Right before Christmas Matt & Madeline went out to do chores one morning and found a dead feeder pig. They hadn’t noticed any of them were sick, but judging by the blood around the mouth and nose it was a respiratory infection.
Within a day or two another one had started coughing. The typical course of action on conventional farms would be to simply add antibiotics to the water and treat them all, just in case.
We advertise ourselves as antibiotic-free. So to treat our whole herd would be marketing suicide. However if one of our animals gets sick or hurt, we won’t let it suffer. We treat it with antibiotics. Then we mark that animal so that we know which one got treated. This pig was marked with a pink paint stick, and soon we’ll do something more permanent like put a tag or a notch in her ear.
I don’t have a problem eating an animal that’s been treated for a specific illness, as long as appropriate timelines for withdrawal before slaughter are followed. It’s extremely rare that we even have to treat an animal. What I don’t want to eat is an animal that’s fed antibiotics daily, for no particular reason other than they’re being kept in living conditions that lend themselves to illness or they’re being fed something that they aren’t built to digest.
We either eat the animal ourselves, or we talk to one of our customers that we know doesn’t mind having one that’s been treated in this manner. However we would never slaughter a treated animal for retail sale of individual cuts. If we couldn’t find someone willing to purchase a treated animal we would sell it at the sale barn.
Sorry to hear about that. One day I walked out to our barn and one of my breeder pigs would not get up. I knew she was sick because anytime I bring food out they go crazy. I didn’t know what to do so I figured I would give her a day or two and see if she got better. By the end of the day, she was back to normal but then my second breeder pig got the same thing. I think they got toxic poisoning from the johnson grass in our pasture because this happened right after a frost. I read that you have to wait 48 hours for them to eat it after frost but at the time I didn’t know that. Anyways, I hate you lost a pig and now may have a bug going around. One thing I do to all my animals since we do all natural meats is give them apple cider vinegar in their water 3 days in a row each month right before a full moon. This kills any parasites, worms, bacteria that may be sneaking up on them. There is a meterer called a chemilizer that does it for you. You want to give 1 ounce per gallon figuring that each animal consumes about a gallon of water per 100 pounds of weight. Works on cows also so you can set it up where you are rotating cows and pigs each month making you only have to purchase one chemilizer. Kinda pricey but worth every penny.
kramer – thanks for the info, fascinating! Matt loved it so much he was talking to the computer. (“How cool! Thank you, Kramer!”) We use ACV extensively with our broiler chickens, but hadn’t tried it on the pigs or cows. Will look into the chemilizer.