WHY WE'RE NOT RAISING PIGS THIS YEAR (AND WHY THAT'S OKAY).

 We love pigs... most of the time. Most of the time the pigs are well-behaved, sweet, and ultimately nutritious (I am, as I write this, cooking sausage from last year's pigs for breakfast). But then there are the times they are not: they are gone, out of the fence, in the garden, in the woods, who knows where they are. It's those times that are most prominent in my mind right now as we prepare for a really big season on the farm. We're doubling our CSA, we're taking on a lot more debt, and we have to wonder... are the pigs worth it right now?Are they worth the stress to the farmer, the risk to the gardens, the upfront cost, the sausage? The answer? Begrudgingly, maybe not. So I'm having to, for perhaps the first time since we've been farming, make a reasonable decision here. We're going to skip the pigs for the year.The reality is we just don't yet have the infrastructure to properly manage them. They wind up costing a lot more time and stress than we make back on them; than perhaps the pork is worth.This isn't in any way the end of our relationship to pigs. We just need to clear a little more forest—which is currently too dense, unmanageable and inefficient for portable fencing. We need to find more sources of slop—restaurants, shareholders, etc.. And we have to get through this year first. We do that, and we may have pigs again next year. We don't make it through, and heck we'll probably do pigs again anyway. Because if you can't win for losing, you might as well have some pork to show for it.-Jesse.