I was raised on a farm in central Kentucky with four brothers and three sisters. We raised a big garden and our own beef and hogs to eat.
It was the boys’ job to slop the hogs. Slop is a mixture of leftover food scraps and water, which the hogs love to eat. It was downhill from the house to the barn. My younger brother could coast his bicycle from the house to the pig lot. He would hang the pail of slop on the handlebars of his bike. One day he went to slop the hogs and got his bike in a rut and wrecked it. Of course the slop went everywhere, covering him from head to toe. That was the last time he did that.
Another time, the hogs got where they wouldn’t eat ear corn, so my dad called the vet. The vet told him there was nothing wrong with the hogs. Come to find out, my brother had been laying the ears of corn on the electric fence and the hogs had gotten afraid of eating it. Boy, did my brother ever get a whipping for doing that.
John Haynes, Brownsville,Kentucky
