![]() When it came to pastries, he turned up his snout. Purdy Boy, the other contender, favored a mix of ground corn and soybeans. “Yes, it’s not a cheap hobby, but what hobby is?” In the other corner… “It’s been expensive having to drive to get this stuff,” Rietema said. Pee-Wee washed down those pastries with gallons of creamy milk from a nearby dairy farm. ![]() He knew a guy at a nearby Hy-Vee who obliged and at times was fetching up to 25 pounds of them from the store. The creature’s appetite for the sweets swelled to the point that Rietema had to seek an additional source of stale doughnuts. He had found a meal for the pickiest of pigs: cream-filled long johns. On a whim, Rietema picked up a load of old doughnuts that were set to be tossed at the end of a week at the Dutch-themed Casey’s Bakery in Sioux Center. “He’d take one sniff of it, and he’d walk away. “I tried everything that I humanly knew,” Rietema said. Rietema, who said he has raised pigs nearly all of his life, added dried milk to the feed. The pig gained 70 or 80 pounds over this past winter, and in May it was clear to Rietema that he needed at least an extra 50 pounds to be a contender for the top prize. This could be a record-setting pig.’”īut Pee-Wee plateaued at too low a weight. “He did about 4 pounds a day,” Rietema said of the pig’s weight gain. At the time he was about 950 pounds, but he gained another 170 pounds by the time Rietema showed him at the Clay County Fair in Spencer last year. ![]() Marv Rietema, 73, of Sioux Center, bought his pig Pee-Wee at an auction last summer. The person who raised this year’s winner was able to sidestep that problem, almost by accident. “So, if a boar is eating that much feed and a guy is doing it as a hobby or as a fun deal, do you really want to feed a boar for a year with high-priced feed?” “Those boars are going to eat 25 to 30 pounds of feed a day, and feed cost is higher than we’ve ever seen in the history of pork production or livestock production,” Barnes said. Usually there are between five and 10 entries. Or maybe the summer’s unrelenting heat made those 1,000-plus-pound bruisers lose their appetites.Įither way, there were just two entries in the Iowa State Fair’s Big Boar Contest this year - the smallest number in at least two decades, according to Ernie Barnes, who oversees the fairgrounds’ Swine Barn and emcees the contest. It’s possible that the cost to feed giant pigs was too much. ![]()
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