Women experiment with pig raising in Old Crow

Three little piggieswere flown intoOld Crow, Yukon, this spring and those three little piggiesrecently went to the market, or into the freezer.

Frances Ross, Sophia Flather and Megan Williams decided to try pork farming this summer as a way to raise food locally. None of them had raised pigs before, althoughWilliams had experience raisingchickens.

The conclusion?

"It's pretty cost prohibitive and even effort prohibitive," says Ross.

She says it cost hundreds of dollars tobuy the pigs and their feed and fly it all into Old Crow.That's expensive bacon, but groceries are expensive to buy locally, regardless.

The project wasn't without its successes. Ross says many people from the community chipped-in by feeding food scraps to the pigs and the Old Crow Co-op helped by donating old food.

"Those pigs ate a lot of bananas,a lot of brown bananas,"says Ross with a laugh. "We fed them a lot of expired hamburger buns."

The greenhorn pork farmers had a stroke of good luck atslaughter time. Ross says the women were doing internet research on how to slaughter the pigs when along came a visiting farmer from New Zealand.

"In walks this guy who [has] slaughtered about six to 12 pigs a week for decades of his life and so we had pretty much the best person on hand to help us out."

Although the women probably aren't going to take to raising pigs again anytime soon, the experiment did emphasize the value of "living close to the land" and taking advantage of the availability ofmoose and caribou, says Ross.

Food security is an issue in Old Crow. Last winter, the community waswithout a grocery store for a short period of time while the Co-op was under construction. Coupled with that was a below-average caribou harvest.