With that money he built wooden pig pens, installed a deep well pump to draw water from underground, and purchased thirty healthy piglets from a breeder across the county. The work took months, but when the final boards were nailed into place he stood proudly in the center of the mountain clearing and imagined the farm that would one day grow there.
The morning he transported the piglets up the mountain he felt as proud as if he had already succeeded. His wife Angela Fletcher, who was thirty one and expecting their first child, watched him load the animals into a trailer outside their small rented house.
Before leaving he placed his hand gently on her shoulder and said with a hopeful smile, “Just wait for me. Give it a year and we will finally build a house that belongs to us.”
Angela wanted to believe him because she knew how much this dream meant to her husband, yet life rarely follows the simple success stories people see on television. Only three months after the farm began operating a disaster swept across many livestock farms in the western states when a d/ea/dly strain of swine fever began spreading rapidly through the region.