pain to have to haul so many people around everywhere you go?

What they donÂ’t understand is that when you are a big family, you have that group of comrades; but it goes even deeper and lasts even longer, in fact it lasts for eternity. Lord willing our children wonÂ’t go looking for a group to belong to because they already belong to the most unique and fun bunch of folks that they know; each other. We enjoy each otherÂ’s company more and more every day, and each new addition to the family gets pampered and loved on by more and more older siblings. We are not the perfect family, far from it, but with the LordÂ’s help we can get better all the time. As for now we seek His guidance to show us how we should be living, and sometimes we also listen to our conscience; especially when it tells us to bake chocolate cakes with ice cream.

It was October of 1999, two months until Y2K, and we were in a pretty good position. We had our 40 acre rented farm, two pigs, numerous chickens and even some guinea hens. Most of all we had our Jersey milk cow Dilly who would freshen in a month or so, and, we had a Jersey bull calf that we would raise for beef. Or so we thought.

At first we kept the calf in the barn and bought a bottle and some milk replacer. Training him to drink from a bottle was a hilarious venture that left nearly the whole family drenched in milk. After he took to it, it became the choice job on the farm, everybody wanted to be the one to feed him. Our son Mike wanted to name him since he had taken on a special fondness for him. One day the calf laid down in a bed of pine straw and nearly disappeared, being almost the same color. Mike named him OlÂ’ Pine and it stuck.

Raising a calf from a bottle is much different than buying one fully grown. Dilly was cantankerous and snobby, while OlÂ’ Pine was a big baby. He would follow us around the yard like a puppy and mooo whenever he got bored with what we were doing. Later he developed the annoying trait of head-butting us when he wanted something, which of course was usually food. Several times I made the mistake of bending over while he was around only to be launched a few feet forward via his head. I would turn around and he would dance from one foot to another as if he just wanted to play.

At night we would put him in the same small pasture as Dilly which he loved; Dilly on the other hand did not appreciate his company. He would sneak around her trying to see if her udder was producing his favorite beverage or not. She would turn in circles so that her back was never to him. Once in a while he would be quiet enough to get his head up under her, where she would jerk and kick at him and then run away. He would stand there and moo, like an unwanted child, (which he wasnÂ’t), but it was pitiful anyway. The day came when we realized that there was no way OlÂ’ Pine was ever going to the butcher, so he became a part of the family. It was just as well since we could breed him back to Dilly if we wanted to.

By December we were looking for Dilly to calve any day now. Every morning before work I would go out and check on her, but to no avail. The whole month passed and no calf. I called Nathan and he told me that he might have gotten her mixed up with another cow and she might really be due in January. So we waited, and waited.

One day as we returned from taking our first pig to the butcher, (see One little piggy goes to market), I pulled the van and trailer into the barnyard to unhook it. Olivia yelled, "OlÂ’ Pine got into DillyÂ’s pasture!" I knew I had locked him in the barn, but looking over at Dilly she was standing over a Jersey calf and licking it. The whole van broke into a chorus of "She had her calf!!" Before I could bring the van to a full stop everyone was unbuckling as fast as they could to get out and see this wonderful new addition.

Everyone piled out, myself included, and ran to the fence. Where just that morning there was a stubborn and snobbish cow, now stood a loving mother, licking her new born who was lying on the grass. We just sat there and watched and smiled at each other for a while and then I entered the gate. I didnÂ’t know how Dilly would react to me being near her calf so I went slowly and gently. As I came to it and knealed down, she stopped licking it and looked at me with a very proud look on her face. Laying there on the grass was the most beautiful calf I had ever seen. It was a solid beige color from one end to the other and had perfect features. I lifted one leg and saw where one day an udder would be. "ItÂ’s a heifer!", I told Kim. "SheÂ’s a beautiful blessing from the Lord", she responded.

Nathan had told us that once she calved we would have to remove the calf from her and bottle feed her, or else she would be just as stubborn as her mom. Also because the calf would take too much milk and not leave any for us. We thought this was a shame but we put the calf in the barn the first night.

Dilly mooed and mooed at the barn the entire night. Once in a while the calf would moo back and Dilly would moo louder and longer with a desperate tone in her voice. The whole family was getting torn up listening to it. The next day OlÂ’ Pine joined in out of sympathy, or because he smelled fresh milk, and we had a chorus of three sad Jersey cows. I went out with some grain and attempted my first milking of Dilly. Not a successful attempt. She was so heartsick that she would have none of it. I had read that the calf needs the colostrum of the first few days so we decided to trust the Lord and put the calf back with her. You never saw such a joyous reuniting as that one. We watched as the calf fed from DillyÂ’s udder while OlÂ’ Pine stood and watched and cried at what he was missing.

After three days I went back out with my bucket of feed to the milking lean-to. Dilly would let me milk her until she lost sight of her calf, then she would promptly back up and stick her foot in the bucket, ruining all the milk. I learned to bring the calf over to the lean-to and keep her there so Dilly would stay still. We wanted a name for the calf that went with Dilly, so we named her Dumpling. For the next couple of months Dilly, Dumpling and I went through the milking ritual twice a day. How much milk we really ever used I donÂ’t remember, but it wasnÂ’t much. Between milking by hand, lack of experience and Dumpling getting her share, it was more an exercise in fun than utility. Most of the milk went to feed our other animals which they devoured quickly.

Sometimes good things come to an end. By February of 2000 our lease on the farm had expired and the owners were making changes to it that we could not agree to. After some struggling over what to do we ended up selling off all of the cows and chickens and moved back closer to town. Kim was going to have our fifth child as well, so being closer to a hospital was not such a bad thing. Now we were full fledged homesteaders who were living on, of all things, a golf-course and back in the subdivision life. However, we knew that one day we would be back on a farm of our own; which we are now. Now we have six children and another on the way, and all of us on our very own land with pasture, creeks and woods. We donÂ’t look back on our first homestead experience with sadness but with gladness that the Lord was preparing us for where we are now. The LordÂ’s timing is, indeed, always perfect.

The day came when NathanÂ’s truck pulled up in our driveway pulling a livestock trailer. Everyone in the house came outside to see our new addition. Inside the trailer was #706, plus a small bull calf. Nathan said the bull calf was three days old and he thought the children would enjoy raising one from a bottle. We thought that was a really nice gesture. Nathan was out of his work clothes and looked more like a neatly dressed cattle-man than a dairy farmer. You could tell that this 100 mile trip was a big deal for him too. He even brought a lady friend with him (Nathan was a single parent).

He unloaded our cow and I noticed she had a halter on her. "IÂ’ve been halter breaking her for ya", he said. "What does that mean?" I asked. He explained that commercial JerseyÂ’s were a little stubborn, and they donÂ’t really trust people. During the weeks after we had last seen him he had been paying special attention to her when she came in for milking, even putting a halter on her and leading her around so that she could get used to it. I told him how we appreciated that, but at the time I didnÂ’t realize how much it really meant. He tied her halter to a twenty-foot lead and then tied the end to the fence. "Let her graze one area each day" he said, "then untie the rope from the fence and quickly move to another area and tie it up again, before she realizes that sheÂ’s free". "Hmm" I thought, "He makes it sound like she has a will of her own".

JerseyÂ’s are small, good mothers, and have the highest butterfat ratio of any dairy cow, thatÂ’s their good points. The bad thing is that unless you raise them from a bottle, itÂ’s very much like owning a mule with an udder. I naively thought that a cow would pretty much do anything for a few grains of oats and corn, especially if she had a lead on her. As Nathan was leaving, he stressed the fact that I shouldnÂ’t let her graze on her own for at least six weeks. I thought that was a little extreme, but agreed. He also told me to work with her as much as possible, leading her around, "But keep her tied to the fence". I said o.k.

