It’s easy to forget how much agriculture has changed over the years. Production levels have changed, techniques have changed and most of all, the equipment has changed.

I was reminded of these things some years ago when I walked into a modern swine farrowing barn to photograph baby pigs.
There they were 10 or 12 pigs to a litter, all lined up and attacking their dinner.

Some think confinement farrowing systems are cruel to animals, but I see them as much more humane than older methods of production.

Modern swine systems restrict the sow’s movement, which helps keep the baby pigs warm, well-fed and safe from the shuffling hooves and wafering impact of a 500-pound sow.

Good riddance to the days when we headed for the woods with a bucket of wet grain (slop) and a trough to feed the old sow who opted for a bed of leaves under a paw paw tree, rather than the nice A-frame house we had provided for her.

If being stepped on or otherwise mashed by a sow makes a pig feel good, I suppose some of those woods pigs were happier than the modern ones. I know a lot of them didn’t survive until they got to the barn.

I can also remember a few Saturdays when my brothers and I were coerced into entering the old hog barn with a pitchfork and a shovel to throw manure into the spreader parked outside. At times like these a boy learns if he wants to heal people, he should become a doctor. If he wants to relieve suffering, he should be an agricultural engineer.

The hard part of cleaning the hog barn was throwing the stuff through a window that was a little too high and just slightly smaller than the shovel. If you tilted the shovel, the manure ran down the handle; and if you threw it too hard (or missed the window), you had better have your mouth closed. We didn’t talk much when cleaning the barn.

Readers who have cleaned those old barns will remember the pitchfork was for the thick stuff and the shovel was for the thin. The old wedding vows “through thick and thin” had some real meaning in those days.

There was nothing glamorous about cleaning the old barns. My father taught me that becoming sentimental about hog manure is a big mistake, as well.

I will always remember a farm columnist’s attempt to make something poetic out of barn-cleaning day. The writer’s husband was busy cleaning the barn one late February day when she wrote, “I watch through the kitchen window, as Herman loads the manure spreader and makes pretty brown ribbons in the snow.”

My dad read that and nearly fell out of his chair. “Well, isn’t that something?” he said. “Most of us just haul the manure to the fields, but Herman uses it to make pretty brown ribbons in the snow!”

Readers with questions or comments for Roger Pond may write to him in care of this publication.