Have you recently found yourself humming “Wide Open Spaces” and looking up vacant farmland? Before you ditch your one bedroom for room to make a big mistake, you might want to read Modern Farmer’s section Farm Confessional. Think of it as a rural version of xoJane’s “It Happened To Me” (known for being both salacious and eyeroll-worthy), but instead of stripper librarians and fake cancer, you hear from manure haulers and hesitant ranchers.
This week’s Farm Confessional takes a seedier turn when we hear from a pig semen catcher. Sabrina Estabrook-Russett was a vet student getting experience in pig husbandry, and although she’d inseminated pigs before (as one does), she’d never witnessed the, er, receiving end of things. What happened next nearly took Estabrook-Russett from Farm Confessional material to “It Happened To Me” territory:
A few months ago I spent one of those beautiful Scottish summer mornings watching a 450 kilogram pig ejaculate into a coffee Thermos that was being held at an appropriate ‘catch-all’ angle by a bearded Slovenian man. …
None of the ejaculating took me by surprise, but what happened after the release was uncharted territory. Emerging victorious with the cheesecloth-lined Thermos, the Slovenian brought it to me, proud of his harvest, bursting at the seams to tell me all about it …
“We test by ALL the senses: see, touch, smell, taste. You want taste?”
“Um … no thank you?”
“When boar young, semen sweet. When boar old, semen bitter. We taste.”
While the pair ended up not partaking, and Estabrook-Russett never found out whether or not her Slovenien instructor was joking, boar splooge remains a serious business. We’re not suggesting that all pork farmers and breeders use all senses when testing pig sperm. But farm reality is a little less picturesque than your Dixie Chicks daydreams.