We got her grain and her shelter and everything prepared and now we were just waiting on the day for her to calve and freshen. One day I decided to go into her pasture and walk her around a bit so that she could get used to me. As I got close to her she would wait and then jump away a few feet. I remembered that Dirk Van Loon talked about ‘flight distance’, which is basically just a cow’s comfort zone. I was a little put out that my very own milk cow thought I was violating her personal space. When she got to the end of the rope I took it in one hand and petted her. Kim was standing by watching. I tried to lead her around but she would have none of it. Every time I pulled the rope, she would back away from me and dip her head as if to try and get loose of the halter.

I told Kim I should take the rope loose from the fence so that she couldnÂ’t use the tension of it to try and break free of the halter. Kim said "I donÂ’t think thatÂ’s a good idea, Nathan said to keep her tied up". "But he also said I needed to walk her, which sheÂ’s not letting me do" I said. "IÂ’ll just take it loose for a while and stay close to the fence in case she starts to walk away. Kim repeated that she didnÂ’t think it was a good idea, but I began to untie the rope anyway. After I had it loose I walked over to the cow and began to pet her, "See, thatÂ’s not so bad" I said. Kim said that if she got loose we might not be able to corral her again, so I wrapped the rope several times around one hand and gripped it tightly. Bad idea.

I took the rope and began to walk her slowly. Both Kim and I were smiling at the progress being made. After about a minute of this, I went to stop her; she didnÂ’t want to stop. I pulled the rope tight and said "woah!" This was her cue. She bolted like a calf in a roping contest across the pasture, with me hanging on by the hand that was now wrapped tightly in the rope. I was being dragged along the ground at what felt like about 40mph, hitting every bump and ant mound along the way. Kim was yelling "Let go of the rope! Let go of the rope!" I was thinking what a great idea that would be if it were only possible. About half way across the pasture I hit an old stump in the ground that caused me to go limp, just long enough for the rope to slip off my hand and I came to a stop, face down in the cool grass.

I could hear Kim scrambling with the gate latch to come see if I was okay. I stood up; it hurt everywhere. As she walked over to me she was smiling and looking to see if I was actually hurt. She looked me over and then said, "I didnÂ’t think that was a good idea". Mike was standing on the fence yelling, "That was neat Daddy, do that again!"

We looked over at #706, who was grazing and looking at us. The long lead trailed along the ground from her halter. She was eyeing us with a look that said, "Now maybe youÂ’ll treat me with a little more respect". She was right.

After a little coaxing and a lot of corn I got her tied to the fence again. We decided she needed a name so we set the children to thinking of a fitting one. Their favorite story at the time was Anne of Green Gables, and they remembered that Anne had a Jersey cow but no-one could think of her name. Our daughter Olivia remembered that Anne wanted to call herself Cordelia, and we all thought that was great cow name. We nick-named her Dilly, which to me sounded like a very jovial name for one cow so bent on having her own way.

I got used to going out twice a day with a bucket of grain and walking over to where Dilly was and holding it while she ate. Of course this was after much dancing around while she got over her problem with me being too close for comfort. I would pet her while she ate and talk to her gently. She really was a pretty cow. She had a coat that went from medium brown to almost black in places, especially on her face. At the top of her head between her ears there was a patch of reddish-orange fur that stuck up in a hair-do of sorts, complete with curls. Standing there next to this relatively large animal and considering that she is able to feed herself and at the same time provide milk for a calf, and for our family, gave you a real sense of the plan that God has for this earth and for his people; if we would just do his will and take dominion over it. After a couple of weeks of this it seemed that we were really making progress. I was now able to untie her rope and lead her to another spot on the fence where there was fresh grass. She seemed to have settled into her new home and was enjoying it as much as we were.

One day I walked out to where Dilly was; or was the last time I left her. The rope was there, tied to the fence, and as I followed the rope along the ground, there at the end of if was the halter, laying on the ground. I looked over and there was Dilly, at the other end of the pasture, grazing and staring at me with a very prideful look on her face. I had a mixture of anxiety and anger as I watched her looking at me, almost daring me to try and come catch her. I figured out that this was going to be a battle of wills from now on, until she realized how good she had it here. Then I got an idea.

I shook the grain in the bucket in my hand. She immediatley raised her head and her ears popped up like little radar recievers. She took a few steps towards me. I went through the gate and laid the bucket on the ground. "Dillllly" I called to her. She came prancing over and stopped short by about ten feet. I backed up and she came over and started eating from the bucket. The problem was that to get the halter on her, it had to go around her mouth and up over her head, something that seemed completely impossible to do while she was eating. I finally laid the ring of the halter around the lid of the bucket, when she stuck her head in the bucket, she was already half-way in the halter and I reached down and quickly pulled it the rest of the way over her head.

She quickly lifted her head up and looked at me, all the while chewing a mouthful of grain. She then backed up slowly until the rope was taught, where she then drooped her head and ‘pop’ the halter came off. She then walked back to the bucket and continued to eat. It was if she was saying, ‘Oh, you want to see how easy it is to get out of it?, just watch. I reached over and petted her; she didn’t flinch. I reached under and felt her udder, mimicking what it would take to milk her; again she just kept eating. I figured this was a fair trade, I don’t make her wear the halter and she’ll let me milk her (provided there is grain involved). I let it go at that and put the halter in the barn for good.

In August of 1999 and we had only four months to prepare for Y2K. Probably the one thing that we wanted most for our homestead, even more than pigs, was a milk cow. I had read Dirk Van LoonÂ’s "The Family Cow", and felt that we were now ready to take the plunge. We knew we wanted a Jersey, and so I began looking on the internet for a breeder. The price that the breeders wanted was cost-prohibitive, so I began calling dairy farms looking for cull-cows. I finally found a gentleman about 100 miles from us who said that we could come over and look at what he had. The manÂ’s name was Nathan, and he said that he might have something that would suit us.

This was a joyous day; taking a day off of work to ride through the countryside in search of a family milk cow. We had never been to a real dairy farm before, and the children were all very excited. We arrived at a small white barn, with a line of cows forming outside of the door. Inside there was a room about twenty five feet wide and forty feet long. The walls were painted white and the floor was all concrete. In the middle of the floor was a concrete pit about three feet deep than ran the length of the room. On both sides of the pit, at floor level, there was a row of stanchions and milking machines, six on each side.

Standing in the pit were three men who were hooking and un-hooking milkers from the cows. Big clear glass globes with DeLaval marked on them hung at each station, and frothy white milk was pulsing into them at intervals. The noise was great, but the cows didnÂ’t seem to mind. Each one was calmly standing in her row, leisurely munching on grain from a bin that was in front of her at mouth level. The bins were fed from an overhead auger that dumped it into a container above the cows head. By pulling a string attached to the container, grain would dump into the bin. The cows had figured this out, and once the grain was all gone each one would curl its big red tongue around the string and pull, dumping more grain into the bin.

Kim and I and our (four children at the time) stood and watched this for a while, it was a very interesting sight. Finally one of the men walked out of the pit and came over to us. "You the one I talked to about wantinÂ’ to buy a cow?", he said. "Yes, thatÂ’s me, are you Nathan?" "Yep", he said. Nathan is a country man, about 5 foot nine, and is usually wearing overalls that somehow are uniquely shaped to account for his extra large middle section. He usually looks like he just woke up.

His father had started the dairy decades before on a different piece of land to the south. Nathan told us about how their land had been perfectly suited for dairy farming and all of the investment that his Dad had made in the property. Then came the interstate. One day they told his Dad that I-75 would cut directly through their farm. He protested, but was unable to sway the government to change their plans. Un-yielding, he forced them to come up with a way to accomodate both. The highway department built a large culvert to run the cows under the interstate from one side of the farm to the other. For several years they struggled with the loss of pasture, combined with cows finding their way onto the interstate and getting killed and causing accidents. They finally sold the farm and bought another smaller piece of land where they currently lived, but I got the impression that things had never been the same. Nathan and his two brothers now ran the dairy.

