Purebred Duroc Hogs

One of Dad’s greatest interests was in raising top-quality Duroc breeding stock. He was widely recognized as a real “pro” in the hog business. He always had a front row seat for the Duroc judging at the International Swine Show each year. He was a contributor to and advertiser in The Duroc News. He was sometimes paid to judge hogs at regional and county fairs. He was a major supplier of breeding stock for 4-H kids and regional farmers--the Amish from around Arthur were good customers--and it was not unusual for him to ship to out-of-state buyers. He often went to Duroc sales events around the country looking for promising young boars with top bloodlines.

A “Breeders’ Notes” column for the popular Prairie Farmer magazine (date unknown) states that “DeForest E. Baird of the Baird Anchor Farm, Bethany, Ill., is something of a humorist as well as a poet. Witness the jingle appearing in his ad in a recent issue of a local paper as follows:

“If you want your spring pigs early,

Want them to grow big and burly,

The kind that push down hardest on the scales;

If you want a start in whoppers,

Big red beauties, market toppers,

Now's the time to see our Duroc sales.”

When I was growing up there were hog lots and pig pens all around the place. There were four large ones with almost half an acre each, four smaller ones and three or four other places sometimes used for pigs. The farmstead is quite open today, but earlier there were lots of fences and gates. There was some kind of a shed for shelter in each pen.

The main hog house was by far the best hog-raising facility for miles around. Dad designed it with lots of skylights, individual pens (each with a little door to the outside), an inside water pump and a heating stove. (It also had an old rocking chair for those long nights when he served as midwife to expectant sows.) That hog house was torn down a couple of years ago when our family finally went out of the hog business, but I well remember what happened there one day in 1928 when I was four years old. Dad was cleaning up a pen as I walked in, but he didn’t see me enter. I put my hand on the railing just as he was hefting a heavy partition onto that rail, splitting the tip of my left middle finger down to the first joint. Dad put a rubber band around my finger and rushed me to the doctor in Bethany. Dr. Coffey stitched the split parts together, but apparently he has concerned about hurting me and didn’t draw the stitches very tight. The wound healed OK, but with a definite “V” all around the split, giving a “double finger” effect. It has never bothered me very much--and I jokingly blame it for my slow typing speed.

I think we raised about 30 or so litters of pigs a year. At an average or about eight or nine little pigs per litter, that’s a total of more than 250 pigs. Most of these pigs were sold for breeding stock, but Dad wouldn't sell for breeding any pig that didn't come up to his high standards. The culls—any pigs with faults or problems—were sold “on the market” (for pork chops and sausage).

Feeding all those pigs in scattered pens was a big job! Mostly they were fed a mixture of ground corn, wheat and oats mixed with water and fed as “slop.” They also got commercial feed supplements, skim milk from the cream separator and kitchen wastes--including dishwater, which they really liked! Looking back, it’s hard to imagine how much work it was to mix and carry all those buckets of feed and fresh water to the pigs every morning and every evening.

Most years Dad planted a couple of the large hog lots with rapeseed, a member of the cabbage family, early in the year. When it was grown, he would turn the hogs in --and they loved it. We had a four-acre field near the house that he always planted with corn and soybeans (in the same rows) and every fall the hogs were turned in to “hog down” this field. The hog manure was great fertilizer and this little field produced great crops year after year without any commercial fertilizer or crop rotation.

Donald and John used to show their 4-H pigs at the State Fair and considered it quite a treat to get to live on the fairgrounds in Springfield for a week. Paul and I had no such luck; the Depression hit at about the same time we were old enough to show. But we enjoyed showing at the Shelby County 4-H fair. Dad would help us get ready by trimming the pigs’ hooves, trimming the hair on their ears, spraying them with oil, etc. He also taught us how to show pigs to the best advantage: “Keep it standing straight on its feet.” “Poke it under the belly with the cane to keep its head up and looking alert.”

March first of each year was a very important date. The 4-H and all other fairs ruled that only pigs born on or after March first could be shown as “spring pigs,” so the breeding schedule was timed to this date. And early March was always a busy time. The hog house would be thoroughly cleaned and disinfected, there would be a fire in the heating stove and all was ready to welcome the new litters of little pigs. Dad had a rocking chair and a cot in there and sometimes spent the night as a midwife. He kept very accurate records and had a practical system for distinguishing the pigs in one litter from those in other litters--he used a punch to make distinctive little notches in each baby pig’s ears.

In the 1920s and early thirties Dad held a big tent sale each year in late February—timed to sell bred gilts (female pigs under a year old) ready for 4-H club litters. These sales were well attended and were big excitement for us kids. We liked to watch the tent being put up and were proud that such a big-time event was happening right on our farm. We cleaned out the garage and the Ladies Aid from the church sold lunches and refreshments there. It was fun to listen to the auctioneer rattle off his fast spiel—it sounded like double-talk to us. I remember one year Donald, John and I all had the mumps and had to stay in a darkened bedroom all day—but we spent most of the day peeking out the window.

The tent sales were dropped after the Depression hit and fewer farmers could afford good breeding stock. We didn’t raise quite as many pigs after that, but Dad still sold good pigs with top pedigrees and our 4-H pigs continued to win prizes.

Dad sometimes gave his hogs imaginative names, often biblical or classical. Two of his favorite sows were “Queen of Sheba” and “Cleopatra,” and a prize boar was “Alexander the Great.”

A couple of afterthoughts: With all this attention to raising top-notch breeding stock, the Baird farm really was “anchored” to Durocs!………On a dare from Paul I once jumped on the back of a huge boar and rode it for a minute or so as it as it ran around the lot. When Dad heard about it he asked me never to do that again. On reflection I think maybe he was more concerned about that prize boar’s safety than he was about mine……...I never heard Dad mention this, but a Bethany Echo clipping in one of Mother’s scrapbooks tells how Dad was once the victim of a swindle. A man presenting himself as being the manager for one of the country’s largest and best-known Duroc breeders came to look at hogs, said he was very impressed with their quality, and bought several of Dad’s best bred gilts. When the check proved fraudulent, Dad later found that the con man had quickly sold his hogs on the market and had “taken off for parts unknown.”