Feral Hogs in Montgomery County?

Not feral, just some piggies we raised a couple of years ago

Or just one that jumped out of somebody's pig pen up in the Town of Glen? (Doesn't matter too much, because that is one of the ways populations of the nefarious things get started.)

Anyhow, Alan saw a loose pig yesterday, rooting around in the field of a farmer we know up there, not somebody that has pigs as far as we know, certainly not inside any kind of fence...

If you are missing a white pig with spots and a lot of hair, give us a call...we are in the phone book...and he can tell you just where he saw it.

Meanwhile, we are hoping that it isn't a symptom of a population of them getting started up here. They are already a problem in Pennsylvania and the NY Southern Tier.

They are bad, bad, bad I'll tell you. They ruin crops, kill birds, eat pets, carry a whole laundry list of livestock diseases and do all sorts of other nefarious damage. One of the kids' college friends got a good paying, full time job down in Texas doing nothing but shoot hogs, all night every night...and probably didn't even make a dent in the population.

As they trickle into NYS, probably from Pennsylvania, the DEC is asking that they be shot on sight, according to the article in the Evening Sun and what Alan has been told by DEC officers when he was in the Fisheries and Wildlife Program at SUNY Cobleskill.

Read more about feral hogs here.... and here

Here is a video

Rain and piggies

After a stretch of exceptional fall weather it is raining again. It never really dried out but now the mud has the consistency of grease.
Hard to walk.
Hard to work.
No corn will get chopped today. These photos are from yesterday, when it was fine enough to pick tomatoes and try to dig out the roots of those giant sunflowers.....unsuccessfully I might add.




Also, yesterday, Alan and Becky made the long trip south to get new piggies, a pair of gilts this year. They are remarkably fuzzy and quite different from last year's pigs. However, we have never gotten one that didn't grow really well from our pig farming folks and I am sure they will be fine. Last year we ended up with the best sausage ever, so we are going to make a lot more this time....believe it or not everybody liked it better than pork chops.