Novice Notes: Rethinking Pig Pastures

After a lot of deliberation, I finally decided to plant a prepared hog pasture mix on half of last year’s pig field. The other half will be in corn with red clover undersown at the third cultivation. The pasture mix is put together by Albert Lea Seed in Minnesota and contains sudan grass, field peas, rape, and annual rye grass. They call it “Laugh and Grow Fat.” You add oats to the mix when you sow it. It looks like the best chance for rain over the next ten days is tomorrow, so I am going to try and broadcast the seed today.

Over the past two days, I spent about two or three hours working up the ground, which is about 2.5 acres. Because I knew that this year I would be tilling the field and planting it to an annual crop, last year I did not worry about how aggressively the pigs rooted up the field. In fact, I let them till it bare in quite a few spots, especially along the fence lines where they generally root a lot anyway and where I dumped waste vegetables over the fence. About 50% of the pasture, however, is a nice thick sod. Because the other 50% is either bare or spotty and because the mix will take at least a bit even when broadcast over sod (according to a woman I know who has been using it for a few years), I decided not to plow the ground up, but to disc it instead. The bare spots disc up to a nice seedbed, while the discs just cut little furrows in the sod.

As I was driving around the field alternately watching the discs churn the soil into a nice seedbed and doing nothing but cutting little furrows in the sod, I realized that I should rethink pig pasture management. It seems to me that annual pastures managed so that at the end of the season the ground is bare is the best pig pasture management plan on my farm. I don’t have enough land or enough proper land to adequately rotate the pigs around the farm (eg, how do you maintain a wallow on a hillside?), so I need to find a way to use the same fields for pigs year after year (or maybe with a one year break) without making those fields “hog sick.” One of the main concerns is internal parasites. One solution to the problem of internal parasites is tillage — although, in truth, I do not yet know if discing a bare field counts; it may be necessary to plow the field so that the worm eggs and larvae are buried at the bottom of the furrow. Because haying a field substantially reduces the parasite load on a field, I suspect that in addition to pulling worm larvae off the field through the baler, exposure to the sun probably kills the eggs and/or recently hatched larvae as well, but this is just a hunch. Worm eggs are supposed to be able to live for years in the soil, but generally speaking, that soil is well-shaded and kept moist by the grass. Because the worm eggs have evolved to be viable in a moist, shaded environment, they might be delicate in a dry, sunny one. Tillage will, I hope, also help break communicable disease cycles. They say that sun is the best santizer, so I hope that as the sun beats down on the bare field while the seed is germinating and just starting to grow, it will have a powerful sanitizing effect.

Such a pig pasture management strategy runs counter to the current of the grass farming movement. Grass farming orthodxy is anti-tillage and requires that animals be raised on mixed grass pastures that are managed to preserve and intensify the pasture “sward.” I couldn’t agree more when it comes to the ruminants. Pigs, however, are not grass eaters, even though they eat lots of grass, and while they love clover, clover will not pack the pounds on a pig. Rape, maturing field peas, and oats, however will. Certainly, there is a higher cost to planting annual pastures compared to grazing mixed grass permanent pastures. However, in my limited experience mixed grass pastures reduce grain costs by very little. They provide exercise and entertainment for the pigs, and a nutritious snack bar. I think pig pastures should be more than a snack bar. They should be a major source of protein, nutrients, and, especially, energy. I will know after this season whether the costs of purchasing seed and planting annual pastures is outweighed by the decrease in grain consumption (or the increase in weight or decrease in time to market). The woman I mentioned above who has used Laugh and Grow Fat for a few years says that her grain consumption goes down by 30% to 40%, but those numbers are for open sows and gilts. Growing pigs have very different needs.

One issue that I need to address is the ecological problem of topsoil erosion on bare ground. One solution to this would be to plant annual ryegrass as a cover crop. The problem with that solution, however, is that in the spring I will not have nice bare ground. I will have a field of ryegrass, which cannot be killed simply by discing it. It would need to be plowed. One potential solution to this would be to turn the pigs into the field early in the spring to plow up the rye grass and then disc it up after the pigs are rotated off the ground. I have seen annual rye grass re-root, but as long as it is eaten down and beaten up well enough it shouldn’t be a problem. A further concern, however, is that annual ryegrass has pretty powerful allelopathic properties that prevent the germination of other seeds, which is one of the reasons that it makes such a great cover crop. You are supposed to wait a month to sow seeds into a rye grass bed that was churned up and not plowed (the plow inverts the soil, so the roots are at the bottom of the furrow, more or less). If I wait a month, that might give too much of the ryegrass a chance to re-root and it will also give weeds a chance to get a good start. Maybe I should just plant buckwheat or something like that instead. I don’t know, however, if a winter-killed stand of buckwheat will lay down heavily enough to hold the soil in place.

