I've been sufficiently quiet, they're still sleeping soundly. Notice that they're all woven into each other, head to tale. that's the way piglets sleep. They snore a little. 
I'll sneak a little closer here.
Yep, they're out of it. but it's not like they're alone. Mom is sacked out too. that's her in the picture below, to the left. It's exhausting raising this many piglets. Moms need a break, too.
Everyone sleeping in the sun on a warm spring day.
So this is the first piece of kitchen equipment that I really liked. It's a huge steam kettle that both allows you to draw liquid off the bottom, for stocks or broth or whatever, and tilts so you can empty it. It holds...50 gallons?
The class started with a half a pig laying on the table. Pink, with the USDA slaughter marks stamped on it, it was a duroc/hampshire off of the farm that Gabriel Claycamp is now a part owner of. For me it was interesting to look at because i don't often deal with USDA slaughtered animals; most of my sales are custom slaughter. So they do things like trim the eyelids off, and they seemed to have hacked the feet with a knife a lot, which I couldn't really figure out. No matter.
So we hacked the pig apart into the primal cuts. The top of the shoulder went into roasts to be cured as copa, the ribs were filleted out to allow us to use the side of the pig, the front leg boned and cubed, the ham carefully cut off under Gabriels' direction. The class materials has some diagrams of this, but it's difficult to do this from a black and white diagram or even a black and white photograph. The overall procedure was different than American butchery that I've done in the past -- basically we removed the legs and deboned the carcass with an hour of knife work.
The head, feet, kidneys and the entire skeleton were put into that huge steam kettle along with orange zest, leeks, celery and various other spices, and the whole lot was simmered for the rest of the day, resulting in this:
You can see the head of the pig in the center, and a rib bone, and various cooked vegetables. So the process from here for making Coppa Di Testa is to pick the meat off the bones, separate out the pig snout and ears and slice them thin, discard the vegges, place into a turine, refrigerate while being pressed. I liked the idea of this dish because it uses the meat from the entire pig head. Unfortunately for me we didn't finish this dish during the class, so I can't tell you how it might taste.
Here we're working on the Cotechino, a larger sausage that includes the skin of the pig. This is pretty cool for me because the skin isn't an ingredient that I've used before. The tray in the center is trimmed bits of pork skin, so the first thing you do is scrape most of the fat off the skin.
The skin before being processed. I'm not sure why it was cut into small bits like this, it might be easier to scrape in bigger sheets, but I'm here to learn, so I'm scraping the bits.
this is the bulk of the material, ready for grinding. The skin on the left, the cubed pork shoulder on the right. 
You grind all of the ingredients through a medium plate, here's the skin.
It has an interesting texture to it. It's a little springy and rubbery. When you put your hand into it it feels a little like tapioca. At this point I'm curious what it'll taste like.
You grind the skin, mix it with the rest of the ingredients, and then grind it again through a medium plate, and then toss the whole thing into a mixer and mix it for 5 minutes or so to get the right consistency. Then you cook a little piece of it as a final check of seasoning, and then load it into a sausage stuffer -- pictured below. I've been using my kitchenaide mixer attachment. This one made 15lbs of sausage go in 10 minutes.
The finished sausages are on the pan. Here the casings are being threaded onto the spigot for the sausage stuffer.
We made other fresh sausages as well, here's bratwurst, but I've done a lot of fresh sausages so this part wasn't very interesting. They're pretty, though.
Each of the two days of the class ended with a meal based on some of the items that we'd prepared. Here's the upstairs kitchen of Culinary Communion.
A good way to spend a weekend.
Here's my solution. Take a couple of medium sized pigs and put them into the pen with the small ones. Yes, the bigger pigs do get to eat first, and drink first, but they also show the little guys how to eat and drink. 
There's a pretty dramatic size difference between pigs, and they grow fast. In a month or so the little guy in the center will be the size of the pig on the left, and in another month the size of the pink pig. The little guys spend a lot of time trying unsucessfully to push the bigger pigs around. Mostly the bigger pigs ignore them. Within this little herd the pigs will form friendships and hang around with each other. When I move them out to the pasture they'll continue to socialize mostly with their friends that they met when they were little.
Theyr'e quite a colorful lot. I like having a variety of colors in my herd. Some of these are hampshire, yorkshire, berkshire, duroc and crossbreeds of all of those. When I'm working with them I'm looking at their temprament, and overall disposition. I prefer to work with calmer animals that respond well to kind treatment, so traits that don't work well with this operation will probably be noted for early sale.
This pig is earning high marks for being curious and coming over to see what I'm doing. I take a note of what she looks like (literally, I note the markings and that I liked her) and keep watching.
The whole time I was working with the medium sized pigs the boar was standing abosolutely still watching. He's about 200 feet away. He is much bigger than my dog. He's just much farther away.
The basic elements of this pen can be seen in the picture above. It has a 36" woven wire fence, and an inner electric fence. The outer fence prevents the piglets from taking a good running start and running through the electric. If they do that, they hit the woven fence, and are held there as they get shocked a few times. Usually you'll have one piglet do this, and the other ones watch it squeal and decide as a group that that's not a good time. The first few times they get shocked they pretty much shriek. EEEEEK! EEEEK! So do I, when I get shocked by the fence. I get shocked once or twice a week. Guess I'm a slow learner. Both the inner and outer fence are on 4' T posts that I salvaged from a highway project. They were throwing away thousands of them in a dumpster, so I dove in and pulled out 3,000 fence posts. I figure i have a lifetime supply. Such tremendous waste.
The white dome is a really a calf dome, used for raising calves, but in this case they're tough, relatively cheap shelter. We bed this calf shelter with 6-8 bales of hay, so the hay inside is at least a foot or two deep.
Welcome to the earth
I've found it easier transition if I put an older, experienced piglet or two in with the new litter. The older pigs know where to sleep, where to eat, and how to drink, so they show the new pigs pretty quickly how it works. Later I'll remove the older pigs. Here, the new pigs are slowly exploring the new space. This is the first time these pigs have been on any sort of dirt -- the farm I purchased this group from raised them on concrete.
Here the bravest pig of the new group says hello to the older piglets -- who have figured out that the hay is pretty darn comfortable, and were snoozing before I pulled up in the tractor.
Later that evening i went back and put every pig into the shelter. Once they've spent the night in comfort they'll find their way back. Pigs like to sleep in groups -- warmer for everyone. The original pigpile.
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