March 24, 2025 – Do you like bacon? It’s so good! But have you ever made your own? We are about to. You may recall that our family became the proud owners of a pair of piglets about eight months ago. The kids called them Winifred and Cordelia but I called them Bacon and Porkchop. And last weekend the pigs moved much closer to living up to the names I gave them. My beautiful wife opted to stay in the house for the day’s events but most of the kids wanted to get right in on the action.
With our learning brains on, the kids and I gathered down at the barn as our friends educated us in the art of meat management. Day one of pig preparation would mostly be outside where it was cool and day two would be in the shop where it was less cool. The boys wanted to dispatch the two porkers but our friend had brought along the necessary equipment to quickly and efficiently carry out step one. We prayed before it all happened, thanking God for providing this meat for us to eat.
I led one of the pigs out of the barn where we felled it. Some kids watched wide-eyed. Others stayed in the barn out of eyesight. “Do you have any chains to hang it up?” my friend asked. You’d think a little hobby farm would have chains around. We do not. The boys ran up to the shop, grabbed a couple ratchet straps and before you could say, “Where’s the meat?”, we had one of the pigs hanging from the tractor forks and ready to go.
Being the rookies that we are we lacked the necessary scale to see just how much Peppa 1 and Peppa 2 actually weighed. Lucky for us our friends had some fancy calculations to determine the pig’s approximate weight. Roughly 250 lbs each. The tractor is a bit big to get in the shop. I thought one strong guy (my friend) and one weak guy (myself) would be able to hang the meat inside for processing but I was incorrect. Have you ever tried to lift an unwieldy, slippery mass of meat up a stepladder? We failed. My son brought the tractor and forks in but of course the mast was too tall and would hit the ceiling. He tilted the forks up at a very inconvenient angle so we could get the meat on the forks plus the two of us on the forks twisting and straining to lift. But we accomplished the mission! Meat was hanging! We could now channel our inner Rocky and start boxing with the meat just like in the movie.
Day one as a butcher was quite a success. Tune in next time to hear about day two where we learned all about fat. Pigs have a lot of it in case you were unaware. The kids got a first-hand account of how meat gets to our table and our learning brains were full of anatomical animal knowledge. If you don’t have animals of your own maybe you could take your kids on a field trip to a butcher and see how things are done. Time flies! Make every moment count! Even the heavy ones.
Jason Weening learns about farming things with his 10 kids and one wife. Check out his new book, “Yes, Dear…I’m Watching Them” on Amazon.