Cheyenne says Hello!

These American Guinea Hogs are just the coolest pigs around.   We just love our little porkers.  Right now we just have Ebony and her daughter Cheyenne here at the homestead.   Our boar, Onyx, is due home shortly, but he’s in quarantine from being at a friends farm for a few months entertaining her ladies!  Just a day or two shy of two weeks and he can be back here at the fold and hopefully creating a pair of litters for us in the spring!   Cheyenne is old enough now to be a mom, she’s actually 14 months old.  It’s recommended for AGHs to wait until they are a year old.  Considering that she might not cycle right away, she might even be closer to 15 months when she conceives and then about 19 months when she delivers.   That is perfect, in my book!

With hogs, it really is in their nature to have litters on their own schedules, since it helps with their body systems and such.  If you let a gilt go too long, without a litter, she can start to have difficulty conceiving. We are eager to have piglets again in the spring, they are just adorable and a good help to our budget!  We have now had two litters, resulting in 10 piglets, 9 of which have been sold and are out there helping to make more American Guinea Hogs!   That is a good thing for these endangered heritage hogs!

If you are wondering…   Even though Cheyenne and her mom, Ebony are obviously related, Onyx is not Cheyenne’s dad.   So no one is related.   Her dad is Harry, another friend’s boar where Ebony came from.   It’s a little weird, I guess, since Cheyenne kind of thinks of Onyx as her step dad, but well, in the livestock world, steps don’t mean anything when it comes to the hokey pokey!

With the sheep wooing each other, we shall soon have wooing hogs as well!

Now, if we could only get the darn rabbits to breed!!!

(Yes, we are sorry to say, we are dreadful rabbit breeders.   I know everyone says rabbits are so easy but I have to tell you, Angora rabbits seem to have some issues!  I dunno…  we are just not having any good luck with bunny babies of late!  We are going to give it a good try again and hope for some spring bunnies!)

In the springtime we hope to build a new hog enclosure, nice and sturdy with more room for all the little pigs!   We are going to also build another hog area for our feeder hogs, from these spring litters. We hope to raise a few AGHs for our own needs, instead of selling all the babies!  And that will give our pair of breeding sows more room to have later summer litters if they choose.   AGHs can easily have two litters a year, or in about 14 months.  We like to have our breeding trio, a boar and two sows and then let everyone co-parent the litters.   We have read over and over that this is a wonderful and natural way for the hogs to exist.  We saw both litters doing fine last year that way…  In fact, the retained gilts from the first litter, Cheyenne and Shawnee, were great helpers for the second litter!

Our pig pen will have hog panels instead of wire fence, which if you see in the above pictures is not the best for piggies!  They are very strong and very determined to mess with stuff.  We are going to dig a little trench around the perminiter of the hog pen and put some concrete rubble in it, to help discourage digging.   And the corners and middle posts will be deeply set round posts with concrete!  I can’t wait…  we have adapted this ramshackle little pen and house over the last couple years and it’s served us well, but it’s just not the look we are trying for in our homestead!  It would be wonderful to have everything beautiful and just like one of Martha’s fine farms but the reality it, we have to do things in phases and this spring will be the pig pen expansion phase!   Their house is wonderful and just perfect for them.   Just the yard needs a little help!

All in all, we just love our American Guinea Hogs!   If you are interested in talking with us more, you can email me at:    sherri@chekal.com   and I would love to talk more about these awesome little hogs!