Guy Reads: Akron Edition

Gotta love my Aunt CS from Akron. She is the Queen of holiday family group photos, a humble health care worker like me, and she even takes time to clip and mail articles for her nephew-in-law (Husband) from the Akron Beacon Journal.

So, thanks to Aunt CS, it's time for another installment of Guy Reads, the exciting segment where I share with you the news items I (and Aunt CS) clip out of the paper for my husband.

Small town side note: when she lived around here, Aunt CS used to share rides to college with my father-in-law. Not knowing that many, many, many years later her niece would marry his son.

Anyway, she surprised us this week with a fascinating story out of Akron about the very rare Red Wattle pigs. They are known for their extremely unattractive under-chin wattles and dark meat.

Photo: Ohio.com

A little additional research on my part shows that the Red Wattle is "critical" according to standards set by the American Livestock Breeds Conservancy This means that the breed has fewer than 200 annual registrations in the U.S. and estimated global population less than 2,000.

We know a little about rare breeds here on our farm, so we wish the young lady from Akron all the best.

We also know a little about fake cows here on our farm. That's why I was concerned to hear that the police in Akron have been hassling a kind man about his restaurant mascot, Cattlelena. Is that not the best name ever given to a fake cow?

Speaking of great names, the PR person in me just HAS to give it up to the forward-thinking geek at the Akron Beacon Journal who thought to register Ohio.com as their domain name. Some Akronite (Akronian?) back in 1995 really had their sh!t together, besides Aunt CS, that is.

And That's When the Fight Started...

Today, local radio DJs were inviting people to call in and share their stories of domestic bliss that end with the phrase, and that's when the fight started... One poor woman called in to say she was very pregnant with her daughter and she borrowed a red dress from a friend. When her husband saw her in it he yelled, Hey Kool-Aid! And that's when the fight started...

I was very tempted to call in but like so many of the stories I want to tell about my home life, my most recent and that's how the fight started story requires agricultural definitions, explanation of rural culture and possibly a quick refresher on the birds and the bees.

Let's go back to the beginning... (harp music, harp music, harp music, waaaaves)

Husband showed up to a farmer meeting a few years ago and was put in charge of procuring awards for the Champion and Reserve Champion Yorkshire gilts at the Ohio State Fair. A position, I am finding out, that has the same term of office as U.S. Supreme Court Justice--forever.

So now husband is in charge of ordering the annual awards. The first year I stayed out of it. The kids who won with their prize Yorkshire pigs got a check in the mail after the show was over.

The subsequent years I got involved and we ordered embroidered lawn chairs (they still got a check), which are a very popular way for kids to brag about their accomplishment when they bring the chair to the barn at the next show.

This year, after scoping out the award chairs kids were bringing to the shows, I got crazy and decided to order a chair with a pig embroidered on it.


Yorkshire pigs are all-white (pink) pigs that have ears that stand up. Note that other breeds of all-white pigs have floppy ears that hang down--this will be important in a second. Gilts are female pigs that have not been bred--or at least that's what is implied by their purity rings.

Let's play a game now. Pretend you are a serious pig farmer. What's wrong with this picture. (Jeopardy music, Jeopardy music)

The pig is actually white. This photo doesn't do it justice. That part I got right. One big problem is that this pig has a wee-wee underneath. He's a boy.

Also, look at those ears. THEY ARE POINTING DOWN. THE CHAIR IS RUINED. HOW COULD WE GIVE OUT THIS ATROCITY?

And that's when the fight started.

In my defense, I ordered the pig sight unseen from Friendly Suburban-Dwelling stitchery ladies who only knew that I specifically asked for a white pig that was NOT a cartoon. I figured discussions with them over the phone of Yorkshire breed characteristics and gender indicators would really be too much. It's a representation, not a photo.

I had also forgotten to have them sew Yorkshire gilt on there so what we had was a chair that said: Jr. Show Champion
[image of male pig not of the Yorkshire persuasion]
Ohio State Fair

I fell on my sword and offered my resignation as Special Assistant to the Farmer Who has to Acquire Awards for the Ohio State Fair Yorkshire Show. Fearing that he may lose a valuable contributor to many of his agricultural endeavors, he got in the car and drove the chairs back to the stitchery ladies to add the missing words.

