The Gentleman Farmer Part 1

When I was 12, my dad decided we needed to get out of the city and have a farm. Both him and my mom had been raised in Birmingham but had family that live in rural areas and they both wanted to give it a try. I think they believed it would be better for all of us kids as well. There were five of us by then, two boys and three girls. I was the second to oldest boy and it seemed a grand idea to me. I didn't really understand a lot about what we were getting in to, but as I soon found out; my parents didn't either.

My dad didn't quit his job, he just took on another one; the job of Gentleman Farming. What that actually meant was that he committed himself along with me and my brother to working every night and weekend on fencing, gardening, livestock tending, and a thousand other little jobs that never get finished on a farm. I loved it while we were doing it, I don't have any desire to go back to it now that we don't.

He bought a small place in the southern edge of Middle Tennessee that had 26 acres and a somewhat delapidated old wood frame house. Like most things my dad did, it was a bargain hunter's dream. The house had actually been half house and half saddle shop when we took it over. The saddle shop end was to be a den, and two bedrooms for my brother and I. We were excited to have our own bedroom, something new for us.

For several weeks my dad and I drove up to the place every night and on the weekends to build walls, rough in the electrical and hang sheetrock. We ran out of time before we had to move so there weren't any doors in that end of the house but at least the walls were up and the electrical was finished before we moved in. The heat was all supplied by a few baseboard electric heaters which combined with the fact that none of the walls were insulated didn't do a whole lot toward keeping us warm at night but we had plenty of blankets so we thought we were living large with our own rooms.

After a few months of living there we had finished the inside doors and trim and began working on starting our "farm". My dad decided the first order of business was to get some hogs. Mother had already ordered a bunch of chickens through the mail (more on that later) but the hogs were dad's first foray into livestock. Being twelve years old, I was convinced my dad knew pretty much everything there was to know about everything. He was a fair carpenter, and could do enough wiring to put plugs and switches in without burning the place down. I had never known him to fail or even be wrong about anything the whole time I was growing up. We often did things the old fashioned way, right up until he quit building things. He didn't believe in electric saws with the exception of a small jig saw that he used to cut round patterns with. Everything else was done with a hand saw. He cut straight and true with a hand saw with long steady strokes and he taught my brother and I to do the same thing with a lot of patience. I can still hear his admonition to "let the saw do the work," and "find your rhythm and stick with that."

The saw made a pleasing rasp that you could set your watch to in his hands and the smell of fresh cut pine is one that you never really ever forget. He was the same way driving a nail; steady, strong and consistent. The sound of a purely struck nail "drinking" in the wood is one that a lot of this generation will never hear. As the nail goes into the wood it's pitch changes every time the exposed part gets shorter, hence the "drinking" sound like a man guzzling a glass of water. Later on, when I did framing work and hammers were still in use, we used a 28 ounce checker face hammer almost 18 inches long. One blow set the nail and the next one drove it home in the soft spruce that had become the framing wood of choice. When I was a kid you used a 16 ounce hammer and harder wood so it took 8 strikes or so to sink a 16 penny nail, each blow changing pitch when someone with skill did it.

Our hog pen consisted of a small area on the lower end of the farm with a couple of low slung sheds for cover. The sheds were pretty ancient post and sawmill board affairs with tin roofs. They were just under six feet high and probably 12 foot square under roof with two sides open. We seperated them into two halves for farrowing (hog nursery) purposes. We built a hog wire area around the two farrowing houses that was probably 30 feet square and then added an opening into a much larger area that we put up metal fence posts and electric wire around. It was probably close to an acre and a half, running all the way down to a spring fed creek in the edge of the woods on the east end of our property.

Electric fencing was simply some small gage bare wire ran on plastic insulators on the metal posts. We put the fence charger that drove it in the barn that was close to the farrowing houses so it would be out of the rain. An electric fence puts out an extremely high voltage at low current in a loop from positive charge to negative charge and then to ground. It pulses on an off a couple of times a second and feels a lot like grabbing a live spark plug on a car. The problem we had with our fence was that it wasn't strong enough to burn through grass. When grass grew up into the lower strand it simply grounded the fence out and it didn't have enough juice to get the hogs off of it. At that point you would have to walk the fence down and find the offending grass to cut away from the fence.

We learned all of this after the fact of course. It became one of my jobs to maintain the electric fence. The easiest way to check it was to check the return loop at the charger, if it was still hot the rest of the fence was fine. I soon learned to take piece of johnson grass and hold the thick stem against the wire. It acted like a semi-conductor so that I could feel the fence pulsing without getting the full voltage. It wasn't pleasant but it wasn't as bad as getting zapped full on. I could judge the charge by how close I could get my fingers to the fence with the grass before it was overpowering.