We walked outside. "You ready?", he said. He walked over to an old extended-cab pickup truck. "Um, okay", I said. We all piled in and he cranked it up. The truck was loud, smoky and dirty. We drove up the road a short way and then turned and went through a pasture gate. As we bumped through pastures full of cows, Nathan would point at some and say things. But between the noise of the truck, NathanÂ’s thick southern accent, and him honking the horn and yelling for cows to get out of his way, we didnÂ’t understand a lot of what he said. We just kind of sat there and grinned, and as Nathan would point at a cow, Kim said things like, "Oh, sheÂ’s pretty". The children were in the back seat laughing and bouncing off of the ceiling, literally.

We finally stopped and he pointed at a cow and started talking. After I had said "Huh?" for about the third time, he shut off the engine and all was quiet. "Now that one right there might do", he said. "Why is that?", I asked. He told us about how she had tried to jump a fence a while back and caught her udder. As a result she now only had three of her four quarters working. I should have picked up on the phrase "tried to jump a fence" as a bad sign, but we were in milk-cow-mode and our senses were deadened. "And", he said, "SheÂ’s due to calve in December". That settled it. "How much?", I asked. "Ummm...", Nathan thought about it for a second. "Let me think about it a while", he said. He then started the truck again and we went bouncing off across more pastures.

He showed us the calf-barn, which I know he really did for the children, and several other aspects of the farm and then we returned to the milk barn. His brothers were grumbling at him from a distance about how there was still work to do as he pretended not to hear them. As we were standing there a woman drove up in a car and got out. "Do you ever sell cows?", she asked. "Um, yeh", he replied. She was there for the same reason we were, to get a milk cow in preparation for Y2K. I could see the wheels in NathanÂ’s head starting to turn as he suddenly saw himself in a unique position. "Well, I may have to start advertisinÂ’", he laughed. "How much?", I asked him again, before he started a bidding war on my cow. He hesitated, weighing the situation, and then gave me a price. We agreed and shook hands. On the check to Nathan I wrote #706, the ear-tag number of our cow, to make sure that the lady who came after us didnÂ’t try to top our price on her. We agreed on a date for Nathan to deliver our cow to us and then we went on our way.

We got home and spent a few weeks re-enforcing fences and building a lean-to shelter for milking. There was a perfect small pasture near the house about an acre in size where we were going to put her. We had images in our minds of walking out to her pasture each morning and calling her. She would follow us over to her shelter where we would give her a nice bucket of oats. While she munched on her breakfast I would quickly fill a bucket full of fresh warm milk. From there I would take it to the kitchen and put it into a couple of gallon jugs for the refrigerator. Our family would enjoy fresh raw milk and cheese even if the world was shut down by Y2K. Yes, that was a good plan...

After helping Mr. Kendrick bale hay on the 14 acres near his house he asked if we were available in a couple of weeks to do some more, and we said sure. We got his call soon after and headed back to Pleasant Valley. He explained that the field we would be working in that day was down the road a piece on another tract of land that he owned which was a little bigger than the one before. We followed him a couple of miles to the base of the mountain where the scenery opens up into a beautiful valley of green pastures, lined with white fences that seem to go on forever. On one side of the road he owns a hay field about 120 acres in size, bordered by a lake and several small ponds. He had already cut the field on one side, and the greenish-brown carpet of hay stretched out for over a half a mile.

I have spent the last 22 years working in a florescent-lit office building, staring into a computer screen. Reality becomes whatever you are used to, and reality for me had become what most people believe it to be; the selling of intangeble objects and services and the accumulation of wealth, in order to buy things that you don’t really need, on credit. Not to quote secular music, but there was a song that said, ‘...and it’s true we are immune, when fact is fiction and TV a reality’. It took years of having the Lord convict us, (mainly through having children and seeing the world through their eyes), that what we consider reality is anything but. If anyone wants to understand the lunacy of the work-day world, then spend one day on a tractor, in a field, under an immense blue sky, watching shadows of clouds move slowly along the ground while immersed in the sweet smell of freshly cut hay. It never ceases to amaze me that Mr. Kendrick actually makes a living at this, along with his heard of Angus cows.

This is all he has ever done, just as his father before him. Sometimes he will ask me questions about the business world and my answers will usually leave him with a puzzled look on his face. I have decided that this is a good thing. People shouldnÂ’t have to understand things that have no relevance to GodÂ’s kingdom. Our first few times baling hay were carefully coordinated around my schedule at work. Unfortunatley this left Mr. Kendrick going it alone sometimes because his schedule is determined by such high-tech variables as the sun, wind and rain. At some point I decided that I needed the reality of hay baling more than the un-reality of the workplace and so I began to help whenever necessary and I would use vacation days, paid-days-off, whatever.

There are a lot of comparisons between the work-place and home-schooling. Public school is an institution that takes creative individuals and sequesters them all day long in a building, doing mundane work, in an effort to create a workforce for corporations. Those corporations then take them and sequester them all day long in a building, doing mundane work, for the rest of their lives. Of course unlike schools, corporations keep people employed with the understanding that if they work long enough and hard enough, that one day they can manage more and more of the mundane workforce.

When I used to ride to elementary school I would notice all of the activity going on around me, unrelated to school. Men coming and going in trucks; store owners opening their businesses for the day; firemen standing out in front of the station, a whole world that existed outside of the classroom. In the classrooms there were huge windows all along one wall, but the venetian blinds were always kept tightly closed. The teachers said it was because we would spend all of our time looking out the window and not paying attention. Looking back I can see that not only was that true, but also very understandable as well. The best desk in a classroom was by a window, and sometimes you could sneak your pencil between the blinds and watch the world go by.

Watching an interesting sight from a window was a far more educational experience than anything going on in the classroom, yet there I would sit, hour after hour, day after day, and for what? To take 6 months to learn how to do addition and subtraction when my mother could have taught me at home in a week. To take a year studying how to breakdown a sentence into a subject and a predicate, identifying nouns and pronouns and a hundred things that have absolutely no relevance outside of a classroom, ever. The same goes for the workplace. I sit hour after hour, day after day, helping banks figure out how to reach into a consumers pocket and take their last dime without them noticing it, while all the time they smile and say, ‘the customer is our top priority’. You bet they are, there’s one born every minute.

The bottom line is that the classroom has become just another form of daycare, so that both parents can serve a corporate master without the burden of childcare. The workplace is servitude, the more you work the more money you make and the more money you make, the more debt you accumulate. The more debt you accumulate, the more you need your job, and so the more you work, and so on. Debt and the credit industry drive our economy. Personal debt has grown so large that credit institutions are scrambling for ways to tap the last sources of cash in the American familyÂ’s budget, and to insure that they maintain a steady stream of new business, the top market for new credit today is the 18-year-old.

A few years ago I sat in a meeting with executives from a national furniture store chain that had been in business for decades. We ran their credit accounts and they had asked us to come and help them figure out how to squeeze more money out of their existing customers and how to find new ones as well. During the course of the conversation one of the execs stated that they were considering changing the ‘front room sales model’. I asked what he meant. He said, "Furniture; that’s what draws people into the store, but the real sale is in convincing that customer to finance his purchase, whether it’s $100 or 10,000". "We don’t sell furniture, we sell credit". "Furniture has become a losing proposition, but credit never is".

I could see the founder of the company turning over in his grave. No doubt he saw furniture as an art-form, and now decades later it had become a prop, a convertible commodity whose only purpose was to lure customers into the store like a carnival barker, with the real purpose of turning a sale into new debt. I was dumbfounded, I was about to comment on the fact that they would have to change the name of the store, after all you can’t call yourself XYZ Furniture if your showroom is full of vacuum cleaners. Think about how many times are you about to pay for something in cash when the sales clerk says ‘Would you like to put this on your ABC credit card?’ Or, If you apply for a Mega-mart card today you can get 10% off on your purchase! Yes, and pay 25% in interest on it for the next 3 years while you try and pay it off.