Whatever the best plan, it is definitely clear to me that for pig pastures we should be focusing on high protein, high energy annuals.

 

Notes from My Novitiate: Moving Pigs to Pasture

Yesterday I was finally able to move the group of bigger pigs out to pasture. I am hoping to move the group of smaller pigs out today.

Two days ago, I hooked up the trailer and drove it over to the lease farm. I had about an hour and a half to load the pigs up and move them to their pasture before I had to leave to drive to Connecticut to check out a group of eighteen feeders pigs that I was thinking about buying. An hour and a half seems like plenty of time doesn’t it? Not! There is a loading chute at the lease farm that makes dealing with the pigs pretty easy. However, there is no forcing pen leading to the chute. The chute entrance is just in the corner of the barnyard. Alone, I can’t drive the pigs into the chute. I have to lure them. Twelve out of the thirteen went right into the chute. One however, swung out to the side at the last second and went alongside the chute on the barnyard side. Initially, I didn’t worry about her. I closed the chute gate and drove a group of the pigs down the chute and onto the trailer. I had hoped to get them all, but about half of them zipped by me to the wider part of the chute. I closed the center divider on the trailer to lock that first group inside and then I went back for the rest of them.

At that point, I needed to get that lone pig into the chute. I couldn’t leave her and come back for her later because she was one of the smaller ones and could get under the barnyard gate. Ordinarily two strands of electrified wire kept the pigs away from the gate. But, in order to get them to the chute, I needed to remove the wire, and, more importantly, I needed to take the fence energizer from the barnyard to the pasture. I could put the wire back up, but I wasn’t confident that she would think it was electrified. So, she would have to load. After about ten minutes of luring and cajoling, I nearly lost the group that had been happily munching away on some grain in the chute because I hadn’t realized that they had finished the grain. Just before they started to march out of the chute, I was able to swing the gate shut. Leaving the lone pig in the barnyard, I climbed into the chute and drove the pigs down it and into the trailer and closed the door.

In spite of the fact that that lone pig now really wanted to be with her friends who had suddenly gone out of sight but could still be heard and smelled, she simply would not go more than two feet into the chute. I had her in it once, but when she saw the gate swinging closed, she turned and scrambled. Of course, I wasn’t holding the gate with the sort of grip necessary to fend off a determined surge from a 100 pound pig. She just put her nose to the ground and hit the bottom rung of the gate with that great big thick rooting muscle on the back of her neck and the gate popped out of my hand and swung open, and out she went. I am not even sure if I could have held her in if I been holding the gate as tightly as I could. I think I would have just been flung forward with the gate.

To make a long story short, after about who knows how long of futilely trying to get that pig into the chute, I was out of time, so I grudgingly walked to the trailer and opened the door and let the pigs out. Then I walked to the divider and swung it open and let the rest of the pigs out. Then I ran them all back up the chute and into the barnyard. After feeding and watering them (it was lunch time), I unhooked the trailer from the truck and drove off to Connecticut.

Those pigs did not get supper that night.

Yesterday morning, I tried again with some very hungry pigs. Five minutes. It took all of five minutes. The pigs flowed into that chute like water with stupid Number 70, my antagonist from the day before, practically leading the way. They all hopped onto the trailer where there were a couple of troughs of grain waiting for them. I closed the door, loaded up the truck with the rest of the feed troughs, waterers, fence energizer, etc., and drove off down the road to the pasture. The whole process, from loading to unloading took maybe thirty minutes.

This might sound pretty corny and cliche, but seeing a group of pigs munching on lush tufts of green grass and clover is so much more satisfying than seeing them rooting around in the dusty dirt, or worse shitty mud, of a barnyard. They looked like a totally different group of pigs.

 

Notes From My Novitiate: Mixing Groups of Pigs

Pigs, like all of our livestock species are herd animals. They are very social. They also have a very strong sense of hierarchy. Each pig knows, claims, or is put in its place. The claiming and putting is often extremely violent, but, in my limited experience, only occasionally dangerous. I have seen little more than a scratch here or there after a battle for position in the hierarchy. However, in spite of the fact that little harm generally results, for someone who doesn’t like to see animals suffer or experience stress, watching these herd hierarchy conflicts can be quite difficult, especially when a dominant animal goes after a submissive one and won’t let up. It doesn’t happen all that often, but when it does it is ugly. I have felt compelled to intervene once or twice. Usually, hierarchy conflict is explosively violent, but over quickly.

