Meet Bob. He's a Berkshire pig, bred for fairly quick growth for meat. We picked him up about a month ago, to give us some bacon for this year's meat harvest. Bob was the runt of his litter and was malnourished. The prior owners managed to get him from a neglectful home into their own dairy farm, where Bob (then called Bones because he was so skinny) thrived on their waste milk. When we picked him up, he was doing pretty well.
Bob isn't alone now; we picked up a couple of pink piggies from a big growing operation, similar to Peppa and George last year (fast-growing meat pigs). When we got them, they were the same size as Bob. Now, however, they've both outgrown him by a significant amount. And I found out that Bob isn't eating the hog pellets we put in their pen. So, he's not growing at all. In fact, my wife thinks he's actually lost weight. That's not good.
So, we consulted with some friends, and we picked up some milk replacement. After some quick instructions on how to mix it and give it to him, we tried it for the first time tonight. Well, Bob definitely loved it, and gulped down quite a bit. We're going to give it to him a couple of times a day for about a week to see if there's any improvement.
You can't tell in the picture above, but Bob's spine is protruding; there's no back meat on him at the moment. So, we're hoping the milk replacement will give him a bit of an opportunity to catch up to the others, or at least keep pace with their growth so they don't muscle him out of the food altogether.
We're also going to be looking at a replacement feed; the other pigs all like it, but Bob's not thrilled with it; he barely eats it, which is the main reason the other pigs are surpassing him so quickly. We're not giving up on the little guy, though. We'll try the milk replacement and a new kind of feed and see how that works for him.
