Just as curiosity, have you changed feed or vitimins, feeding regimines? It can be amazing what having a little too much or not enough, minerals or vitimins can do to animals. We see problems with certain hay, grain, vitimin feeding programs in young horses. Calcium-Phosphorus balance is the most common. Alfalfa hay skews the Calcium way over, leading to tight tendons, other problems. Many people feed Alfalfa hay, lots of grain, makes for heavy weight on young bones that need different minerals. See a lot of lame young horses from poor feed choices. With the different pig breeds named, I can't point at breeding being the factor. Sometimes you get a line of related animals who have the same problems, so you point at breeding. Don't use that stallion or his relatives again. The other person mentioned a disease. Something that would be passed between pigs or a germ living in the barn, farrowing areas. Sounds like a reasonable idea to me. I am most familiar with horse problems and a couple things happen to bred mares. Rhino that causes abortions coming to mind first. All horses can carry the Rhino bugs, might give them a cold type infection, no big deal to healthy horse. Rhino causes the bred mare to often slip her foal. There is a Rhino vaccination, given at 5-7-9 months. Problem comes when giving the vaccine, because the mare can ALSO abort from the shots! Abortions from shots happen often, not always on the first or second shot either. Just really a heartbreaker to lose a foal that far along. However for the big breeder, multiple mares, they save most of the crop. They also preg check mares, palpate a couple days after shots, to ID any mare who lost a foal. Get her bred back immedialtly. Nobody TELLS the single mare breeder about problems with shot until AFTER foal is lost, "Oh yeah, abortions can happen when you do those shots". Keeping track with acquaintences, they lose more than 50% of foals when giving shots. Pretty high losses. I advise single mare owners to avoid the shots. Few of those mares are exposed to Rhino anyway, not much new horse traffic thru their barn. The other horse thing was feeding fescue grass. With the infected fescue, mare develops a very tough bag tissue holding the foal. Bag also turns red, hence the name Red-Bag Delivery. I think the foals can't get out of the bag quick enough to breath, and those who are helped, still have problems, die. One of the big warnings for bred mare owners, don't feed fescue grass/hay in the last couple months of pregnancy. Those with fescue grass, dry lot the mares in paddocks, feed hay to avoid problems. With the terribly high numbers you are having, perhaps some help is called for. Your vet should be asking questions, call the local State College, get some information coming. It may be your local problem, could be wider spread. Pig problems affect a lot of people, big money loss. When we had swine Cholera locally some years back, the State had teams of people all over the place, IMMEDIATLY. Slapped a bunch of rules into effect, regarding shipping, hygiene, selling, checking before unloading. Our local area had thousands of pigs being raised, was a major feeder pig source. The rules did prevent the spread of the disease, helped restrict the problem and loss of more pigs. You need to make some noise, get some big time help with such a serious problem. The money loss is pretty bad for you right now. Allowing a problem to spread could wipe folks right out of business. Get the vet and some of those experts we all pay for down from the College to help find the root problem, come up with the solution so the pigs are back to normal. My best wishes to you, sure hope the answers come soon.

Amazing! You just reminded me that we haven't had any toadstools this year because of lack of rain. Our second storm season is in late Sept./October before it gets cold, so maybe we'll get some rain then. lol

Our rain was pretty scarce here until recently. All those earlier rain storms missed us. Most of them went south of us, just like the snow this winter went south. Then when there were nice showers around us I'd wait for the rain which never came, so I'd check the radar and there was a nice big hole right on top of us as everybody else was getting good rain. Our grass was burned and brown and is just now turning green, but there's still some nice brown in there. I'd say we've had a dry spring with lots of sunshine. Perhaps it's payback because you STOLE ALL OF OUR SNOW!!! I still don't see why you couldn't have shared a little of it. Maybe next winter you'll let us keep our snow and we'll let you have some sunshine? Deal?

I got 2.5 inches!!! Which means I won't have to drag hoses and set up sprinklers for a while. In fact I was taking a break from work to check on the sprinklers when I felt the first drop of rain. It does mean that I will have to mow the grass some day soon. The only good thing about being dry is that the grass doesn't grow as fast.