(A note on intervening: Even small animals are substantially stronger, relatively speaking, than we are, and when they are in a fight, no matter how tame and sweet the animals are under ordinary circumstances, they might turn on you. Never, ever, try to get between two large animals in a real battle, especially if one or both of those animals is a male and reproduction has anything to do with it. The previous owner of my farm, who knew absolutely nothing about horses, but started a horse farm anyway, was nearly killed by a stallion about two months before the closing on the property when he tried to get between that stallion and a mare who had gotten out of her paddock. The stallion broke the guy’s shoulder, broke a bunch of his ribs, smashed his head, and nearly broke his back, all in about five seconds.)

Because of this strong and violently established sense of hierarchy, mixing groups of pigs is a challenge, and should really be avoided if possible. It is not always possible, however. When it is necessary, the animals should ideally be able to meet and get to know each other through a fence line for a few days. This introduction mitigates, but doesn’t prevent entirely, the conflict when they are put together.

The first time I had to mix two groups of pigs was last year. I had a group of three pigs that I needed to put in with a group of ten. The ten pigs were Berkshires, which are black, and the three were commercial crosses, of which two were black and one was white. When my mother was a freshman in highschool (about 1962?) her biology teacher tried to use the example of the seemingly color-based conflict between gray and black squirrels as justification for racism (this was in a school in a suburb of Syracuse, NY, not somewhere in the south, by the way). In spite of the fact that such a justification for racism is absurd, there does seem to be some sense on the part of pigs that pigs that are substantially different colors are less welcome than those that are the same color. That poor white pig suffered at least twice as much abuse as those two black crossbreds. It was a week before those crossbreds, especially the white one, could sleep with both eyes closed.

This year so far I have had to mix pigs four times, and each time has gone pretty smoothly, even though I have not had the opportunity to introduce them between a fence line. They fought and chased each other around for a while, but after a few hours, they had settled down. The boss in one group wore herself out trying to put down all five new pigs. She put three down pretty easily, but the other two felt they deserved a higher position in the group. It seems that she kept her position, but by the time she was finished she was exhausted. She walked off and collapsed in a heap and then rolled onto her side, her chest heaving. I went over to make sure she wasn’t cut or hurt. When I started rubbing her shoulder she sat up on her butt like a dog and leaned into my fingers. When I stopped she lay back down and took a great big breath. I checked back in on her about an hour later and she was up rooting around in the barnyard. The new pigs were at a respectable distance from her. I could see them watching her out of the corner of their eyes.

Yesterday evening, just about an hour before dark, I put four new pigs in a group of ten, and that went very smoothly in spite of the fact that three of the four pigs were a different color (so much for the color theory?). They hardly fought at all.

What I have learned by reading and through my very limited experience:

• When possible, let the groups get to know each other through a fenceline for a couple of days before putting them together
• Try to introduce groups in as similar numbers as possible. A single pig introduced into a group will likely have a lot of trouble
• Try to match groups by size, or introduce groups that are opposite sizes. I introduced eight thirty pound pigs into a group of four 100 pound pigs and the bigger pigs hardly did anything more than sniff the little pigs and occasionally toss them with their snouts
• Pigs seem to have a sense that differently colored pigs are less welcome than similarly colored ones, so don’t be surprised if differently colored pigs suffer more abuse
• Even when the introduction goes badly, the violence is generally not dangerous, and eventually the pigs will work it out. Be prepared, however, to deal with a week to ten days of feeding, watering, and sheltering, the abused pigs separately until things settle down. I had to feed and shelter those three crossbred pigs separately for about four days. The other pigs weren’t letting them eat or near the shelter at all
• The damage done by big pigs to other big pigs is more likely to be substantial than that done by little pigs to other little pigs. A guy I met recently nearly lost a sow after backing her out of her farrowing crate after five weeks and putting her directly into a pen with two other sows and a boar (all of which she had been with before). He has had pigs all his life, but he only recently started using farrowing crates. He hadn’t realized just how much muscle and body condition a sow would lose after doing nothing but laying down and standing up for five weeks, all the while producing gallons and gallons of milk. In less than an hour, one of the other sows nearly killed her. It took three hours for her to muster the energy to walk fifteen feet from the breeding pen to another pen. She would take a few steps and collapse and just lay on the ground for an hour. It was two days before she could stand for more than five minutes at a time. She was pretty much recovered after about a week
• Never, ever get between two animals in a conflict over reproduction