CORN & HOGS

When my children were young, I took them to visit my friend's farm. Roger Conklin, who I worked for and with at different times, owned a large spread in Xenia, Ohio. He grew a lot of corn and raised a lot of hogs.


It was his parents farm while they lived. He had a tenant farmer take care of it for him for a lot of years but had recently quit working in the city to build a modern hog operation there. It was quite an eye opener for me and my children. City kids just don't get to see these things up close.


In a long barn, huge sows laying on their sides in stall after stall with distended teats suckling piglets . In a long lean to with slanted concrete floor, hundreds of pigs separated by fences according to size from smallest to largest. The slanted floor made it easy to wash down the slop into an open sewer leading to a holding lagoon. The next step for the largest was onto the attached loading dock for a trip to the market. Swine were everything there. We were invited into the kitchen of the tenant farmer and found a large glamour shot of a pig on the wall.


Acre after acre of corn was grown, reaped and stored in tall silos with humidity control. The extra corn was sold for animal feed and when it was sent to market it needed to be just the right weight to maximize its value.



All of this was foreign to us. The flies and dirt and smells and sights were both revolting and revealing. I hope the kids never forgot the experience.