These experiences are the type of things that have convinced me that there is a world that exists outside of the classroom and outside of the workplace; in other words; the real world. To me there are three alternatives; homesteading, or entrepreneurialism, or a combination of both. Homestead, to me, means grow your own food, raise your own animals, teach your own children and leave me alone to enjoy GodÂ’s creation. ThereÂ’s a lot to be said for this type of lifestyle, unfortunately you can never fully escape from society, or especially, the government.

Then there's entrepreneurialism, and by this I mean serving others (not a corporation) and supporting your family at the same time. This is freedom in its truest sense, the freedom to create and sell things, to make your own hours and set your own prices. You have the freedom to include your family in your business and use it to keep them from wanting to leave home and go elsewhere to find happiness. ItÂ’s also the freedom to use a business as a way to minister to others, about things of the Lord and about the traps of a corporation lifestyle.  Our goal is to always have some type of agricultural enterprise going on, and we know many others who feel the same way.  This is why stopping things like NAIS is so important.

Mr. Kendrick is an entreprenuer, he makes and sells cows and hay. Whether he knows it or not he sets an example for others who find themselves owing their soul to the company store. There is a life that exists outside of the conference room and the cubicle, sometimes it just takes walking over to the window and peeking through the blinds to see it.

For most people seeing a tractor at work in a field is something that happens while you are on vacation, or in the rare instance (these days) when the family is out for a drive in the country. I always wondered what it would be like to make a living from the seat of a tractor, rolling through an immense field, keeping your path straight by concentrating on a large oak tree that is a mile in front of you. When I got my first camera at the age of 18, Kim and I would peruse the countryside looking for a taste of real farm life. I would take pictures of tractors and farm buildings, and Kim would take pictures of cows; lots and lots of cows. When my Grandmother died in 1986 she left me over 500 Kodachrome slides that my Grandfather had taken back in the 1950Â’s. Many of them were taken while my Grandparents took trips through the countryside. To my great satisfaction I discovered that, in true family style, many were of tractors, farm buildings, and yes many were of cows.

For years we had looked for land. One of the real estate agents that helped us from time to time was Richard, a fellow home-schooler with 10 children. Richard lives in the northern part of our county, a beautiful area known as Pleasant Valley that lies between two mountains. We called Richard one day and told him what we were looking for. He said that there was nothing listed at the time but asked if he could call us back; of course we said sure. Later that night he called and said that the house next door to him was for sale, although not on the market. He explained that it was owned by a gentleman from Atlanta that used it as a hunting cabin during open season. His wife was ill and Richard had called him to see if he was interested in selling, and heÂ’d said yes. His name was Mr. Powers.

We went and looked at the house the next day. Although nearly an hour from town and far from perfect it did provide a unique starting place for a small farm. It came with seven acres, and seven additional acres adjacent to it were also for sale. The additional seven acres were owned by a gentleman named Mr. Kendrick who lived across the street. Come to find out, Mr. Kendrick built the house that we were interested in, for him and his wife back in the 1960Â’s. It was part of his parentsÂ’ land of nearly 1000 acres at the time. Mr. Kendrick sold the house to Mr. Powers and moved back into his parentsÂ’ house (who were now deceased) across the street. We agreed on a price with Mr. Powers on the condition that our current house sell first.

For a nearly year and a half we tried to sell our house. Finally, along with Mr. Powers, we all agreed that the Lord must not be in it. Having to face the fact that we had no reason to go out to Pleasant Valley anymore was hard. While we were leaving one day we ran into Mr. Kendrick, and I told him that if he ever needed anything to please let us know. He looked away for a minute and then said that he might need some help ‘puttin up some hay’ the following week. We quickly agreed and said to just let us know when and where and we would be there. Of course at this time our exposure to real farm life was limited and my exposure to heavy equipment was non-existent.

He called the next week and asked for us to meet him at Mr. Powers place the next day. I gladly agreed and asked him what he needed us to do with the hay. He said "Oh I just need some help rakinÂ’ it and gettinÂ’ it in the barn, that kind of thing". I imagined our family out in the field, everyone with a rake in hand, putting the hay into piles while Mr. Kendrick heaped it onto a truck and toted it to the barn. The next day we showed up at the field, and standing there was Mr. Kendrick with two tractors. One was a huge John Deere with what I knew to be a large round hay baler attached to it. The other was a smaller John Deere with an odd contraption attached to it that had giant round metal swirls on it. I started to sweat. We piled out of the car, while Mr. Kendrick walked up to us smiling as usual. "You ready"? He asked. "Um...yep" I said. I was lying. "Okay, I drive the baler, you drive the rake, got it?" I looked at the ground covered with freshly cut hay, all fourteen acres of it. How could I have thought that we were going to rake this by hand? I suddenly realized that love for the country life had gotten us in over our heads once again, and this time we were going to take Mr. Kendrick with us. I looked over at the assembled tractors and equipment, trying to estimate in my head how much they were worth, so I knew how much I would owe when I wrapped them around the first pine tree.

Mr. Kendrick said that he had to run down the street for a minute but he would be right back and we would get started. I grinned until he was out of sight, and then Kim and the children came over and started asking me how I was going to drive a tractor. Drive a tractor?, I said. What about raking hay with that thing? I ran over and got into the drivers seat. I found the keys and tried to find a gear shift diagram. I found a square of dirt that was higher than the other dirt and wiped my finger across it. Sure enough there lied an ancient shift sticker. I found neutral and started the engine. "Do you know what youÂ’re doing?", came a chorus of voices. "No" I said, "But I only have a few minutes to figure it out". I fiddled with several levers, all which seemed to do nothing. Finally I found one that began to raise and lower the hay rake; Kim and the children ran for cover. "Maybe you should just tell Mr. Kendrick that you donÂ’t know how", Kim said. I disagreed, humiliation would only make the situation worse. Just as I was just getting a feel for all of the mechanisms I saw Mr. Kendrick returning.

He pulled up, jumped out of his truck, asked our son Mike if he wanted to join him, and the two of them climbed into the cab of his tractor. He then gave me the high sign. I lowered the hay rake, found first gear, said a prayer and let out the clutch. It was like jumping onto a horse at full gallop; both of my feet flew up into the air as I started to fall over backwards, while all the time I was clinging to the steering wheel for dear life. I quickly looked back to see if Mr. Kendrick was watching. He was smiling and waving and pointing at the fence line next to me. We had started out directly along a barbed-wire fence line that was now precariously close to the tines of the hay rake. I could just imagine the rake and the fence getting tangled together and pieces of metal starting to fly everywhere.

I eased away from the fence. Looking back I could see the rake draw the hay into a neat row, where Mr. Kendrick’s baler was picking it up. Okay, I thought, at least I’m still moving. We drove around the fields for about 2 hours; every so often Mr. Kendrick would drive off and deposit a 1000 pound round bale in a neat line that he was making along one side of the pasture. It was a great experience actually. I finally felt like we weren’t playing ‘farm’ any more and now we were actually doing something. Of course we weren’t making money yet, but Mr. Kendrick was and that was good enough. We were finally able to do something for someone who had done a lot for us, and enjoying it immensely at the same time. The best part was that it was actually work. It was dusty, dirty, noisy and dangerous, and somehow that made the fact that it was so much fun not seem so self-indulgent.

When we finished the last row I pulled up near where Kim and the children were playing and turned off the tractor. Kim walked up to me, she was smiling from ear to ear because she knew I was trying not to. Just then Mr. Kendrick and Mike pulled up and stopped. Climbing out of the cab Mr. Kendrick was laughing out loud. "Boy thatÂ’s gotta be the funniest thing I believe IÂ’ve ever heard!" "WhatÂ’s that?" I asked. He explained that about half way through with the job he told Mike that he was glad that he had finally found someone that could rake hay good. "How longÂ’s your Daddy been rakinÂ’ hay?" he asked Mike. "Never", Mike said. "Huh?, Well then how long has he been driving tractors?" "My Dad has never driven a tractor before in his life", Mike answered. Mr. Kendrick said that his heart nearly stopped for a second or two there. "Man I about fell out, I even thought about stoppinÂ’ for a minute there, but then I figured, you were doing so good, why?"

