🌡️ Too Hot, Too Fast — A Hard Loss on the Farm

This week, we were in a race against time—and the Missouri heat.

With the heat index soaring above 100 degrees, Tom and the kids spent every spare minute working on our second pig pen; the one meant for the boar and butcher pigs. The old setup had taken a beating. The boar and sow had rutted deep holes into the dirt floor, and the side panels were starting to bow. It needed a new concrete base. It needed reinforcement. It needed attention … fast.

The concrete was poured yesterday morning and was curing quickly in the heat, but it wasn’t ready.

So the boar, the sow, and the butcher pigs were still together in one pen — overcrowded, and definitely not ideal. Tom and the kids worked brutally hard, sweating through long hours in the sun, trying to beat the clock before labor started.

But sometimes, despite your best efforts, you fall short.

Last night, the sow went into labor.

Pigs are smart. They’re instinctive. When labor begins, a good sow will try to nest by gathering bedding, pawing at the ground, and creating a safe, quiet place for her babies. But we hadn’t laid straw or bedding in that pen. We were preparing to move everyone, and we thought we still had time.

She tried her best. But with no bedding, no privacy, and too many bodies around her, she had nowhere to settle. No soft landing for the piglets. No real chance to give them what they needed.

We lost the bulk of the litter.

It’s the kind of heartbreak that hits hardest when you were so close — when the pen was almost ready, when you had a plan, when you were trying to do everything right.

But livestock doesn’t wait for our schedules. And nature doesn’t follow our timelines.

We’ll finish the pen. We’ll separate the animals. We’ll be ready next time.

But today, we sit with the sorrow. For the sow who did her best. For the little lives that didn’t get a chance. And for the lesson we won’t forget.

This life teaches you many things but mostly, it teaches humility. It teaches how fragile the line is between preparation and circumstance, between instinct and infrastructure, between birth and loss.

Because that’s what this life is, too. The hard parts. The heartbreaks. The lessons you never wanted to learn.

🖤 For the piglets we lost, and the ones we’ll try again to raise.