Oral History Feature | Melinda Brown

Melinda Brown loves pigs. She has been breeding and raising heritage pigs in the High Country for well over 10 years at Never Ending Farm, her homestead in Sugar Grove, NC. She took us through the animal husbandry process and told us some fun stories about her time with swine.

"In the spring, I’ve got six mommas that I’ll be breeding and two of them are new guilds, they’ve never been bred before and sometimes they can have 10 babies on their first round. You never know for sure what’s going to come up. I can have 40, 50, 60 babies and there is nothing cuter than that, because there is no gate that will keep them in. I used to keep the daddy in the front pasture and it was so cute because the momma would take all the babies down the drive to go visit the daddy, they just walked down there just to see daddy and he’s snorting at the fence. It’s way cute watching them.

Pigs are really smart, they say they’re like a 3 to 5-year-old human, but they’re mischievous if I’m out working on the barn they’ll grab my hammer or the extension cord, they want to interact. And that is why I don’t use automatic feeders, they relate to me with food and I’m momma, and when you have automatic feeders, they really don’t interact with you at all."

Photo by Ashley Warren @naturalcraftphoto
Photo Title: Melinda Brown

Read Melinda's full interview here: https://www.blowingrockmuseum.org/farmforagefeast