While we were working I noticed that a car had pulled over to the side of the road across the street. This was odd because it is a narrow 2-lane road that does not have much of a shoulder and so any car parked along there would stand out. It was a shiny expensive looking car and I could see two people inside. After watching it for a while I made a pass close to the road to investigate. A man was reclining somewhat in the driver’s seat while a woman in the passenger seat was taking pictures. At first I wondered what they were taking pictures of, until I realized that it was us. What a strange feeling. For so long it had been us taking pictures of ‘real’ country scenes, and now we were the real country scene. I suddenly realized what a great picture it was; two tractors, moving in unison, a long stream of neatly rolled hay trailing the first one, only to disappear into the second one where a young red-headed boy sat and laughed with an older gentleman farmer, and all of this taking place in a lush green meadow of grass. We had advanced from being the artist, to being the subject.

Since 1999 we have now raised seven hogs. All have been purebred Landrace and all purchased from Mr. Floyd. Until yesterday we have been raising three that we bought back in September. The same things seem to happen with each set of pigs:

6 weeks old: Piggies are cute.

Driving to pick them up is a wonderful day, with the children anticipating seeing the piggies, and Mom and Dad anticipating a freezer full of pork in six months. ThereÂ’s the fun in picking them out of the pen, with the children running around and saying "Oh, Mommy and Daddy look how cute they are!". Then bringing them home and putting them in their new quarters, using all of the things that we have prepared for them for food, water and shelter, etc. For the first few weeks we sit and comment on how big they are getting, even though we havenÂ’t seen anything yet.

Pigs are of one of God’s unique creatures with a set of traits all of their own. You begin to realize how smart they are when they respond to individuals differently. Their ‘feeder’, (me), gets treated well during this time. When our children visit the pen, the pigs run and do spins for them, much to their delight. Our other animals are met with the pigs’ noses being pushed through the metal wire and sniffing loudly.

Something happens to a hog when he realizes that he is bigger and stronger than you are. They take the things that drive you up the wall and use them to their advantage. As their feeder, their treatment of me has gone from "Thank You, Thank You!", to "What took you so long?", and, "Oh and by the way hereÂ’s some crud from my nose that you can wear to work with you".

The metal wire panels containing them were a veritable fortress just a few weeks ago, but now they are a flimsy picket fence. They get their snouts up under them and lift them into the air, as if to say, "Hey, I could just walk out of here if I wanted to". By this time IÂ’m spending my Saturdays strengthening and reinforcing their enclosure, while the rest of the week IÂ’m praying that they donÂ’t get out. Then thereÂ’s the water.

Pigs love water, but they cannot and will not understand the direct connection between an empty water bucket and them dying of thirst. They are obsessed with spilling their water. This time around I spent $20 on a 13 gallon metal water bucket. I figured that full, it weighed over 150 pounds. Once they got to be about 175 lbs, I would find the bucket turned over each time I went to feed them. The mistake I made was scolding them about it; this gave them insight into driving me crazy. Soon I would find the bucket empty and stomped on, and so I would have to knock it back into round with a hammer.

In recent days this progressed to the water bucket being empty, stomped on, and dragged into their manure area for a nice coating that had to be removed as well. Last Saturday I dragged it out, washed it off, hammered it out and put it back into the pen and filled it with water. One of the hogs walked over, took a sip, and then put her snout under it and turned it over, where it rolled away. She just stood there and stared at me like, "What.., what are you looking at?" I said, "YouÂ’re going to the butcher on Tuesday, you know that?" Kim, who was watching all of this said, "Kevin, youÂ’re arguing with a pig". I didnÂ’t care, she got the message.

But seriously, years ago Kim and I listened to a tape by Garrison Keillor about his childhood memories of hog-killings. He talked about how somber all of the adults would get before the process started out of respect for this animal that was going to give it's life for their food. Keillor said that once when he threw a rock at the penned-up animal, he received the spanking of a lifetime for it. It's that kind of respect that we have tried to instill into our own children as well. Today most children, and most adults for that matter, have a disconnected view of where our food comes from. The pursuing of peace through personal affluence combined with media and entertainment have dulled our senses as a society about the realities of the world that we live in. What happened in New Orleans is living proof of that, not only was no-one prepared for the inevitability of a flood, but most sat and waited for the government to come and rescue them, and then were shocked when it didn't happen.

Yesterday we loaded up all three hogs, (which is always a thrill), and took them to a Mennonite community about an hour from our house. There is a Mennonite run butchery there that does a good job, and we gave them all of our wishes for the kind of cuts of meat that we wanted this time. In two weeks we should have over 450 pounds of pork, frozen and ready for the next Y2K, flu pandemic, or just barbecue for the coming year. Now we just need somewhere to put it.

The first time we ever took a pig to a processor, in January of 2000, it was nearly a disaster. I was completely unprepared for the strength and stubbornness of a 200 pound hog. I actually tied a horse lead around her neck and tried to drag her up a 4-foot ramp into an open trailer that only had 2 foot high sides. After about an hour of struggling and ear-deafening squealing I was seriously considering getting the gun. Finally with Kim pushing and me pulling I managed to drag the screaming block of granite up the ramp and into the trailer and we quickly locked her in. I tied off the horse lead to the front of the trailer, "just in case". We then headed to YorkÂ’s processing in Thomaston, about 30 miles away.

When we got on the road everything seemed fine until about five miles out, when we heard a car honking his horn behind us. In the rear view mirror I could see what he was honking about. Miss piggy had somehow gotten her hooves up on the top railing of the trailer, her huge ears were flapping in the wind. She was actually looking forward up the road like a dog in the back of a pickup truck. "Oh no", I thought, here weÂ’ve come all this way and the pig is going to jump out of the trailer. I had never seen either of our hogs climb up on anything before, no, she had saved this remarkable ability for the moment when I was most vulnerable; just like a pig. I had a vision of her leaping off the side, hitting the ground and being dragged by the lead at 50 miles per hour. The guy in the car behind us would be an animal rights advocate who would quickly have me arrested for animal cruelty. I would be in handcuffs in the County jail, where they would refer to me as "the guy with the pig".

I slowed down to a crawl and waited for Mr. PETA to pass our mini-van. He drove by, leaning over his console, looking at me and laughing his head off. I was humiliated, but relieved that I wasnÂ’t going to jail. I waited until he was out of sight and then swerved the van to one side; that brought her down off the rail. For the rest of the ride to Thomaston we went through this same ritual of her getting up on the rail, me swerving the trailer, and her hopping down again. I realized that as long as we kept moving, I could control her attempts to jump. Stop lights and stop signs, however, sparked her interest and she would quickly jump back to her perch where I was helpless to do anything about it. She would look down at the ground and hop on her hind legs, looking for a landing spot; where, I decided, she would become a permanent resident because there was no way I was getting her back on the trailer. No, we would just calmly drive away and take the long way home, explaining to the children that Daddy had changed his mind and decided to let the piggy go free.

About a mile from YorkÂ’s I was getting confident, that is until I noticed that the traffic up ahead had come to a stop. The Georgia State Patrol was conducting a random license and insurance check. "Oh no" I thought to myself again.

