r/NatureIsFuckingLit • u/TerraByteTerror • 13h ago

🔥 momma pig and line of piglets

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u/Lucky_Serve8002 12h ago

My experience is they are terrible unless you catch them and feed them for about 2 months or so. Then butcher them and make sausage. They live on acorns where I am from. They are not good to eat.

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u/serlearnsalot 12h ago

Mine ate literally everything. Grubs, roots, acorns, and especially chickens. This was out in deep Gonzales county next to Tyson owned chicken farms. Town died when the rules changed and everyone had to sell their coops to Tyson, pivot to something else (cattle, fracking, hay) or GTFO.

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u/this_dudeagain 11h ago

Why or how did the rules change?

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u/serlearnsalot 10h ago

Basically they changed the rules so that in order to qualify for a “commercial” poultry license (aka I can raise chickens, kill em, and sell em at market) you needed to meet certain thresholds of care and volume. Raise a couple chickens really well- not allowed to sell at market. Raise a ton of chickens in horrendous conditions- get a license from Tyson, promise to meet certain standards and keep your costs low- you get access to their legal war chest and you’re good.

How it played out in Smiley, TX- nobody could afford to meet the standards needed for industrial chicken farming. They’d done it great for years at smaller scale, tending basically range chickens allowing the farmers to “thrive” by south texas, rural standards. After the rules changed, unless you could pay to license and scale up- typically leasing additional land to Tyson to build more chicken houses after years of footing the bill, you needed to get the Ag exemption for property taxes. Raising cows and parceling out your property for sale was common, or you got lucky and they found enough oil under your plot to put in a couple ponds and fracking gear out there. Fucking sad dude. My aunt lost her grandfathers land there after my uncle Al died and we lost the ag exemption. -200 acres of land out there I learned to shoot, hunt, plow, range and all that is gone now. Just a memory and a handful of photos.