Willie Nelson Once Took Time off to Raise Hogs and Lost a ‘Minor Fortune’

Early in country singer and songwriter Willie Nelson’s career, he decided to take time off from the road to focus on writing songs and raising hogs. While Nelson was compelled to get piglets from the auction because he had experience in raising them, all the piglets got loose as soon as he got them to their new home. So, how did the venture turn out for Nelson in the end?

Willie Nelson was raising hogs ‘nearly all’ his life

As Nelson explains in his book, Roll Me Up and Smoke Me When I Die, he went on hiatus early in his country music career. It was at some point during his marriage to Shirley Collie, so prior to 1971 when that marriage ended. He writes, “I literally took myself off the market.”  

At the time, he said his music was only doing well with audiences in Texas. So, he decided to stay home from touring for a year to focus on writing new songs. But he also wanted to raise hogs.

“Why hogs?” he asks. “Because I had been raising hogs nearly all my life, starting out in the FFA at Abbott High School where I raised hogs for show, food, money, or whatever. I even won some blue ribbons.”

Notably, Nelson lived with his grandparents in Abbott, Texas when he was a child. According to PBS, they instilled in him his love for music, as well as his lifelong knowledge of farming.

Willie Nelson made a mistake that allowed his piglets to go hog wild

In Nelson’s book, he writes about going to an auction and buying more than a dozen weaner pigs at twenty-five cents a pound. Then, he brought them back to his farm in Ridgetop, Tennessee and unloaded them into the pen he’d built.

“Unfortunately, the bottom rung on the pigpen was about two inches higher than the tallest hog,” he shares. “Consequently, all seventeen pigs hit the ground running.”

All the piglets eventually made it out into the woods and scattered. As the country legend tells it, they were out there for days. But he eventually brought each and every one home. They were already slightly bigger, but he’d also fixed the bottom of the pen to prevent the same fiasco from happening a second time.

Hog hiatus didn’t work out for Willie Nelson

While Nelson was familiar with raising hogs, he said he made another mistake in his first endeavor. He placed the feeders and water trough too close to his pigs and they weren’t getting any exercise. So, they started gaining weight too fast.

According to Nelson, the hogs were “falling out of their own asses” from overeating. So, he loaded them up and took them back to the auction. Unfortunately, he only brought home twenty cents to the pound for them after building their pen and feeding them all for three months. “I lost a minor fortune my first and only year raising hogs,” he concludes.

Fortunately, that meant Nelson could get on the road again. But notably, his daughter, Susie, shared that she had fond memories of growing up on a farm with her dad, per Chicago Tribune.

“Dad was a pig farmer,” she recalls in her book, Heart Worn Memories. “He’d get up in the morning, go milk the cows and take care of the pigs. And he’d write [songs].”

So, it seems Nelson’s experiences with caring for hogs aren’t all quite the same as the one described in his book.