Ok, I have been rolling this post around and around in my mind for the past week plus, and I am still not sure how to get out what I want to express but I’m going to try and see how it goes..

Now as most of my longer terms readers know, I run a very holistic based old fashioned farm, and I do alot of closed loop small farm practices.. We had cut the weeds in the pasture, I use vinager and salt or hand dig things out, we spread our own composted manure and use organic treatments to improve the soil itself, like spreading molassies water and when the cow starts milking this spring, I will be spread the correct milk/water ratio on both the pasture and in the garden.

I believe in using good feed, water, shelter, fresh air and sunshine along with commen sense as the best tools in the health box when it comes to keeping the critters healthy, but I also do believe in using modern medical help when its required, it makes little to no sense to me to nurse a animal for months with a holistic treatment, if there is a short proven treatment, a example of this would be Girl, when I got her she was lightly scouring, I could have worked every holistic trick in my books and I am 99% sure we would have been good to go and I did increase her feedings, along with  a number of other old ways with her but I also put her on scour medication for the full proper typical dose..

So both Miss Piggy and Angelo were wormed before they arrived here and they have thrived, as has Tootie so you can imagine my surprise when I butchered out the piglet to see clear proof that my piglets had round worms by looking at his liver (which is why there was no liver recipe or cooking pictures shown, I burned it, as I didn’t want to compost it..

Now don’t worry, the meat was perfectly safe to eat but it really made me unhappy at the idea that the piglets had worms at such a young age, as their bedding was clean, the pen they were given was a new area that was built in the barn for them and certainly had not been used for critters for years an years..

Then I went, hmmm, I had been putting shovelfuls of dirt in the pen from day one, as the books said they would get natural healthy minerals from it, they had broke out a few times and dug in the sheep bedding pack, and I know that the sheep carry a round worm load, and they had time in the pastures digging and rooting etc, and so has their mother, which means that the odds are one or more of these exposed them at a fairly young age.

But lets think about this in a different way, I know that my land carries a worm load (its had critters on this land for 90ish years) which left me with a couple questions.. not the least of being, how was I going to treat them.

I spent a few days researching and talking to different folks about the choices I had, and some of the things they are talking about will work on a slower longer term base for my keeper pigs to help make sure that their worm load is low, clearly its never bothered them that I can see to date but treatment is still required.

So I finally decided that when it came to the piglets that I would in fact not go the “natural” holistic way, that I would in fact use a chemical wormer to clean them out, and would then use more natural/holistic ways to reduce re-infection rates.

So that’s what we did on the weekend, we carefully did weights, we measured and carefully gave out the doses to all the pigs on the farm, this means that I now have a withdrawel time frame on the pigs when it comes to safe human eating, something I admit creeps me a bit but lets face it, I at least know when they were treated and I know that they have a couple months after the time frame is done before they will be eaten, where as with the meat from the store, there is no way to know if they even had the full withdrawal time given or not.

So there you have it, I will admit to being a bit shocked at finding it and Its never a easy thing to admit in such a public way that something didn’t work out perfectly, but you know, life is a learning curve and even after days of looking, reading and research, I am still not sure what I can really change in the way I am raising the piglets, time will give me that answer..

So would you have treated? or would you have continued to work with holistic only?