By DoktrChris

Many years ago in another life I lived on a cattle station in Western QLD.

One day, the guy who worked for me turned up for work & remarked that he had seen a wild pig in the paddock.

“Mate” I said. “You must be dreaming. There are no pigs in this country.”

Back to the pig in a minute.

At about the same time, the farmers in the area were harvesting their sorghum crops. Unfortunately for them it was coming off about 1% too high in moisture content, so they could not sell it. My Dad, who was pretty innovative, read that the Egyptians (yeah, the guys with the pyramids) used to bury grain in the ground and it kept for many years quite ok, in fact it would keep for hundreds of years. Anyway Dad put out the word, we will buy your grain for a cheap price and dig a hole in the side of a hill, tip hundreds of tons of grain sorghum in and cover it with dirt. Which we did. Like 500-600 tonnes !!

Anyway, a few years later the price of cattle dropped to like, nothing! This is called a “Cattle Depression”. I mean like you can’t make enough money to pay even your grocery bill.

At the same time the price of grain went through the roof. This is called a “Grain Bubble”. So the grain we had buried in the side of a hill was worth a shit load of money!!

Our only problem was it was too high in moisture, because how you bury it is how it comes out!

Solution: We purchased this bit of gear called a grain dryer, which was powered by a tractor and sucked up diesel like it was going out of fashion. So we have this grain dryer at the end of the grain pit and we’re in to it. Day and night.

Back to the pigs… We notice that when we were doing the work at night there is the odd pig sneaking into the pit to have a feed. Because it was dark and we had no light they could slip by un-noticed. A few grew into a few dozen. A few dozen grew into a few hundred!!!!!

One night I could see all these pigs come into the pit and then about 2 minutes later comes this HUGE boar (bloke pig). Like I mean this guy is humongous!!! .

So this was the pattern every night.

One day I’m cruising through the paddock with the grain pit in my old Falcon ute, and there he was, right in the middle of the paddock on his own! He’s just snuck into the pit for a quick feed. So I slip the old ute into second and made a run at him, thinking he would gallop away. No… not this guy. He stands his ground… I keep driving at him, the old ute running a bit rough and then POW! I hit him with the bull bar. He is so strong he actually stops the ute and gets under it and lifts it up at the front end.

What could I do?!!! I went for the horn!! (On the Falcon ute mate. Hoping someone would come to help)

The end

…and folks this is what my father-in-law and grandfather to my children, Doctor Chris*, sent me when I suggested he should do a write up about the pork we cooked for dinner a few nights back. The only point of conciliation is the fact that his story was about a pig, so this is where a vague segue slots in…

 

 

In the oven