And that's when the fight ended.

Experiencing the Fair

I set the bar pretty high with my last Multi-Media Pig Show Report, so I decided to switch things up at bit at the Ohio State Fair. Posing as non-farm civilians, the kids and I left the barn and infiltrated many fair attractions. Husband stayed behind so as not to arouse suspicion among the other farmers that we were out actually enjoying the sights.


Nothing says Oh my God, my tits are rubber and I only produce water like the look on this fake cow's face. Ryan, Justin and Morgan couldn't get enough of this. I had to drag them away from the water-producing cow so we could move on to other attractions. It only seems fair that kids who have never seen a cow in their life should take precedent over kids who have 40 cows milking outside their back door twice a day, 365 days a year.


Thanks to a very friendly Division of Wildlife officer, Justin was able to catch this fish at the Ohio Dept of Natural Resources park inside the fairgrounds. We passed on taking the fish home with us. I'm not sure what a plastic bag filled with dead fish would be like on our third day at the fair.

We passed through the sheep barn and feeling very touristy I snapped this photo of some very interesting sheep. They all assured me that they had nothing against goats and in fact had some goat friends.

All three kids enjoyed playing putt-putt in the cattle barn surrounded by educational displays of the protein content of beef and interesting kabob recipes.

We arrived home in time to do laundry and turn around and send the boys back to the fair with their grandparents a day later to show another trailer load of pigs. I'm sure their grandfather, last-man-in-the-barn-Don, will keep them focused on the business at hand. Fortunately, there will be other relatives around who can take them to ride pedal tractors or see baby chicks or get tractor tattoos from the USDA. I just hope that poor cow and her rubber udders are ready.

Multi-Media Pig Show Report

Welcome to the only place on the internet where mad communications skilz, almost unbearable maternal pride and swine come together. It's the first ever Multi-Media Pig Show Report®.

Welcome to our report from the National Swine Registry Summer Type Conference. Where else would a Multi-Media Pig Show Report begin but the pig barn at the Expo Center in Louisville, Kentucky, where the pigs were very happy. Aren't they cute when they're sleeping.

Oh, and this little one is cute too. Shhh don't tell Grandma S. that she's in your computer--she won't like it!

Back to the report... Todd showed pigs, Ryan showed pigs and Justin won first place with his poster all about pigs. The end.

But wait! I promised you a Multi-Media Pig Show Report and I don't disappoint. We have next our first-ever Bringing Home the Bacon video production, starring Ryan and featuring jerky photography and jumpy editing by yours truly.




Wait! There's more! If you act now, I'll throw in the complete photo montage on Flickr, a $24.99 value--yours FREE!

If for any reason you haven't enjoyed your Multi-Media Pig Show Report, just return it for a full refund. Minus shipping and handling.

7 Pigs, 2 Boys, 1,166 Miles

Let me take a moment to suspend this blog's regularly scheduled gentle teasing of Husband to point out admiringly that he just completed a five-day, 1,166-mile trip with two boys and seven pigs.

Last week he loaded up our beautiful aluminum trailer with his finest Yorkshires and headed out to Des Moines for the World Pork Expo.

Not only did he care for a selection of pigs and 2/3 of his own offspring, Husband, the man who is genetically predisposed to take six photos on a weeklong trip to Disney, TOOK SEVERAL PHOTOS.

In addition to showing his barrow and gilt for ribbons, Ryan participated in a number of contests on his skills as a junior swine farmer. He won fifth in his age group of more than 100 kids from 48 states and two countries. Justin and his Yorkshire gilt won a lovely silver ribbon too.

Here is Justin showing his Yorkshire gilt. The goal of pig showing is to get your pig in view of the judge multiple times. Unfortunately, both the judge and the pig insist on walking around the show ring randomly. Your job as a pig exhibitor (well not your job, actually) is to use a plastic pipe or wooden cane to gently tap the pig and steer it in the direction you want, to maximize viewing by the judge. Of course, 250 lb pig + 40 lb kid = things not always going as planned.

Ryan and Justin both did a great job, but it was all due to the dedication of their father, whose only slip-up was coming home with seven boys and two pigs.

