Beeman Hollow Farm

I’ve often stated  “It’s who you know that gets you where you want to go” and sometimes where you didn’t necessarily know you wanted to go. When I noticed now retired Mother Earth News editor Cheryl Long sharingour Facebook postabout our sow Abigail taking a walk with her new little piggies I was pleased to see it. I had met Cheryl when we exhibited our Gloucestershire Old Spot hogs at the Mother Earth News Fair in Topeka last fall. So, it was nice to see that she saw our Beeman Hollow Farm Facebook post that day and took time to ‘like and share’. But, it wasn’t until the next day when my phone started blowing up with notifications about people liking and sharing our page. It was then that I saw that Mother Earth News, with their two million plus Facebook fans, shared the same post on their Facebook page. What a difference a day makes! I think I had about 518 fans on my page before that day. By that evening we surpassed 1000 likes on our page! It grew through the night and a couple hundred more trickled in. I was going to do a shout out to our 1000th fan.. and maybe give them a voucher for some pork or something… however, they were from Romania and everything was in a foreign language on their page. I began to look further and to my amazement there were tons of folks from all over the world that now were following Beeman Hollow Farm. They hailed from Cambodia, France, South Africa, Romania, Korea to name a few. Some, I noticed, were attending agriculture universities. Some, I couldn’t read the language, but still, they connected to Mother Earth News which connected to our little farm in the Ozarks in Beeman Hollow. It was all because of Mother Earth News being a friend and a fan (and vice-versa). By the way, I so much wanted to go to the Mother Earth News Fair this past weekend in Belton, Texas.. but we decided that cleaning out the barn, separating pigs and taking hogs to the processor needed to be done more than going to the MEN Fair to learn about farming. 🙂 We went to the animal fair, the birds and the bees were there… Remember that old children’s song? Well, going to the Mother Earth News Fair this past weekend wasn’t exactly an animal fair for all concerned, but it was for us. We were invited to bring our Gloucestershire Old Spot pigs to exhibit near the American Livestock Breeds Conservancy stage. Since the hubby and I have been Mother Earth News groupies from way back in the day and members of the ALBC, we were all for it. I had actually already purchased advanced tickets for the MEN Fair so hooking up a trailer, gathering up feed, feed pans, water pans, along with other tools, hooking up a trailer, loading uncooperative pigs at dawn and pulling it a couple hundred miles was just no big deal. Some people might look at that as too much trouble.. for me – it’s my kind of therapy. The pigs were – did i just say “not very cooperative” early on Friday morning as we had to hurry up and load up early so we could get to our appointment at the vet to get a quick health check and health papers to cross state lines with these oinkers. Interestingly, our veterinarian, who had actually inspected some of our pigs in the past, says he never heard of this breed of pig. The talker and educator that I am proceeded to overload him with all of the wonderful things about the breed and since he was a vet I figured he would appreciate talking genetics and gene pools and semen and the lack thereof. I was right, he shook my hand and told how much he thoroughly enjoyed the education. My daughter-in-law, who I have been mentoring about all things farming, came along for the adventure to MEN Fair. I thoroughly enjoy her company and love her enthusiasm about learning. (And, having a hand to help unload pigs and such was nice, too!) We got there mid-afternoon and unloaded our pigs in their pen, which was just down from the American Livestock Breeders Conservancy stage. There were some itty bitty Idaho pasture pigs down the row from