Annual Pollinator Mix Conclusion, Summer Farrowing

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In conclusion, the Annual Pollinator Mix from Lacrosse Seeds made fine pig pasture, but the flowers were not that impressive and I didn’t see an abundance of insects.  To be fair, it was competing with my wife’s flowers and the Native Pollinator Garden I planted last year, plus acres of clover, alfalfa, and the occasional weed.

My summer farrowing group didn’t do very well.  Some of the litters of piglets had diarrhea and quite a few died, leaving an average of just over five piglets per litter weaned.

Either I am a lucky person, or I choose to frame it that way, but weaning less per litter won’t hurt much economically because I had kept more gilts to farrow than I usually needed.  The gilts were AI sired and I just couldn’t bring myself to sell them for meat.  As the boars bred them I kept asking myself what I was going to do with all the extra piglets.  I try not to raise extra hogs for the commodity market, preferring all my pork is sold direct.  So the extra death loss is keeping my numbers down, but farrowing more gilts will give me enough hogs to satisfy my direct market.

 

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2 Responses to Annual Pollinator Mix Conclusion, Summer Farrowing

  1. Dave Perozzi says:

    You mentioned in an earlier post that nobody was eating the sunflowers. Did they end up being eaten or just trampled? My limited experiments with sunflowers for both pigs and cattle have been disappointing.

  2. Never touched them. They were one of the last things standing.

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