Waiting in line, I could feel sweat starting to bead on my forehead. The children were all facing backwards shouting "SheÂ’s up again!", "SheÂ’s down again!", "SheÂ’s up again!". This didnÂ’t help. After what seemed like a year, the patrolman finally got to us. I gave him my license and insurance card and figured this would take just a few seconds. Instead he said, "Just a minute" and started walking towards the back of the van. He walked, looking down, to the rear of the trailer and checked the license plate. When he turned around he stopped cold and his eyes were fixed on the pig which was now leisurely lounging on her side; the big blue leash tied around her neck like a favorite pet. He very slowly walked along the side of the trailer back towards me staring at the pig the whole time. When he got back he said "Where are you folks headed?" with a mixture of humor and disbelief. "To YorkÂ’s Processing" I said, with a mixture of panic and embarrassment. "Well you passed the turn about a half a mile back". "Turn around over there, go back, and it will be on your right". "Thanks" I said.

Since both lanes of traffic were stopped, the troopers started blowing their whistles and waving their arms to allow the mini-van-full-of-children pulling the hog-on-a-leash-trailer to do a 180 in the middle of the road. As we were finally pulling away in the right direction, all of the troopers were laughing and waving goodbye, we had obviously provided some comic relief to their day. Red-faced and nodding, trying to smile, we hurriedly got on our way.

We did finally get to YorkÂ’s. I tried for a few minutes to un-tie the lead from her neck, but then I just handed the other end to the guy helping me unload her. We had to get her off of the trailer, down the ramp and into a catch pen. The horrific time I had getting her onto the trailer that morning was fresh on my mind and I was dreading a repeat performance. "This isnÂ’t going to be easy" I said. He looked at the pig and said, "Come on!!". She quickly sat up and he walked her off the trailer like a trained poodle. I guess I never asked her nicely.

A continuation of previous blogs...

We got our piglets home and into the pen. The problem now was what to feed them. We did what most people would do in that situation; we went to a local feed store and bought a bag of pig chow. Kim and I had heard of all of the nasty things that happen on a commercial hog farm like feeding pigs hormones, anti-biotics and animal bi-products, not to mention forcing them to live in cramped, polluted quarters. After I had fed them a few times I finally read the ingredients on the bag. The first ingredient listed was Bacitracin, which I knew was a topical antibiotic for humans. The rest of the ingredients read like a TwinkieÂ’s bar.

I called around on Monday and could only find one local feed store that sold un-medicated hog feed. They mixed it themselves and it was relatively cheap, so that was that. Watching them eat it, I noticed that it seemed pretty dry and would get up their snouts, making them sneeze and cough. I told Kim that the ‘book’ says that pigs love milk, so wouldn’t it be great to find a supply of milk to add to their feed. I started the next day by going to a major supermarket in town. I spoke to the dairy manager and asked him what they do with expired milk. He said that long before it expires they pour it down the drain, several gallons every day.

I asked if I could come by sometimes and get a few gallons before they threw it out. He asked what I needed it for. When I told him I was raising hogs I got the usual raised eyebrows, followed by the, but why? look. "Nope", he said, "CanÂ’t do that". I asked him why not. He said that if I got sick from drinking it, the store could get sued. "But IÂ’m not going to drink it", I said, "the pigs are". "How do I know that?", he asked, "Because I just told you", I said. Obviously in the world of food regulations my word wasnÂ’t good enough. I tried again to reason with him, but to no avail.

It was the same story at every store I went to. Finally, almost as an after thought, I stopped at our local family owned grocery store. Here the manager was interested in my endeavor and we talked for a while about it. He told me about how his father had raised hogs when he was young too. He agreed to give me whatever day-old milk they had on hand whenever I stopped in, and wished me luck. After that I had an endless supply of milk to go with my all-natural feed. Our two pigs got a gallon at each feeding, which they devoured; like pigs.

This went on for a couple of weeks. Owning livestock was a new experience for us and was not at all like I expected. It was somewhere between having pets and children. You feel obligated to check on their well being far more often than a pet, I mean after all youÂ’re going to eat them. Whenever we would come back home we would drive the van through the pasture back to the pig pen to check on them. They would always run scared to the back of the pen, then once they recognized us they would come galloping up towards us, their ears flapping over their eyes as they ran.

One night we came home late. I drove to the back of the pasture and pointed the headlights into the pen; no pigs. Kim and I got out with a flashlight; we climbed over the hog-wire and started looking around. There was no sight of them until we got to the very back, where the pen started to slope downhill. Here we found them both dead. It was a tragic sight, something or some-things had clawed them completely from head to hoof, they had even ripped the tough skin open in several places. We stood there looking at them for a minute trying to make sense of what had happened. I figured it had to be wild dogs, because coyotes would have at least made a meal of them

We now had our second big failure as self-sufficient homesteaders. If it had not been for the impending Y2K question we might have given up. Instead we spent all day on Saturday raising and re-enforcing the hog wire fence, doubling its height in the process. This was something that we wanted very badly, something that we felt like we were being led to do. On Sunday we drove back to Mr. FloydÂ’s.

So now we had two more piggies, encased in a virtual fortress of hog and barbed-wire. Up to this point we had discouraged our dogs from hanging around the pen, we weren’t sure if they posed a danger to the pigs or not. Now, however, we would bring them with us whenever we went back there in the hope that they might ‘patrol’ that area of our land while we were away from home. The extra-high fencing would also keep them at bay if their tastes ever turned to pork. One morning before work as I was walking the feed bucket back to the hogs. Abbie, our German Shepherd, went with me. While I was feeding the pigs, Abbie began to lower her head slowly and she got very stiff. She then started a long low growl that made the hair on the back of my neck stand up. She was staring into the woods beyond the pen. When I looked in that direction all I could see were trees. But then I could barely make out two white figures on all fours standing perfectly still, looking at us from about 75 yards away. I could see that they were two neighborhood pit-bulls, who had obviously been sneaking up to the pen when they heard us coming. I told Abbie to go get them and she took off running, growling and barking. The pit-bulls took off and thankfully we never saw them again.

Mr. Floyd had told us to make sure we wormed the pigs after a few days. Of course we said o.k. not knowing exactly what he was talking about. After it looked like our newest ones would live we called the vet again. He arranged for us to come by and pick up a couple of syringes. He noted that these were sub-cutaneous wormers, where you needed to pull up a flap of skin and inject it, avoiding any muscle. It just so happened that the day we were going to worm the pigs, Kim’s brother David showed up at the house. I was kind of surprised, especially since it had only been a few weeks since the ‘pig incident’. As he walked into the house he looked at me and said ‘Killed any pigs today?" I just smiled and said, "The day’s not over yet", and what follows is the second reason of two that David does not come to our house much any more.

I told him he was just in time to help me worm the pigs. "No way", he said. I explained that these were just two little 30 pound piggies in a relatively small pen. All we had to do was hold them down and inject them with the medicine; he could take one and I would take the other. After a while of arguing he finally relented and agreed to help. We went back to the pen and David and I climbed in. It did seem like a much less intimidating task than the prior fiasco in Alabama. That is until we tried to catch one.

Pigs are fast. David and I spent about five minutes just trying to get close to our individual pigs. They would wait until you were about three feet from them and then burst away in trail of dust. The feeling began to get all too familiar. "Alright", he said, "IÂ’m not doing this again". We agreed to focus on one pig at a time; we would both catch it and I would hold it while David injected it. Even this took several minutes of chasing and squealing, until finally David had one blocked from the front while I snuck up from behind. I leapt onto the piggyÂ’s back and then held on for dear life.

It was like jumping onto a small rodeo bull. ItÂ’s amazing the strength of an animal that small. I was shaking and rocking; the pig was squealing for itÂ’s life and David was standing there enjoying it all. "Come on, Come on!", I yelled. David laughed and got down on his knees next to the little pink hog and I. "Quit moving, I canÂ’t stick it if youÂ’re moving!", he said. "Quit moving!?, Are you kidding!?" I struggled to hold onto the pig, his thorny little hairs made It feel like hugging a porcupine. David was having trouble pulling out the skin while trying to inject it at the same time. I had a good grip, so I pulled out some skin for him. "There, go go!", I said. David pushed in the plunger and we were done, I jumped up and Mrs. Piggy ran to a far corner.

