Fair Enough
Life on the farm is about routines. Farmers have morning chores and evening chores. And then there are chores that happen whenever baby animals grow large enough to be moved to a new area. When I was growing up, one of those jobs was forking manure out of the farrowing stalls.
My father had a farrowing shed with four pens on each side, for a total of eight pens. Every day, my brother and I would turn out the sows so they could eat. At the same time, one of us would go inside—there was an aisle in the middle of the shed—and throw fresh straw into each pen. The piglets always had a fun time rooting through the straw.
After the sows finished eating, we would open the doors and let them back into their respective pens. That's when the piglets would get their meals!
When the piglets were ready to be weaned, we moved them to another area where they ate from a self-feeder. That left eight empty pens with a lot of straw-based manure.
The shed was sloped on each side, with the high point in the middle, where the aisle was. That's where I entered with a pitchfork in hand. I climbed into the first pen and began shoveling the manure through a small door used by the hogs. The lowest point of the roof was right above that door. I had to crouch as I was moving about.
I never timed myself, but I would guess it took about a half hour to clean each pen. After forking out two or three pens in a crouched posture, my teenage back was sore. If my father was still alive today, I'm sure he would say it helped build character.
Cleaning out the farrowing shed became one of the routines on the farm of my youth. I viewed it as thankless work, but today I realize it was necessary to keep the swine operation moving along. After my brother and I cleaned the pens, we brought in more sows that were due to give birth. Some of those pigs became my 4-H projects.
Today's farrowing systems are more modern. Pregnant sows are housed in a climate-controlled facility with slatted floors to allow their urine and feces to pass through to a pit located underneath. Most hog farmers don't use straw anymore, and manual labor is used for sorting pigs and doing other things.
If I were born in today's era, I'm not sure I would know what to do on a modern hog farm. Automation has replaced humans for certain jobs, but then I don't think the teenage sons are complaining one bit.