Truthfully, he managed this huge trip with incredible calm and organization. The World Pork Expo doesn't give out ribbons for that--but they should.

Coming of Age on the Farm

Farm kids have different milestones than other kids. While Suburban-Dwelling kids may mark growing up with the distance from the house they can travel on their bike or the hour at which they must come home for the evening, country kids find different ways to age.

In our family, the rite of passage surrounds our annual spring pig sale--pigs we sell to 4-H'ers to take to county and state fairs. This event includes trucking over 100 pigs to a neighboring fairgrounds in the morning, spending the day washing and bedding them, and then all evening running the auction.

Last year marked the first year Ryan was allowed to leave with the pigs in the morning, spend all day working, help with the auction all evening and stay up for our 11 p.m. thank you dinner to our helpers. Yes, allowed.

Like past years, little sister Morgan spent the afternoon with her grandma, making an appearance at the sale and then heading back for a sleepover at bed time.

Justin didn't spend the whole day working pigs but got to arrive two hours before the sale, help all evening and even go to the late night dinner (he almost made it). See here how excited he was. (Actually, I've never seen a kid with the ability to ruin a photo like this one can.)

It won't be long until they'll be driving the pigs to the sale themselves; then their father and I will have to go through some milestones. How long til we can make an appearance and then slip out for a sleepover?

Couldn't They Have Called it the Mexican Flu

This blog is all about my worlds colliding. So, here we are at swine meets PR meets health care.

Let me start by wearing my agri-PR hat and saying:

1. There is no evidence at this time that the virus is in U.S. swine. (USDA)
2. Swine influenza viruses are not transmitted by food so you cannot get swine influenza from eating pork or pork products. (USDA)
3. This virus is different, very different from that found in pigs. (NPPC)

And now for my health care PR spiel, courtesy of the CDC.

1. Cover your nose and mouth with a tissue when you cough or sneeze. Throw the tissue in the trash after you use it.
2. Wash your hands often with soap and water, especially after you cough or sneeze. Alcohol-based hands cleaners are also effective.
3. Avoid touching your eyes, nose or mouth. Germs spread that way.
4. Try to avoid close contact with sick people. Influenza is thought to spread mainly person-to-person through coughing or sneezing of infected people.

Lastly, a note about branding. Anyone who thinks that naming and branding aren't important should talk to the people at Smithfield who saw their stock pummeled today. An emphasis on geography rather than an old-fashioned name for certain symptoms, and people would be afraid of Taco Bell--not pork chops.

UPDATE: Looks like H1N1 virus is the new flu name being slowly adopted. The New York Times has an interesting article about the naming of the flu and theories that it actually started in Asia. Also, want to point out that I am sleeping with the hottest "get" in southwest Ohio. Husband has declined two media interviews.

Pork and PR

We get a lot of publications at our house that feature many, many pictures of pig balls. Get your mind out of the gutter! These are serious publications that include ads from boar studs (a boar stud is exactly what you think it is) that are showing the males they have for sale.

We also get a number of earnest publications put together by the Pork Producers Council and the Farm Bureau featuring swine manure management strategies or perhaps stories about farmers and how they plant the exact grasses in their pasture to maximize the digestive process of their goats (an actual story that I read).

The point I'm getting to is that in looking over the farm literature that comes into the house daily I'm starting to see a trend. Farmers, at least when talking to each other, are tired of lying back and letting others shape their image.

I participated in my first #agchat on Twitter tonight. For two hours, I watched over 130 tweets roll in from people all over the world who are concerned about the image of agriculture and the way certain groups have gotten ahead of us in framing a conversation based on emotion rather than the science most farmers are more comfortable with.

I helped Husband tweet about the Ohio Pork Tour, a print, Web, YouTube campaign to show that Ohio's pig farmers are real people who care about the environment, taking good care of their hogs, and supporting their families. As a PR person and a hog farmer, I find this to be an interesting campaign at an opportune time. I encourage you to check it out.

All About Pigs

Following on his hit essay I ama pig farmr, our son has penned the book on the swine industry.

I bring you: "All About Pigs."

Pigs that are white are Yorkshires.

