Saturday morning Dane County Farmer’s Market closed due to Covid-19. Making biweekly trips to Madison for meat drops. Next delivery April 11th. Contact Matthew for more information: oakgrovelane@yahoo.com. Thank you!
For those of you with a small backyard, we also have compact models of our popular biological tillage machines. For an economical price, you can have your backyard tilled without using fossil fuel. And a bonus: most likely your neighbors’ yards will be tilled as well. Everyone in the neighborhood will know who you are!
Piglets are very mouthy, chewing on everything. While they are learning, observing mom, it also helps prevent baby pig anemia. Sows’ milk is deficient in iron, so the swine industry recommends injecting iron into piglets when they are 1 to 2 days old. When piglets are on dirt however, there is no need, as you can see these noninjected piglets don’t appear to lack for anything.
Piglets are also born with eight baby teeth, two upper and two lower on each side of their mouth. These teeth are called needle teeth, I think because they are so sharp. I’ve had piglets break the tough skin on my finger with their needle teeth.
I’m not sure what the function of needle teeth is, but the piglets do use them when they fight with each other. Sometimes they fight over space at the udder. Sometimes it appears they fight just for practice. I’m pretty sure that is what caused the abrasions on these two bold piglets in the photo below.
Curiousfarmer 
The piglets all remind me of Babe . . . too cute!
About the iron on the soil. Perhaps you already know, more or less, how much iron is in your soil.
If not, I wonder about an easy little experiment I heard about some years ago.
A woman I know, physics professor, was teaching an entry-level college science class. I think they had boxes of dirt from completely different geographic areas.
The dirt was dry, and crushed to powder (by hand) somewhat. Large magnet was drawn through it.
One box of soil had lots and lots of iron filings clinging to the magnet. Another type of soil had virtually none.
Seems like it would be a fairly easy experiment. Just takes a strong magnet and very dry dirt?
Thanks, Anon! That sounds like a great experiment, will give it a try.