Pig Farming

So I don't know if the technical name is pig farming or pig ranching, but either way, I'm going into the business of it. This past week I was out of town and spent about eight days down on a farm. It was a great environment and I learned a lot. There was a hog expert from the states that came out and did a seminar for four days. It was really interesting and I learned things like pig nutrition, how to build sanitary pens, pig development stages, genetics, pig breeding, and how to perform artificial insemination (which definitely falls under the 'more than I ever wanted to know about pigs' category). It was a lot of great information. Also during the week we talked about soil testing and applications in rural settings. It was a great week of training and I'm going to be applying a lot of what I learned soon. The hope is to take what I'm learning out to villages and use that to create some access and build some relationships. Things are really picking up with it and soon we are hoping to create a testing facility in town to use as an example to bring local villagers out to see the technologies. We have actually found a potential site and, hopefully, I'll be working with some locals to get that up and running here in the next month. So things are moving pretty quickly on the whole thing.

In other news, we have a two week holiday from school. It is kind of sad that I'm excited about having a holiday when I've been gone so much lately. I enjoy school and I'm learning a lot, but can you blame me for enjoying a ten day holiday? I have a lot going on in town at the moment, so I don't know if I'll get to do some traveling. Some of us have been tossing around the idea of going out and hiking the Gorge again. We can travel out there, hike it, and travel back in under two days and it'd only cost about $30. So that might be an option. I'll try and keep this updated a little better over the next few weeks now that I'm going to be in town more.