When we visited
Mr. Dennie's pig farm, he told us to feel
a pig's nose. Its nose works like a shovel to help it
    root in the dirt. The top is very tough, but the underneath is very soft.
Pigs are also big and round, and have cloven hooves. They have
short curly tails that are clipped when they are babies to keep them from
biting each other's tails. They are very smart, and can be trained like dogs.

Pigs are good to raise for meat because they grow up quickly. A pig is ready to
send to the slaughterhouse when it is 6 months old. A mother pig carries her babies
for a little less than 4 months, and has a lot of babies at once, like you will see in
our pictures. Pigs are omnivores, which means they eat plants and animals both.
They may have been domesticated at first because they can eat so many
different things. Today, farmers feed them mostly corn, and some beans, like
soybeans. We also get leather from pigs--like for footballs! We also get
bristles for brushes. Lard comes from pigs. We get meat, like bacon
and ham, and . . . BARBECUE!

 

So, we found answers to all our questions! If you have more questions about
pigs, we recommend reading the Encarta entry on "hogs," or even visiting
another pig farm link we found, Swineonline, at http://members.tripod.com/~two_herders/

Take a Virtual Tour of the Pig Farm We Visited

    There are about 90 different breeds of
pigs recognized today. Mr. Dennie mostly raises
Yorkshire pigs for meat, but he also has some Duroc pigs.
Yorkshire pigs are called white, but they're kind of a light peach
color. Duroc pigs are red with brownish blackish spots. Most farmers in
the United States crossbreed the pigs they raise for meat, which means the
mama and daddy pigs are two different breeds or varieties.

In our tour of Mr. Dennie's farm, you can see that a lot of pigs are raised in a
relatively small space. Some commercial farms raise a whole lot more pigs, and
may have 1000 sows (mama pigs) or more.

Pigs live best where it's not too cold or too dry. They are common farm animals in China, in northern Asia, in Brazil, and in the United States. They are popular in Europe, and in the islands of the Pacific Ocean. There are more than 800
million pigs in the world! In the United States, pigs are most commonly
raised where farmers also grow a lot of corn. So, it's not
surprising that Iowa has the most pigs--about
14 million of them!

  When we visited
Mr. Dennie's pig farm, we had lots of
   questions! What are pigs? Where do they come from?
What is a pig like? Why do people raise pigs? What do we
   get from raising pigs?  What different kinds of pigs are there? Where
are they raised? What are the scientific names for pigs? After visiting the
  farm, we read the Encarta Online (www.encarta.com) entry on "hogs" to learn
some more. Here's what we found out:

Pigs are domesticated mammals in the swine family. They are raised in almost
every part of the world for food, but they cannot live where it is very dry. Pigs are also called swine and hogs. Pigs have two enlarged canine teeth that grow out of their mouths to make tusks.

There are two species of wild swine, one in Europe and the other in Asia.
Pigs were first domesticated in China about 9000 years ago. Later,
Europeans domesticated pigs. Then Christopher Columbus,
Hernando de Soto, and other Spanish explorers brought them
to the western hemisphere. Modern wild razorbacks,
in the American South, are descended from
the pigs these explorers brought.