It's Tonya's husband again, so here is the disclaimer: The following is not from Tonya, the following information is provided for entertainment purpose only.

We picked up some pigs the other day.  They are very docile unless you move them from their comfortable surroundings, they fight and scream so loud that if you closed your eyes you'd think you were in a steel mill.  As they were making me look foolish because I couldn't grab one I thought "no wonder they grease them and allow kids to try and catch them."  I'm not even sure you need to grease them.  They sure are cute though, except for their poop.  Just ask Keena.

Pigs are just like rototillers.  They are amazing, now I know why you are supposed to give them room to roam and rotate them into different fields.  Pig meat is also actually red, not white.  The "other white meat" thing is just a marketing ploy.  Keeping pigs cooped up in massive F DA approved facilities changes the meat so it does not have the same nutritional value as pigs that graze.  I can also better appreciate the cliche "you eat like a pig" after watching these guys.  We supplement with a little corn and pig feed but most of their food comes from vegetation until later in winter.

This is just before checking out animals at the auction (Calvin is working on his cowboy pose and TJ is becoming master of the electric fence).

Things are bigger in MO, especially marshmallows ("no Keena, I'm not going to buy those") and tennis balls.

Here I made a rear gate for the truck bed out of trampoline parts, 

Our little girl's hair sure is soft and pretty.  Why did we give her a boy's name?  I've got to ask Tonya about that.

Local raw milk & honey, on the honey it says "...all the essential minerals necessary for life, 7B-complex vitamins, amino acids, and other vital ingredients.... processed honey has been heated and filtered which destroys its nutritional value."  Also, the milk is actually $5 a gallon.  Milk at Walmart is $4+ so we just go to a farm and buy it, and no, you don't have to boil it and kill it's nutritional value like the gubmit says.  As you learn more about producing food and speaking with other farmers, you realize that the "raw milk is illegal" claim from the gubmit has nothing to do with protecting your health. Big milk producers absolutely don't want farms to sell milk because it cuts into their profits.  So that's where the health dept comes in.  It's really ole fashioned fascism, it's not capitalism that's going on.  The big producers call favors in from their friends in the health departments around the country.  For example, in MO, I can sell milk from a farm, but if I step off of the property and sell the same milk where the big producers do it's illegal.  How does the milk change when it leaves the farm?  It doesn't.  The real reason I can't is because I can sell a better gallon of milk that's already in high demand and spend only a fraction producing it compared to the big milk companies and their health dept. "approved" facilities.  Plus by doing so it demonstrates how the health dept. is absolutely useless when it comes to protecting our health and only wastes our money.

    

Animal shopping.  It's like used car shopping except... we'll I guess it's just like used car shopping because you can check out a few things but you can never know everything.

We ate at the only restaurant in Highlandville. The meal was truly excellent, and they have something called fried pies. It was so quiet and felt so remote compared to what we're used to that it didn't matter what was going on in the rest of the world.  I also met one of Highlandville's two cops and the Mayor.

For my next post I'm going to try and get a pic of our postal lady.  When I was dropping off mail a customer heard me say that we just moved from NoVA.  He said “Northern VA?  That’s a big change, what brings you here?”  I said that I needed to get away from politically correct stupidity.  The postal lady then said “We don’t follow any of those rules around here.”  She sounded like a female version of Clint Eastwood (but she didn't call me "pilgrim").