A Tail of Two Piggies

It was a late summer day in the year 2010. The pigs were busy grazing and we were busy with farm chores. The day seemed normal enough when I came home from my day job. Then I saw him. Bubba was in the sow pen!!! As many of you know, Bubba is our Large Black boar. Bubba is usually fairly content to stay where is placed except when one thing is going on. I got a sinking feeling when I realized that I had just taken a litter of Mulefoot piglets off of their mother the week before. Well, I got a bucket of feed and raced into the pen to try and get Bubba back to where he belongs. He was not really interested in the feed, but, lucky for me, his fair lady, with the funny looking feet, was tired and hungry from the day's activities and was willing to follow the bucket and he was very interested in following her. Well, I got him back into the boar pen, and fixed the two gates that he had to go through to get to his fair lady. I marked down the encounter on my calendar to see if what I thought happened had. Well, she never came back into season, so, I knew we were expecting some very interesting piglets around Christmas time.

Flash foward 3 months, 3 weeks, and 3 days. It is December 24th and Bubba's fair lady, with the funny looking feet, was in labor. She delivered 5 very healthy piglets with their mother's funny looking feet and their father's big floppy ears. There were 3 boar piglets and 2 gilt piglets.

I have taken some photos of these pigs for you to enjoy. I have not been able to find any photos of this cross. I know both breeds are endangered, but, I have found cross between other endangered breeds, but, not Large Blacks and Mulefoot hogs.

Pigs.....In...Snow!!!

We had a white Christmas in Georgia!! This is the first time this has happened, in our area, since 1882. The pigs really enjoyed the snow. They spent hours rooting around. I thought for a minute that they were building a snow pig!!

Breeding hogs for sale

We are going to be selling some of our breeding stock. These are fine pigs that are very good producers, but, as we keep more of the cross breeds that we are producing, we need to let someone else experience the joy of owning these fine pigs.

Bubba, our full blood Large Black boar, is 2.5 years old and, well, large. He is gentle and friendly. He has produced many fine piglets for us and many of them have formed the base of our herd. There is simply too few breeding opportunities, for him, to justify keeping him, so, we are offering him to someone who would like to produce some fine piglets for meat production and breeding prospects.

We are also offering, for sale, two sows. Sow #1 is a 2 year old Yorkshire sow that is a piglet producing machine. She is currently bred to our full blood Mulefoot boar and is due to give birth in early February. Sow #22 is a 1 year old half Large Black, half Yorkshire sow. She is also bred to our Mulefoot boar and is due to give birth in early February. The reason for the sale of these two fine sows is that we have decided to base our commercial herd on the Berkshire sows.

Please contact us if you wish to discuss the pigs further.

We are adding a new breed to our commercial herd!!

We have recently placed a deposit on a Red Wattle boar piglet!!! If you find yourself asking "what in the world is a Red Wattle?", here is a link so that you can learn about the breed:

http://www.albc-usa.org/cpl/redwattle.html

We chose this breed because it is known for foraging ability and good meat quality. It also is more heavily muscled than either the Large Black or Mulefoot and a leaner pig than the other two breeds. I believe that the three breeds will compliment each other well. I feel that he is a logical next step in our goal to produce the finest pastured pig possible.

Stay tuned for photos of our new potential herd sire. He will be here in early to mid February 2011.

New Piglet Policy at Doster's Heritage

Hello all,

Here at Doster's Heritage we are trying to produce cross bred meat pigs like no others available in the United States. We have and continue to travel the country to find rare breeds to use in our program. It is an expensive and time consuming procedure. With that said, we have decided that, in order to protect our bloodlines, we will no longer sell female or intact male piglets from our 2nd generation of breeding on. We will still sell piglets from F1 crosses from our Yorkshire and Berkshire sows as usual. We will also still sell Full blood Mulefoot piglets and we will sell castrated piglets from all of our bloodlines for those of you who want the best meat pigs available. We are going to keep all of the female piglets, from the 2nd cross on, and raise them to market size, and then we will decide if we will keep them as breeders, or, harvest them and offer the meat for sale.

Pig Bomb Imploded and left us puppies.

Well, this weekend was exciting. We sold all of the cross bred piglets that we needed to sell. We are keeping two Large Black X Berk gilts and one Mulefoot X Berk gilt. We will breed the two LB gilts to Cletus, our Mulefoot boar and we will breed the Mulefoot gilt to Bubba, our LB boar. We should have some wonderful meat pigs out of these crosses. In the next couple of years, we will look into getting another heritage breed boar. I don't know which breed for sure yet, but, I am thinking about getting a Hereford or Red Wattle boar.

We also had a litter of Catahoula pups born this weekend. Our female, Kitty, has 5 pups out of our red merle male, Lobo. 3 are black and tan, one is blue merle and one looks like she is going to be a patchwork.

Pig Bomb!!!

Hello all,

We have had 4 litters of pigs born in the last week. Our two American Mulefoot sows farrowed with 11 pigs total. Our two Berkshire sows farrowed with 18 piglets total. Our Berkshires had some interesting piglets. It turns out that one of the Berks was bred to our Large Black boar Bubba and the other to our American Mulefoot boar Cletus. The half Mulefoot piglets turned out to look a lot like a fullblood Mulefoot. They all have non-cloven hooves, but, with some of them, you can see a line where it looks like a split should have been. The Large Black crosses have me perplexed. The Berkshire female is fullblood registerable Berk and Bubba is a fullblood registerable Large Black, but, some of the cross breed piglets are spotted!! I don't get where the spots came from. None of the Mulefoot crosses have spots. Here is a photo of the different colors that we got in this litter. These piglets are all half Large Black.