By By JOHN EBY / Edwardsburg Argus
CASSOPOLIS – Blossomtime queens always list cuddling day-old pigs in Cass County as the highlight of their tri-county farm tour.
Saturday's hay ride at Nate and Lou Ann Robinson's hog farm on Decatur Road northeast of Cassopolis enjoyed gorgeous spring weather.
Miss Blossomtime Cecelia Kovach of Gobles, Mr. Blossomtime C.J. Pater of St. Joseph, Miss Cassopolis Krista Jessup, Miss Edwardsburg Abby Campanaro and the rest of the bud royalty, wearing forest green sweatshirts and Farm Bureau caps, took turns holding piglets, which they learned to hold by their legs to minimize squealing and bottle-fed formula to lambs during their last stop enroute back to Tree-Mendus Fruit Farm between Eau Claire and Indian Lake.
"We've also got baby Parker to play with," Nate Robinson said, referring to his grandson, worn papoose-style in front of his daughter, Jamie Adams. Parker's almost four months old.
The 24th annual Farm Bureau Queens' Farm Tour showcasing southwest Michigan's diverse agriculture production is sponsored by the Berrien, Cass and Van Buren County Farm Bureaus.
The farm bus tour, which also includes the Andrews University Dairy Parlor in Berrien Springs, Dickerson's Greenhouse in Gobles and lunch in Paw Paw, is designed to impress upon Blossomtime Festival participants the impact agriculture has on the areas they represent as well as their own lives.
Queens heard two presentations, one on a laptop by Jamie and one from the hay wagon by Mrs. Robinson in the field where the mamas were birthing and nursing litters of eight to 20 pigs.
"It's just a snapshot of the hog farm," Nate said, introducing his wife, LouAnn. Their "sow farm" has approximately 400 to 500 head. Jamie manages a separate operation of comparable size. "I also have a son involved with 400 to 500 sows," Robinson said.
, "so there's about 1,500. They have pigs twice a year. The ladies run the hog operation, so I'll step aside," said "the crop man" and tractor driver.
"The farm I run is different than the farm here," Jamie said, pointing out on the laptap her gestation barn, where pigs stay for three to four months during breeding, and farrowing barn, where pigs give birth.
"They go on full feed when they're five days old. We do the same as they do here, it's just that mine is a little bit more indoors. They get fed once a day for about five minutes."
One image depicted a manure spreader, which hauls it to fields just before crops are planted. That's why she has two hired hands who help her with Bluestone Ridge, the name of the farm as well as the adjacent campground she manages which won Cass County Conservation District's ag-tourism award in March in Marcellus.
Her gilts will be having pigs next month for their first time ever.
"It's quite an adventure," Jamie said, "because they have no idea what they're doing. You have to actually place them in a box and watch them because they will leave and not come back because they forget."
"When she's managing people, who does she have the most difficulty with?" her father asked the young women.
Females, they chorused, but actually the answer is men.
"They don't want to listen to me," Jamie said, "even if they're younger than me." Sometimes it takes Nate to remind them that "she's the boss. I believe that's a problem not only on this farm, but all over. Men won't listen" to women superiors.
LouAnn pointed out how, in Cass County at least, so many farms had pigs on them living in the little half-moon shelters signifying a field-farrowing operation.
"You don't see them much anymore," she said. "A lot of them have gone indoors. With the whole operation spread before them from the hilltop, LouAnn pointed out the barren lots. "That's our breeding and gestating lot where we put the sows to be bred. They stay there until they're 'belly down' and we bring them out on the grass so they can have their pigs out here on the grass. We've got three different lots of that because we have three batches of sows we work with. We rotate pastures, farrowing up here in the summer and down there in the winter because we can't get to the fields" when it's snowy.
Daily, LouAnn said, they castrate boars, dock tails and remove sharp needle teeth which can hurt the sows or scar the faces of their siblings as offspring from a large litter scrap for a place at a nipple.
A sow can waddle all the way down the hill for a drink of water and return to exactly the right shelter containing her litter by smell, Nate said.
"A sow, up close and personal, lets out a big, loud bark," LouAnn said. "It scares you when they're 'barky.' The problem with field farrowing is that little pigs can get lost. They know her sound and they'll go to it, and sometimes we'll do 'cross-fostering,' where if one sow has 15 and another has five, we'll take five and give them to the other. Sometimes that doesn't work very well because those pigs already know that sow's their mom and that one's not. They already have their drinking lineup established as soon as they're born. They know where they're going to be in the lineup, and if there's no nipple there for them, they'll go back to their real mom. Sometimes it works if you get them in the first 24 hours."
"Sometimes we have to go find them," Nate said. "That's what we're here for. Can you imagine just being born and dropping off that hill?"
"Sometimes you don't find them because we have a lot of problems here with predators," she said. "We have a coyote population that just devastates us here," but raccoons also poach newborn pork.
Coyotes can cherry pick a couple of new porkers or wipe an entire litter at once. They tried hunting them, but coyotes are so elusive he killed only one in two years.