"YouÂ’re right, this is easier than running a pig down dead", he said with a smile. I took a few minutes to catch my breath. Kim gave me the other syringe and we started trapping the second one. Of course this was going to be much harder since she had already seen what had happened to her sister. After about five minutes, David was standing behind a tree while I ran her by. He jumped on her back and the pig went crazy. He didnÂ’t think it was nearly as funny as when I was holding my pig down. "Go, Go!", he shouted. I had the same problem of trying to get a piece of skin, the pig was so tense that its skin became as hard as steel. "I canÂ’t get any", I said. David was being thrashed about, the pig was screaming a long ear-piercing screech and I was fumbling for just a little piece of skin.

David finally pulled out a piece for me and I quickly jabbed it and pushed the plunger down when suddenly the needle bounced off. I quickly stuck it in again and pushed it the rest of the way. Another scream rang out, but this time it wasn’t coming from the pig, but from David. "Ow!! That was me!!", he yelled, as he sat up and the pig ran off. "Uh oh", I heard Kim say from outside the pen. David was holding his hand and looking at me with a half-crazed grin that said "You did that on purpose". I realized that the first ‘stick’ of the pig was actually a stick of the brother-in-law. I asked him if he was okay, but he just climbed out of the pen and started walking towards the house. Kim was checking his hand and wondering out loud if pig-wormer could be dangerous to humans.

Again Kim called the vet. I could just see his assistant telling him those crazy pig-people were on the phone again. He assured us that there was no danger to humans. Even David agreed that there was some consolation in knowing that he would be worm-free. We see him mostly at family gatherings now, and though he still does all of our heating and air work, he prefers to come over when he knows we wonÂ’t be home.

By September of 1999 I had been working for 15 years as a systems analyst; commuting each day, dealing with clients all over the country, and problem solving technical issues. The company I work for is like most others, people talk about their lives, their wives, their children and their possessions. People will help each other with problems like how to find the right doctor, which neighborhoods have the newest houses, and where you buy the most high-tech TV.

After our previous ‘pig incident’ (see blog on "One Pig Mistake"), it would have been easy to give up. However, because of the looming Y2K issue and the fact they we had been blessed with 40 acres in which to practice not only farming but self-sufficiency, we decided to press on with our quest for pigs.

But where do you buy pigs? This is not a question that you ask at work. The small family farm is dead, and good riddance for most people. Farms are smelly, hard to work and obsolete. Oh, many people will get misty eyed as they describe their youth growing up on a farm or going to their grandparents farm; but those same people are repulsed by the thought of living and working on one themselves. Somehow, being a slave to a corporate master is deemed as respectful and secure, while working your own land is just the opposite.

It was around this time that some friends told us about the Market Bulletin. Twice a month the Georgia Department of Agriculture puts out a newspaper that consists of hundreds of classified ads, all relating to different areas of farming. One section is Swine, and thatÂ’s where we found Mr. Floyd.

Mr. Floyd is a Georgia farmer who lives on a road named after him, so you know that he has been there a long time. Mr. Floyd is in his 70Â’s, but he still raises purebred Landrace hogs like he has since the early 1960Â’s. Today he is the only Landrace breeder in Georgia. With his son he also raises over 100 acres of wheat and corn to sell and to feed to his pigs. He is a tall thin man with white hair that is always topped by a John Deere ball-cap. When he talks to you he always stands straight upright with his thumbs hooked into the straps of his suspenders. When he smiles his face wrinkles up and his eyes just become squints. He is part of a disappearing group of people, the last generation of Southern small farmers that actually derived a living off of their land.

We have met many of these people over the years and most of them have the same attitude towards our interest in agriculture. TheyÂ’re happy that there are younger people who want to carry on this type of lifestyle, but they are convinced that there is no longer any way to make a living from a small farm. Mr. Floyd points to the fact that just a couple of years ago, it was costing more to feed a hog than they were worth at slaughter time. He does it because he has always done it. He will tell you that it is more trouble than it is worth, but I believe that he just canÂ’t see his life without Landrace hogs as a part of it.

The first time I met him he was in his car-port stirring a huge steaming pot of boiled peanuts. "You the folks that’s looking for pigs?", he asked. "Yes sir", I said. "Wail, I got a bunch of ‘em if you wanna take a look". How can you resist an offer like that. As we drove our van, he led us past an electric fence and down through a rolling pasture full of curious Angus cows. At the bottom was a grove of oak and pine trees with a bare red clay floor about an acre in size. Big, pink hogs were wandering around several pens, their ears neatly covering their eyes. In one pen was a huge sow laying on her side. Mr. Floyd called to her and she sat up. Instantly, about a dozen little pink creatures jumped to their feet and then froze, each of them looking out in a different direction. Of course the children went crazy.

"Male or Female?", he asked. "Excuse me?" I said. "Yall lookin’ for a male or female?" "We’d like two females if possible", I said. He climbed over the metal panel fence, where the little critters immediately scattered to all corners of the pen. We had stopped at Wal-Mart and picked up a cheap animal cage. Of course I had no idea what you put a piglet in for transportation, but I figured this would at least get them home. Mr. Floyd trapped a few in a corner and reached down and grabbed one by a hind leg. Her squealing and shaking was a flashback to the ‘pig incident’ that we had a few weeks earlier; I started wondering if we weren’t getting ourselves into another disaster.

"Where’s she goin?" , he asked. "Oh, right here", I ran over and opened the back of the van. Opening the cage door I asked him if he thought this was good enough. "Wail", he said, "I got one lady that just puts ‘em in her back seat on the floor board, so I guess that oughta do just fine". He handed me the piglet and while I stuffed it into the cage, I was imagining somebody driving down the road with two loose pigs running around the back seat of a car, rooting the upholstery and looking out the windows.

After the two piglets were safe in their cage we stood and talked to Mr. Floyd for a while. He talked about agriculture, government and the way things used to be. We talked about home schooling, small farms and the way things ought to be. Finally we shook hands and said Goodbye and were on our way. About 10 minutes into the 90 minute drive home the piggies were comfortable enough that they ‘used’ their new facilities. Ooo!! A chorus of small voices protested the smell of self-sufficiency.

In 1998 we were members of a great Baptist church in Georgia. We were living in a big house with a mini-van and the all of the comforts and nuisances of sub-division life. We had always talked about having a farm one day, or even just a lot of land, but we never really knew how or when we would get there. Y2K changed all of that. A group of people within the church, led by the pastor, was seeking a large tract of land to move onto in preparation for the potential effects of the millennium bug. We decided to have our family join the group.

We never did find land as a group, but most of us did end up finding and moving onto our own mini-farms by the summer of 1999. We sold our house and rented a house and 40 acres in Pine Mountain Valley. Except for the house, it was actually a beautiful place and was what remained of a 1930Â’s farm with pastures, a barn and a chicken coop. We spent lots of money buying books off the internet about small farms, pig raising, milk cows and more. We studied like it was a college course and actually became pretty knowledgeable, or so we thought, much like college students.

The old place had once been a hog farm and still had a pig-pen nestled in a hickory grove near the back of one pasture. The pen was about 50 feet long by 30 feet wide and still had an old hog-feeder and watering trough inside. We were set up to be in pork production if nothing else, we were just waiting for the right time to start.

The time came one hot afternoon while I was at work. Kim called me and told me that her niece knew a woman with several pigs that she wanted to get rid of for free. They were all pot-bellied pigs except for one huge Chester White sow. Amber (KimÂ’s niece) wanted a pot-bellied piglet and we could have the sow. They were located across the river in Alabama, and KimÂ’s brother David had agreed to come over and help me get the hog into his pickup truck and take her home for us. We met at the womanÂ’s farm around 6:00pm and the following series of events is one reason of two that David does not like to come to our house anymore.

