More new additions welcomed to NH; Healthy baby piglets born in barn

The barn at North Harford welcomed 14 new residents in the last month.  Ms. Cherry, a pig,  gave birth to her 14 piglets on January 31, 2022.

      The piglets are a Duroc breed, which basically means they are red piglets or “ginger piglets,” according to senior Malinah Jerscheid. 

     There is currently an application process going on for students to be able to show pigs at the county fair in the near future Jerscheid says. The students will be able to train the pigs by using “marshmallows,” and basically “train them like puppies to follow you around and pay attention to you.” 

     Students will be selected based on their prior experience with showing and also their overall character, according to Jerscheid.  The pigs will be sold at the Harford County Farm Fair auction on July 30 and “turned into bacon.”  However, Ms. Cherry will stay at North Harford to be bred again in the fall.

    For now, students are working with the pigs regularly.  Junior Hope Mullins explained how each class is taking turns giving the piglets their iron shots and “interacting with them,” and they are also taking turns “ear notching.”

       Iron shots are given to the piglets because they, like humans, need a source of iron and pigs in the wild get their iron from things “like rooting in the ground and dirt,” according to Mullins.

     Ear notching is a form of identification for piglets. “The pig’s right ear is the litter ear (where the litter number is notched) and the pig’s left ear is the Individual pig ear (where the pig number within the litter is notched),” according to Purdue.

     Ag teacher Mrs. Aimee Densmore says, “You take an ear notching tool and cut out small triangles in the pig’s ears. Each triangle represents a number.  In the left ear, we notch the litter number, which will be the same for all of the piglets. In the right ear, we notch the individual’s number, so in our case this year, they are anywhere from #1-#12.”

     Pigs tend to chew on each other so if they put something like a tag in their ears then they would end up chewing them off of each other according to Densmore. But,  with ear notching, they always know what pig they are dealing with.

       Densmore says “the pigs are healthy,” however, “the two runts of the litter passed away.”  The educator assures that this is completely normal because their body systems were most likely not fully developed.

     Each class helped castrate the male pigs and also clip their needle teeth. “The students also feed the mother, make sure she has enough water, and also clean out her pen twice a day,” Densmore says.