How to Raise Pigs for Meat on the Homestead

|

Raising pigs for meat is a great idea for most homesteaders. Every year we raise pigs for our own family and to sell to our local community.

I was watching this video the other day, it has an interesting perspective on the economics of raising hogs on a homestead. Like most things relating to farming and homesteading, pigs aren't cheap but they produce a lot of delicious meat. Neighbors had hogs growing up and Cam Edwards of the NRA makes me hungry every time he talks about the heritage hogs he raises. Pigs aren't cheap but they sure are tasty even though you do want to have a fair bit of land to raise them as I can tell you they sure can smell as they root around in fermented grain.

How to Build a Table in R with Fill Color Style Info from an ArcGIS Feature Server

|

The R code is fairly simple — just grab the JSON from the server and use purrr to map over the various styles. The returned tibble contains the value returned from the server, along with the label and fill color.

# this builds a dataframe of styles/colors from feature server
feature.info <- jsonlite::read_json('https://services.arcgis.com/cJ9YHowT8TU7DUyn/arcgis/rest/services/AirNowLatestContoursCombined/FeatureServer/0/?f=pjson')
style <- map(feature.info$drawingInfo$renderer$uniqueValueInfos,
    \(x) {
      tibble(value = x$value %>% as.numeric, 
             label = x$label,
             color = rgb(x$symbol$color[[1]], x$symbol$color[[2]], x$symbol$color[[3]], x$symbol$color[[4]], maxColorValue = 255))
    }
  ) %>% list_rbind()

Agricultural Area around Lake Champlain

|

I was noticing on the National Land Cover Dataset how relatively narrow the fertile agricultural land around Lake Champlain is on the map. You don't get very far from the lake before the hills and mountains turn the fantastic soil for growing into infertile rock and sand.