“Sasquatch,” a Red Wattle boar co-owned by Kehrli Farms of Winthrop and the Charlie Bieber family of Waukon, won first place in the Big Boar competition Thursday, August 10 at the 2023 Iowa State Fair in Des Moines. The winning entrant (pictured above at right) tipped the scales at 1,012 pounds, more than 100 pounds heavier than the second-place finisher, “Big Joe,” a four-and-a-half-year-old boar shown by Jack Theobald of Muscatine that weighed in at 894 pounds, with those two animals being the only entries in this year’s Big Boar Contest and this being the second consecutive year that only two boars have been entered into the competition.
This is the second time in the last seven years the Biebers have partnered with Kehrli Farms to show a Big Boar Contest entry at the Iowa State Fair. In 2017, the partners entered “Big Chief,” a hog that weighed in at 1,162 pounds but finished second by about 30 pounds to “Big Buck,” a boar owned by McDonald Acres of Ryan.