One thing farmers have traditionally been good at is recycling. A bit of worn bridle here as lashing, a reused timber there for a trough, food from the fridge as feed.

Before this project, I was bad at recycling. At the office I have often bypassed the recycling bin for the garbage can. It’s not as though I’m intent on raising global temperatures or lazy. I just never seem to pay attention.

When we bought the farm in 2000 we found out at closing that no garbage service was available. (We also found out we had a cow, but I digress.) Instead, once a month (twice when it’s warm and the diapers have piled up), I load our garbage cans into the pickup and drive to a dump five miles away.

Occasionally, I will pile old equipment, discarded tools and other items for later disposal. Over the years, this accumulation of discards has come back to haunt me. Soggy rugs and carpets, the 30-foot television antenna ripped off by an F5 tornado that destroyed nearby Oak Grove, a broken microwave from my mother’s home, the glass door bent at its hinges during a spat—it just grew with my laziness and my access to acreage. Now I need a dump truck to haul it off.

But I’m paying attention again, thanks to the ultimate recyclers. The pigs are benefiting from the body of a broken orange plastic wheel barrow. It’s their new trough. I turned my mother’s malfunctioning deep freezer into a storage bin for feed. And I have fattened the pigs at least once from kitchen scraps.

This reawakening of environmental consciousness (at the heart of this project) is affecting other things as well; I’m no longer bypassing the recycle bin at work, and I’m looking through our other tossed belongings looking for things that remain useful through conversion. It’s a side-effect, but it’s a good one.

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