At what age does "boar taint" develop?

[daisymilker]

Well, I went ahead and scheduled the piglets to go to slaughter with the feeder pigs. They will be 3 months old and not very big. Talked to the owner of the custom slaughter house. He said they only skin them, no scalding and scraping, and a minimum slaughter fee of $75 applies for each "roaster". I didn't hesitate a bit because my feeder pigs have been jail breaking the piglets a couple of times a day, broke the door handle to their shed barn area, and I'm tired of chasing and sorting pigs. I have finally figured out how to block the larger pigs from that area, and as soon as I can get a barn stall gate that got tweaked the other day working again, I'm probably going to stall the 2 feeder pigs in the barn for the next 4-5 weeks until they go. The reason they keep getting out of their pasture is the solar energizers I've been using keep dying on me due to lack of sunshine and the hot fence dies. It takes a couple of days to recharge the energizers in the house. I only have 2 and I'm not about to go buy more. The better answer is to contain the pigs and get them to the processor as soon as possible.

I am no longer a fan of solar energizers. It seemed like a good idea at the time... And if I ever try to raise feeder pigs again... highly doubtful, but you never know what I'll do... they will be contained in a pig pen, rather than a pasture, that is more easily secured. It's very idealistic to raise "pasture pigs" on actual pastures, unless you have the right infrastructure to contain them. You have to hotwire 6" off the ground and you need pig panelling as fencing rather than regular field fencing. My pigs have busted through just about every fence I have except, thank the Lord, my perimeter fences.

One time, when I came home from running errands in town, they met me at the front gate and as soon as I opened the gate to drive in, they ran down the driveway and down the country road. Thankfully, they are trained to a feed bucket, so all I had to do was race up the driveway, go grab a bucket, fill it, all the while yelling their names as loud as I could, and they ran back home. LOL. I'm too old for this shxt. LOL.

[simplynaturalfarm]

We raised pigs in 4 strands electric for years. 5 acres we rotated then through moving then daily. One year our neighbor asked would we please fix all the holes or pigs made in his back field.... Those big pigs had been pushing out the back where it wasn't hot due to brush and destroying HIS field. We fixed the problems and I learned to test everything 2x a day because pigs test it.
I got some piglets two years ago that had been trained to not respect it and I ended up putting them in panels as it was so stressful to chase them every single day

[rosalind]

Oh the joy of fencing pigs!!

[grammagrace]

Two strands of really tight barb wire just inches above the ground held our pigs. After I convinced my husband. They were lotted and the rooting kind. There was other wire on the outside.

[nextyear]

We run a big plug in fencer for our pigs (60 mile installed on way less fencing then that, yes it supposedly burns them out faster but we’d rather buy another sooner, and know our animals are staying in. That being said we’ve had our current fencer for 4 years and it’s still kicking). Solar doesn’t work well at all for us. The lowest my husband will let it get on the tester is 7,000. Our fence will go as hot as 15,000 if he’s really careful to keep it all clear. My husband uses the thicker wire (the gauge below high tensile-not sure the actual gauge number) and the ratchets like you would see on high tensile fence. It isn’t actually installed like high tensile though. We usually use a mix of t posts, step in posts and trees in the woods depending on the area we are fencing, but he says the ratchets will keep a fence taught and they don’t push on the fence as much if it doesn’t give. He prefers to run on double strand but we have done single strand with big pigs too. He said if you keep it that hot you usually buy yourself 1-2 weeks of time for the fence to be grounded out before the pigs will start testing it. That strong jolt teaches them real fast though. He likes to train on a hard fence with electric set up about one foot in so they learn that when they get a shock they need to run backwards and not forward. By about 3 months old they are fine on 2 strand.

[katie k]

gee whiz, i guess we got off easy. we did a 20 x 60 pen for two piglets, step in posts, and 2 strands. It ran between 5,ooo and 8,ooo volts. We kept the piglets in a small leanto for 3 days, then let them out. They escaped only once, but I did hear them test the wire a couple times a week. Thankfully, they did not seem to notice when my DD left the charger off over night.

[daisymilker]

I think if I had started with a pen, I could've avoided a lot of heartache. I was trying to avoid having to move fencing often by rotating, so I just gave them an acre to pasture on. The only side I hot wired was the one side they were most interested in because that's the side they are fed from. My mistakes, all the way around.