Pigs that are Hampshires are black.

There is a kind of feed that is special.

Some kinds of feeds have vitamins in it.

Some kinds of feeds are good.

You have to put your pig in a pen. They might get out. You have to get them in.

You make sure that they are in.

I ama pig farmr.

There is no better moment as a parent than when you look over the little head of your offspring to make eye contact with your spouse, both bursting with pride and stifled laughter. We do this often with Ryan like when he visits every pig pen in the entire State Fair to pick out a gilt to buy, or when he notices that the Hampshire sow we bought in Iowa is now in a different barn on the farm, or when he takes little scraps of paper outside to grade this winter's litters.

Today, Ryan came home with a paper he did at school. Heaven only knows what his Friendly Suburban-Dwelling Teacher thought when she saw this:

In case you can't read 1st grade-ese, I'll translate:
What is special about me: I am a pig farmer.
What makes me happy: pigs.
Animals I like: pigs
What I like to do: Go to pig shows.

This fall he had to do a poster about himself where he cut out various things to represent what he liked to eat and play, etc. I had to LIMIT him to two pigs per box. He just couldn't understand why he couldn't put a Duroc sow and a Hampshire boar as two separate things that he liked.

How do you tell a seven-year-old future pig farmr that to most people, a pig is just a pig.

Agriculture in the News

As a public relations professional, I am always following the media in my industry. I also enjoy following agricultural articles, both by reading the farm magazines that come to my house (some day I'll show you the one that mostly features hog butts) and by reading about how agriculture is covered in the mainstream media.

I highly recommend the The Rural Blog as a great source for agriculture articles from around the country.

This week, who could miss the front-page feral hog story in the Dayton Daily News.

Yikes! We live very close to the Germantown MetroPark but have not encountered any wild boar. A feral pig could really cause some trouble on the farm, including jumping in with our prize State Fair gilt and doing the wild thing.

As the lone agricultural person ever known to many of my Friendly Suburban-Dwelling Co-Workers, I often get questions about ag in the news. I usually take the opportunity to answer thoughtfully and educate them on the issues.

Then I go home and find out from the real farmer that I don't know what I'm talking about. I'm going to have to study the pig butt magazine more often.

A Real Farm Wife

Farm wives are a special breed of women. And while I'm much closer to being one than the VAST majority of females in this nation, I'm not really sure I'm a genuine farm wife.

I have known a few REAL farm wives in my time. I'll compare myself to what I think of when I say "farm wife."

Household Vet
Farm Wife: Has conducted bloody operations on pigs/calves/lambs/chickens with needle and thread in her own kitchen.
Me: Are you kidding me? It's all I can do to allow husband to store his pig medication in the refrigerator in bottles--I make him use the veggie drawer.

Heavy Equipment
Farm Wife: Drives the tractor with hay baler, cause that's the girl job. Jumps off at noon to prepare fried chicken and potatoes for all the farm hands.
Me: I mowed the lawn once and reduced a six foot pine tree to toothpicks. Afterward, I decided to Shake and Bake some boneless breasts. Does that count?

Pooper Scooper
Farm Wife: Covers her hair with a kerchief, grabs a pitchfork and gets to work.
Me: I did fill MANY a manure spreader during my 4-H years, including the morning after my Prom (no, this wasn't even punishment, just the way my Dad did things) I have since retired my pitchfork.

Living off the Land
Farm Wife: Tends an enormous garden full of vegetables, which she cans and freezes to enjoy year-round. Raises chickens for eggs and has a freezer full of hamburger from the last steer she had processed.
Me: I like to eat a few tomatoes from the in-laws' garden but I hate chickens. I know most farm wives would shudder, but I buy all of my meat at the grocery.

In fairness, I am comparing myself to farm wives from a different generation who made wife and mother their career. I guess in this day and age of two-income families, a farmer is happy to be married to a woman with a 401K and occasional business trips to satisfy her need to travel further than than the end of the lane.

I think my husband appreciates all my attempts to help out on the farm. Like all the times I have looked out the window and said, "The cows are out. Who should I call?" Or the time I drove the truck and trailer during a long trip so he could nap--luckily he woke up just in time to help me cross four lanes of traffic and make our exit. I know husband will always remember fondly the time I filled out the paperwork for a litter of pigs and used his pet name for one of the boars--that we sold and had announced at multiple shows and sales afterward.

