I assume the Sampler disposes of the piglets because they are of no use to him as, being wormless, they do not provide the visions that inspire him to produce music. Why he dumps them in that particular river is anyone's guess.
From my "old person" point of view, disposing of piglets this way is/was just normal farmer behavior (standards are changing, and the younger population has become squeamish about what the older population just did as a matter of course). The method of disposing of the piglets doesn't seem to me to have anything at all to do with the blue stuff.
Farmers are typically
very wary of animal reproduction. It's a slippery slope from a few animals one year to lots of animals every year, at which point you have such a severe population explosion you can't even afford to take care of all your animals any more. Looking over the Sampler's shoulder from his porch at all his pigs, we can see there are
no piglets. And as he doesn't even know that parent pigs typically become very aggressive and has to be told by a neighbor, it's clear animal births seldom happen on his farm.
So if there are babies despite one's best efforts, what do you do with them? Hopefully some neighbor has a use for them and will take them for free. Otherwise, they have to be disposed of. The standard way to do that is to throw them inside a gunny sack and tie the sack and drop it into deep water.
One doesn't want shallow water, one doesn't want to get your boots muddy, and one wants to simply drop the sack rather than "throw it". Pretty much the only way to meet all those requirements is to drop the sack off a bridge. And there aren't a whole lot of bridges in the countryside - in fact that railroad bridge is likely the only bridge around for miles. So that place gets used again and again by all the nearby farmers.
Whatever river the infected animals were dumped in, blue orchids would grow somewhere downstream in that river, and the Orchid Ladies would eventually find them. And once the Orchid Ladies found some, they'd keep coming back to the same place. So the farmers are always throwing out animals at the same place. And the Ladies are always looking for blue orchids at the same place. And the two places remain on the same river. So the cycle works, and there's no mystery.
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