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Cathy R. Payne spent over three decades teaching struggling elementary students before retiring and launching a small sustainable farm. She had no prior experience but set out to improve some land and raise heritage livestock breeds. When she started raising the little-known Guinea Hogs she spent five years interviewing elders and retracing the history of the breed from the 1940s to 2019. She is now an award-winning author. She continues to write, speak, and advocate for rare heritage livestock breeds and has several books in her future.
Reviewed by Kimberlee J Benart for Readers' Favorite
If you’re interested in the history of American farming and hog breeds in general or preserving heritage hog breeds from extinction in particular, Saving the Guinea Hogs: The Recovery of an American Homestead Breed by Cathy R. Payne is for you. I found it to be an utterly readable, well-organized, very comprehensive, and informative presentation on a topic about which I knew almost nothing but found fascinating. Too many plant and animal varieties have already been lost to the American continent. Once common on family farms, especially in the southern United States, the Guinea Hog was almost lost to the modern agribusiness emphasis on larger breeds that can be taken to market quickly.
“The American Guinea Hog is an old-fashioned heritage breed that was almost extinct in 2006,” Payne writes. “These homestead hogs are survivors and worth preserving for future generations.” In a preface to the book, Professor D. Phillip Sponenberg notes the importance of Payne’s work and praises her networking and teamwork approach as setting an example that could be used to save other local breeds as well. Payne wrote Saving the Guinea Hogs after she decided to become a small-scale sustainable farmer in her retirement years and wanted to raise this smaller, gentler, slower growing hog in part for its culinary appeal. Payne found almost no literature or research about the breed and set out to rectify the situation, especially when she realized that many of the old timer farmer breeders were passing away and with them a precious oral history. As a result, this book, other publications, and a web site now provide breeders, homesteaders, farm-to-table chefs, sustainable and hobby farmers, historians, and conservationists with valuable genetic information about this American landrace hog breed.