Maybe those weren't the best examples after all, but I know that I do try to be a good farm wife. What other kind of woman would still be around months after uttering this real, actual sentence to her spouse: Why does our lettuce smell like pig s&men?

Away in a Manger

The farmer was watching over his sows by night, waiting for them to give birth. When, lo, Miss appeared to be nesting and her heat lamps gave a great light.

And it came to be time for the infants to be born and Miss tried not to step on them and let them rest on a manger full of straw, because there was no room for them at the inn.

Later, after the birth, three wise men from Iowa came to offer gifts of cash, check or credit to the farmer.

The farmer pondered all these things in his heart, and planned for the day that these new pigs would shine at the State Fair. Amen.

Maternity Ward

Well, we're finally seeing the results of all the hard work husband has been doing since September to inseminate the pigs... Oh, maybe that didn't come out right.

What I mean is that all of the planning and breeding that took place earlier on the farm is starting to pay off with the birth of several litters of pigs.

This litter of 13 piglets is two weeks old. The little gilts (females) and boars (males) keep warm on cold Ohio nights under a heat lamp. You can see on the left that they can exit their little warm spot to nurse with the sow but are protected by the fence from accidental squishing by their mother. Hey, if you weighed 500 pounds and had 13 babies underfoot, you might accidentally step on one or two.

Remember Miss? Well, her golden days as a State Fair beauty may be behind her, but she is getting ready to have her first litter of pigs any day now (early December). We'll keep you updated with pictures when the piglets arrive. (Unless it's too cold. I'm very much a fair weather farmer.)
Like Miss, we have several sows who are ready to farrow (give birth) in the next few weeks. Husband claims this sow is 11 years old. He credits her with raising several of the pigs Ryan showed this summer and says she is the grandmother of many of our other good pigs.

This younger sow is also due in early December.

You wouldn't believe the big spider in the corner of this guy's pen, spinning a web that looked like it had letters in it...

This little guy is actually from the first litter from our new piggy Daddy, Big Splash. He and his siblings were outside enjoying the sunshine, looking forward to this summer at the State Fair.

I've just got to say again, while LOTS of blogs can comment on brand disasters and family life, WHAT other blog can provide such fresh-from-the-farm cuteness?

Sympathy for the Blogger

With apologies to the Rolling Stones...

Please allow me to introduce myself,
I'm a gal of wealth (I wish) and taste (I hope).
Pleased to meet you, hope you guess my name.

Hello, I'm Holly Michael. I started this blog 80+ posts ago to share my experiences straddling the sometimes equally stinky worlds of corporate public relations and farm life.

But what's puzzling you is the nature of my game...

I started out keeping this blog fairly anonymous, not sure if I wanted search engines finding this site against searches on my name. But a month or so ago I added this link to my LinkedIn page and search engine-wise, the gig was up. I'm proud of what I've shared here and don't see any reason to hide behind pen names (get it, pig pen, pen name, never mind).

So as I stand on the threshold of greatly broadening the reach of this site, I want to remind all you gentle readers of the rules I established for visitors to this blog.

And I thought this would be a great opportunity to share all the great writing that's already occurred over eight months of posts.

Note: If you are so humorless as to be unable to translate a dissertation on my mother-in-law's Frigidaire into wow, she can write! then stop reading here.

My favorite posts:

• Our May-December romance
• Happy Poop Day - some posts just write themselves
• Hey, That's not Hay
• Marketing to a New Generation
• My personal Brady Bunch story
• We interrupt all this pig stuff for a PR Bone(R)
• Funky on the farm
• Farm kids having fun
• Autumn on the farm
• My husband the crime fighter

Thanks for visiting. You can learn more about me here.

Beauty is in the Eye of the Pig-holder

Growing old is never easy. Your skin isn't as taut as it used to be, your hair loses some of its radiance, and the toll that childbirth takes--well, you really make sacrifices for that litter of babies you had. On top of it all, you have to worry about being replaced with a young showy little miss.

