Hog sloppers & calf weaners: Indiana collector adds "place settings" and "behavior modifiers" to his farm collection.

Farm Collector, March, 2004 by McManus, Leslie

Ron Moore collects hog oilers. For him, expanding that collection to include cast iron hog pans and sloppers is as natural as, say, a tractor collector adding a few implements to his collection.

"They show the whole story," Ron says. Ron, who lives in Bloomington, Ind., has nearly 100 hog oilers. Cast pans and sloppers, though, are harder to come by. Just as tractors and engines were scrapped during World War II metal drives, so were hog pans and sloppers. Later still, when old barns were razed, "the pans and sloppers went off in the hauler with everything else," he explains.

Relics of the past

Cast pans and sloppers are relics of the days before commercially produced hog feed existed. In those days--in addition to table scraps--hogs...