Her hog pen was on a hillside, it was about 100 feet wide by 300 feet long with a muddy creek at the bottom and a catch-pen at the top. She supplied us with a cage to hold the sow, and so our plan was set; get the sow into the catch pen and close the door; open the other end of the pen, and into the cage she goes. Good plan. The problem is that with pigs you basically have one shot at making them do something they would not ordinarily do. After that they think you are out to murder them and they are going to get the attention of the world before they let you.

My one shot was ruined when I decided to get Amber her piglet first. The woman put out some food and all of the piggies came a runninÂ’. They were lined up nice and neat at the trough; I just stood behind them while Amber picked out her favorite. "Easy". I thought, just like picking out a kitten from a new litter. Not quite. Amber made her choice and I simply leaned over and picked the little black piggy up.

I thought someone had stepped on one of them by accident, but it was coming from the one that I held, a noise so loud and so shrill that it was like standing next to a broken steam whistle. When the other pigs heard it, it was like an air-raid siren that told them that they were all going to die. Pigs ran screaming at the speed of light in every direction, leaving me in a huge cloud of dust, holding the instigator. Our 7 year old son, Mike, who had climbed into the pen with me, ran to the fence, scaled it, and jumping over was shouting "Bail out!, Bail out!".

After the dust cleared I walked over to Amber and handed her the pig. In my dress clothes, covered in dirt and dust, with nary another pig in sight she just quietly said "Thanks Uncle Kevin".

David climbed into the pen and we began the task of trapping the sow. She and all of the other pigs had ended up at the bottom of the hill, trying to hide in 6 inches of mud. We figured all we had to do was run her back up the hill and come at her from each side, giving her no where to go but into the pen. We got her to the top of the hill easily enough, it was when she saw that her only option was to get into the catch pen that she decided this was not a good thing. I was confident that we were almost done, after all, where else could she go? If she tried to run between us I would just block her way, and David and I would push her back into the pen.

Hogs are funny creatures, pound for pound they are probably some of the strongest and most solidly built animals in the world. The funny thing is that they donÂ’t know it. They are totally driven by hunger and/or fear. Dirk Van Loon, who wrote a great book about pig raising, said "Nothing can totally contain a hog, they are kept in only by stupidity, so keep them stupid". Unfortunately, I had not yet read his book. Mrs. Sow indeed waited until the last second, then turned and headed into the 10 foot gap between David and I at full speed. I quickly jumped in front of her and knelt down with my arms out like a big stop sign.

Pigs canÂ’t read, nor have they ever seen a stop sign. When she hit me, it was like I had been hit by a car, she never even slowed down or swerved, just ran right over me like a freight train on a rail. After I staggered to my feet, David asked if I was alright while trying to keep from laughing. I replied yes, but I didnÂ’t mean it.

Now I was sweating and dirty. David and I walked back down to the bottom of the hill and started over. For the next 45 minutes we chased the pig up the hill, and she would run back down the hill, over and over again. The whole time we were doing this David was making comments like "You know they sell pork at the grocery store now." Finally, after an hour, I gave up, I told David that I was ready to go home. He looked at me, "No way, not after putting all of this energy into it, sheÂ’s slowing down so letÂ’s try it one more time". He was right; she was getting as tired and as hot as we were.

He found a piece of plywood and we came up with a new plan. There was a wooden chute that preceded the catch pen. We would run her into the chute and trap her with the plywood. I would jump into the chute with her and move her into the pen. Once again we chased her up the hill. Holding the plywood, David backed her into the chute with ease, and for the first time we were looking at each other and smiling. Finally each edge of the wood met the edges of the chute and we had her trapped. I scaled the fence and crawled along the top of the chute. I sat there looking down at her trying to think of the best approach. I jumped down into the chute, landing directly in front of her and shouted "HA!!" She immediately turned around and ran head long into the catch pen. I ran up behind her and closed the gate.

"Done!" we both yelled. Now all we had to do was get her into the cage. We had already positioned the cage, with the door of it open, in front of the catch pen. I scaled the fence of the pen and worked my way over to the front door. She was not a happy hog, she was grunting and squealing and shaking the pen with violence. From the top of the fence I opened the gate leading into our cage, and she just stood still. My last maneuver had worked so well I decided to use it again. Jumping into the pen behind her I shouted "HA!!" Like clockwork, she bolted directly into the wooden cage...where she immediatley crashed straight through the boards at the other end and was now running through the middle of the womanÂ’s front yard.

David and I looked at each other in horror. "IÂ’m going home, IÂ’ll see you later", he said. "Oh", I said, "This is bad, real bad". Kim and Amber were inside the house with the woman, so thankfully no-one knew that we had set her pig free but us. We now debated how long it would take to catch a hog that wasnÂ’t fenced in, while we stood, watching her grazing near the driveway. She moved from one area of the yard to another, rooting, eating and watching us with a careful eye. When she got near a small storage building she became interested in the open door. Just a few minutes before she wouldnÂ’t go through a doorway without extreme coaxing, but now she now entered this one on her own. I ran over and shut the door behind her. Looking in the windows we could see her devouring several days supply of hog feed. More importantly we could see that there was only the one door, one way in, one way out.

We brought the cage over. I quickly slipped into the room with her and found some nails and a hammer. We repaired and strengthened the cage and re-positioned it in front of the door. I went in and took some feed and tossed it into the cage. I then got behind her and (slowly and quietly this time) eased her out the door. She went into the cage after the feed and I shut the door behind her. David then went and got the truck and backed it up. He had a truck top on the back of his pickup which made it difficult to lift up the 250+ lbs of hog and cage and get it inside. We finally did, though, and shut the door to the truck top as well. This enclosure provided an extra measure of security in case she got out of her cage on the hour long drive home.

We got Kim and Amber, told the woman Thank You, and headed for home. Upon reaching the house, David drove back to our hog pen and backed up to it. We opened the truck top and then the cage door and coaxed her out. She hopped down, and into the pen, and then just kind of froze there. We watched her for a few moments, commenting on how she must be nervous in her new surroundings. David and I took the cage out and we all drove back to the house. I quickly prepared a bucket of water and walked alone back out to the pen. When I got there, I noticed that she was still standing in the same place, grunting slowly. "Hmmm", I thought as I poured the water, "weird". I filled the trough and she walked over to drink. She took a few sips, lifted her head and then dropped over, dead.

I just kind of stood there trying to think of what to do. I took the rest of the water and threw it on her, but with no effect. I walked back to the house. David was just ready to leave and Kim was thanking him for all of his hard work. She apologized for it having been such a hassle. "ThatÂ’s all right", he said, "At least you have your pig now". "Well", I said, entering the house, "Not really". "What do you mean"? David asked. "SheÂ’s, um, dead, I think", I said. "WHAT!?", he was not pleased. I told them both about what had happened out at the pen. David mumbled something about all of the sweat and dirt and running, all just to murder a pig.

Kim got on the phone and called our local large animal veterinarian. He explained that pigs do not have sweat glands. They only keep cool through wallowing in mud, and cannot run for very long without succumbing to heat stroke. He said that all of the running combined with the long drive home in a hot enclosure had gotten our Chester White just too hot. He finished by saying, "You know, there’s not many people that raise hogs around here anymore", with kind of a ‘and now you know why’ tone.

The next day Kim took the children to her parentsÂ’ house while I had the task of burying the hog. I had to load it onto a garden cart hooked to a riding lawn mower. Getting a 250 pound dead pig into a garden cart by yourself is something you have to experience to appreciate. Of course calling David for help was out of the question. I hauled the carcass way back into the woods along with a shovel. We were in a dry spell, and digging the trench in the hard red Georgia clay took over an hour. I finally dumped the hog into the hole and covered it up as best as I could.

Driving out of the woods, and looking at our empty pig pen, I was now convinced that if Y2K turned out as bad as people were predicting, with all of the farming skills I had now learned from hours of in-depth study;  we were probably going to starve.