Here on the farm, the old sows don't worry about such things.

All I did was gently suggest that her skin might feel smoother if she did not take naps in manure. See the look I got. Is she sticking her tongue out at me?

This old gal doesn't have time to do her hair. (She's starting to get a little nappy.) But how many of us didn't put on a few pounds and let ourselves go when we're days away from giving birth.

And finally, my heart goes out to this old sow who sacrificed her body and the shapeliness of her tits to nourish her growing brood.

Being the female of the species is never easy. But it's good to be married to a man who knows how to appreciate a female whose award-winning county fair days are behind her. A man who can look past the changes that childbirth has wrought and see strong genetics. A sensitive guy who knows that your State Fair profile shot from when you were a young gilt is the preferred photo to use when touting your son's latest State Fair win.

Farm Wife of the Decade

I would now like to introduce you to the farm wife of the decade.

I haven't met this beautiful couple but I have to say they are off to a good start. Think of the negotiations that must have led to this photo.

Her: I want the groomsmen to wear pink.

Him: OK, but then the entire wedding party is going to pose with a Yorkshire gilt and we're going to use the photo in our farm's ad in a national pig magazine.

Her: They also have to wear thongs.

Special Delivery

Friendly Suburban-Dwelling friends and co-workers frequently ask me, so what's going on at the farm this time of year?

I know they are expecting to hear wonderful autumn-on-the-farm stories about harvesting corn, tapping maple trees, and selecting the perfect pumpkin from our own little patch.

Well, I respond, this time of year, we get a lot of semen in the mail. Seriously, my husband, who normally can't plan more than twenty minutes into the future, knows that now is the time to breed his pigs so they can be born in December, January, and February. This ensures they will be big enough for 4-H kids to buy in April for the county fair in August.

But back to the semen. In the mail. Actually, it usually ships overnight via UPS. Brings a whole new answer to the question What can Brown do for you?

Here's how it works... My husband has a sow (female pig) that is coming in heat, so he opens his boar catalog, selects her perfect mate, picks up the phone and orders two plastic bottles of his swimmers to be shipped overnight.

Yes, just like you have LL Bean and Lands End in your magazine rack, we have Cain's Super Sires and Swine Genetics International. The boars are selected based on their pedigrees and the goals for the litter, i.e. we need purebred pigs to take to the State Fair or this litter should be crossbred to produce pigs for kids to show at the county fair.

The semen arrives in a Styrofoam cooler (not frozen) inside a box. How does it get in the bottle? Look here.

I just want to make an environmental side note here that we DO reuse the Styrofoam coolers. In fact, when I was breastfeeding I would take the pig semen coolers with me on business trips. They worked GREAT to store and ship breast milk too. (Say ewwwww all you want, but I actually did this.)

Once the bottles arrive, my husband takes a long tube especially designed for this purpose, sticks it in the vulva of the pig and then squeezes the contents of the bottle until, if all goes well, the sow is bred.

You can imagine... no, you probably can't... that between talking on the phone almost daily about semen, keeping boxes of newly arrived semen in the kitchen (it's not on the table, at least), and all the breeding that goes on in the barn, our kids have picked up a few things along the way.

Our oldest has already had a bonding moment with his father when they picked out the "piglet daddy" for his new gilt. And our daughter has very innocently inquired about the equipment other men possess for this important task, asking her father while he was breeding a sow with his special plastic rod, does Uncle (his brother) have a breeder?

Swine Lecture Series - Breeds of Hogs

Welcome back to the Internet's one and only Swine Lecture Series. Today we'll cover the basic breeds of hogs.

Every species of animals that includes registered breeds, whether that's dogs, horses, or Big Ten football fans, has non-negotiable breed characteristics. For most animals, breed characteristics include size, coat color and texture, attitude, plus the desire to wear necklaces made out of poisonous nuts and spell the state name during gibberish songs.

For pigs, breed characteristics include color (their hair is clear, so all coloring comes from the skin), color markings (spots, belt, contrast on face and legs) and the direction their ears point (pointy and alert vs. hanging down over the eyes).