After a few weeks of building fence and stringing wire, we were ready for our hogs. My dad had an uncle when he was a kid who had Poland/China hogs but we couldn't find anyone locally that had them. The most common and hogs at the time were Durocs, Yorkshires, and Hampshires. Durocs were probably the most popular but people regularly bred Durocs with Yorkshires to keep from having inbreeding issues so that combination was popular as well. Durocs are a very large red hog with floppy ears and very long low slung bodies. Yorkshires are white with ears that stand straight up. They are also very large but usually taller and with less length between their front and back legs. The cross between them was usually either all red or all white but had ears that were half tipped, somewhere between flopping over and standing up.

I learned all of this as time progressed as we wound up mixing Duroc and Yorkshire but our initial hogs were going to be Duroc. Dad had talked to some local people at the feed store where we purchased chicken feed and corn and they all suggested Durocs were the best combination of size and good health available. We soon found a local breeder named Mr. Dickey. Mr. Dickey had purebred Durocs but they weren't actually registered stock which is much more expensive. For the most part purebreds are healthier than registered stock anyway, most likely because of inbreeding.

One Friday evening when dad came home from work he told me we were going to look at the hogs he wanted to buy. We got in our old Dodge station wagon and drove the 6 miles to Mr. Dickey's farm. Mr. Dickey lived in Kelso, Tennessee and had been raising hogs his whole life. He had a really good reputation for honesty and very large hogs. As we drove up the little gravel road that led to his house I noticed his fencing didn't look anything like ours. The fencing was all on large cedar posts crossed braced every few posts. It was arrow straight and tight like a banjo string with three layers of heavy red brand barbed wire on top. I was beginning to wonder why he had such amazingly stout fencing when I saw the first of the Durocs in a corner of the fence.

I could tell it was a hog by the general shape but it wasn't anything like I had pictured in my mind. It was massive. This hog was probably 40 inches tall with back legs slightly longer than his front. His back curved up to a point a little more than halfway down his long body before sloping back down to his rear end. He was probably 20 inches wide at the shoulders and his legs appeared stubby because of the extremely long length of his body. He was probably 750-800 pounds and put me more in mind of a hippo than what I had thought of as a hog.

Mr. Dickey came out to meet us when we pulled in his driveway with a big smile on his weathered face. He wore the habitual farmer's Lincoln County Bank cap on his head and sported some Liberty overalls well worn with usage. He shook dad's hand and mine as well, calling me Mr. Rick when my dad introduced him as in, "glad to meet you Mr. Rick." His hand was brown and felt like saddle leather as he swallowed my own in his and smiled. He had some very light blue eyes that seemed to almost glow in that dark tanned face and a kind of perpetual grin like he saw the fun in most everything.

As he and dad talked I wandered over to the fence to get a closer look at the huge hog we had seen on the way in. He was grunting deeply as he dug in the mud with his snout. I could hear the ground tearing with each small toss of his head as he dug his snout in and pushed. He was literally tilling the ground with his nose, stopping every few seconds to loudly chew and swallow a root or grass bulb he found in his digging. He eyed me under his loose flopping ears as he rooted around but didn't seem overly interested one way or the other. His wiry bristling hair was thin and barely covered his skin which appeared thick and wrinkly under his coat. His back and shoulders were caked with dried mud, large chunks of hard clay clinging to him. He smelled like hog manure, just like everything in the area seemed to.

Hog manure has its own odor that is unmistakable for anything else. Over my years on small farms I came to recognize almost all livestock by the smell of their excrement. Cows have a mild fermented grass smell while horses have a slightly less sharp almost aged smell to their manure. Chickens smell extremely strong with a tinge of ammonia, which is one reason that chicken manure will burn up almost anything you try to fertilize with it unless you cut it profusely with water. Hog manure is probably only second to chicken manure in the pungency of its odor, it sticks in your nostrils for quite a while. It was a smell I was to become quite familiar with as time went on. Whenever I smell it today, I must confess that it brings back fond memories. I can catch a whiff of it driving down a country road and instantly be transported back to a simpler, happy time in my life.

As Mr. Dickey and dad talked I leaned close to the fence, fascinated with the great tearing ruts the hog was making and the sheer power he possessed to rend the ground that way with just his snout. Mr. Dickey seemed to notice my fascination as he broke off the conversation with dad to say, "you can pet him if you want, he likes to be scratched behind his ears."

I hadn't considered that this beast could be touched, much less petted or scratched like a friendly dog. As I stepped close to the fence he leaned against a post and began scratching his back and side with it, a great shower of dried mud and dirt flying up as he did. I reached through the fence and began lightly scratching behind one of his great floppy ears. His skin was wrinkled and tough like a baseball glove that had been left in the rain for several years. He tilted his head a little and grunted his appreciation as I scratched harder. His grunts were a deep bass sound, rumbling up and out of him like an echo in a large muffled chamber.