Eight Piglets, One SUV, and a Rookie Rancher Mistake

If you’ve talked to me about our ranch, you know we’re now a fourth-generation operation. We’ve been in this business a time or two—been around the block, as they say—but sometimes we still make the most rookie, naïve mistakes. And that’s exactly what this story is.

We’ve been raising pigs for about five years now, and let me tell you—finding a pig supplier who farrows out piglets is tough. You can get a few here or there, but large batches are rare. As you know our piglets live on pasture, root up grass, wallow in the mud, and get marshmallows for treats. It’s the goodlife.

For the past two years, we’ve been buying piglets from a producer outside Casper, Wyoming—down some of the worst dirt roads you’ve ever seen. I’m talking potholes big enough to eat your truck. Last year, we brought home a huge load of piglets, so it made sense to take our big stock trailer. But this year, after a lot of loss on their end, the 36 piglets we’d planned for turned into… eight.

That meant our bulk pork never even went online for deposits—those eight were gone in a flash to existing customers. Still, we needed to go get them, and taking the huge stock trailer for just eight felt ridiculous. The problem? We don’t own small trailers. It’s big or go home.

Cue our “brilliant” idea: we’d haul them in a huge cardboard box—the kind our insulated meat shipping boxes are delivered in. This thing is so big it completely fills the back of my Ford Explorer from side to side and front to back. Last year, we’d brought home three piglets in a dog crate, so we figured—how hard could eight be? Lay down tarps, load the pigs into the box, slide it in, and head home. Easy.

Except when we arrived, these were not last year’s 15-pound piglets. These were 25-pounders with some muscle on them. Once we loaded them, there was no way we were sliding that box back into my car. So we crunched the end of the box, closed the tailgate, and set off—with eight pigs crammed tight in the back.

About an hour into the drive, the stench from pig poop and pee was so overpowering that Brandon and I had both windows rolled all the way down, just gasping for fresh air. When we finally made it home and opened the tailgate, I realized the bottom of the box had completely disintegrated. Those piglets were basically being “contained” by cardboard walls that could have been knocked over at any second and we could have had free range car piglets on our hands!

Brandon unloaded them one by one, and as soon as the last piglet came out, the box collapsed entirely. The tarp had caught some of the mess, but not enough. After a week, the stench still wouldn’t leave, so I finally had to have the car professionally cleaned—which was not cheap.

So, in the end, our “money-saving” idea cost us more than if we’d just taken the trailer in the first place. Rookie mistake, four generations in. What were we thinking?

Until Next Time,

Rancher Brittany