The National Swine Registry, the AKC of pigs, oversees the main breeds of hogs, Yorkshire, Hampshire, Duroc and Landrace. But there are other breeds that are less populous and don't feature class sizes of 500; think of them as the Mid-American Conference of pigs.

For example, there are the Berkshires, mostly black pigs with white noses and white "socks" on four legs. The Berkshire breeders have admirably attempted to market their product as the "Angus Beef" of pork.

You don't see them that often, but many state fairs have a show for purebred Tamworth hogs. Tamworth's are known for their pointy snouts and WILD nature. Years ago hogs were mainly raised outside in lots where tough, rangy hogs survived best and the Tamworth's remain a throwback to that era.

Speaking of hogs that are rare or unpopular (depending on who you ask), our farm raises Hereford hogs, in addition to our main herd of State Fair-winning Yorkshires and Hampshires.

Check out this lovely specimen--and a nice looking Hereford too. This barrow (castrated male) hog was raised by us and then sold to the the cute 4-Her next door who won reserve champion at the Ohio State Fair. The champion was also raised by us. In fact, the champion or reserve Hereford at the Ohio State Fair has come from our farm for the last 10 years or so.

Years ago, when we were young and ambitious (foolish?), my husband and I would load up a trailer or two of purebred hogs and stay for about a week at the Ohio State Fair. The year our son was born, I was still on maternity leave during the fair, so we thought it would be fun to show LOTS of pigs. So we loaded up our Yorkshires, Hampshires and Herefords, plus our eight-week-old baby and headed to Columbus. We did pretty well, winning champions with all three breeds.

We had a lot of help from our family showing most of the hogs, but when it came time to show our Herefords that year, everyone had left, leaving us with no one to watch our baby while we showed. Luckily the kind women who worked in the swine barn office were more than willing to hold our little guy.

Which brings me to the final point about purebred hogs. The best aspect to being part of the purebred hog community (everyone has a "community" these days) is the people. People like us who keep coolers of pig semen in their kitchen, people who fill their magazine racks with boar catalogs, people who know more about the genealogy of their herd than the names of their cousins, people known for their hard work and integrity--they make up a rare breed, indeed.

Making Memories at the County Fair

My kids are filthy, my carpet is littered with sawdust, there are no clean blue jeans in the house. Yep, it's county fair time!

For a farm family, the county fair is part livestock bragging rights, part social gathering, part family reunion, and part marathon. For us, it means making sure our seven-year-old is ready to show his gilt (female pig), the four-year-old has eaten something more than the candy he got from pee-wee showmanship, and the two-year-old hasn't been run over by a cow--because the cow would not want to know her wrath.

The Montgomery County Fair is the culmination of our summer of hog showing. This year our combined family (ours plus my husband's brother's family) brought six gilts, four head of dairy (cows), plus a myriad of cakes, cupcakes, scarecrows, etc.


Here, Justin, Ryan and Morgan pose with the 2008 Montgomery County Pork Queen. Believe it or not, that title is a big honor.

They are celebrating Ryan's grand champion gilt and Justin's win in the 3-4 year-old pee-wee swine showmanship class. He managed to win, even after hitting the judge in the be-hind with his pig whip.



Little sister needs to pay attention and learn from the 3-4 year-old champ.

My sister-in-law was inspired by the displays that the big dairy farms put up at the Ohio State Fair--many include water features, painted murals of the farm, their prize cow sculpted in butter, and more. This one was awarded best dairy display at the fair.

Justin was too busy eating candy to show off his trophy, so Morgan stepped in to share her participation ribbon (it's PINK!) and Ryan had a minor stroke (just kidding).

We have exhibited Ayrshire dairy heifers (females) at the fair for 40+ years. And only once in that time did we actually have any competition. But no matter, we persevere on and are introducing a new generation of the family to the method of walking into the ring and collecting multiple ribbons, then exiting. They are also learning how to cash the premium check.

A motley crew of future dairymen (and dairywomen) participated in pee-wee dairy showmanship.

My husband and I have so many fond memories of our time at the county fair and our years in 4-H. I know our children are also having fun while learning important life lessons:

• The hard work you do behind the scenes pays off when you're on display
• Put your best foot forward, even when you have no apparent competition
• If you walk behind the bull, you will step in it