Moving Pigs

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posted on

May 7, 2024

Pigs are back on pasture at Polyface! Kept warm and snuggly all winter, we've returned our pigs to their usual home - the pigerator paddocks.

Pastured pigs are not only a lot of fun to raise, but the by-products of bacon, sausage, ham, and more make pigs well worth it. What all goes into raising pigs on pasture?

Our pig pastures are set up mainly in forest/silvopasture settings.

We run one or two strands of wire at the height of the pigs’ noses. Pigs don’t have great eyesight so the wire needs to be easy for them to see and kept at a high voltage. This means we often trim around the paddocks to keep the wires free from overgrowth and tall grass. In each paddock, there is a “doorway” to the next paddock which is closed with wooden gates. Pigs have an easier time moving from paddock to paddock through the wooden gates because they can see it better and can tell when it's open.

When we go to move the pigs, we drive out to the pasture with a tractor hooked up to a feed buggy. After letting ourselves into the paddock, we open the gate to the next paddock, scoop up their feeder with the tractor (we time the moves so that it is empty now), bring it to their new pasture, and fill it with fresh feed. All of our feed is non-GMO whole grain feed milled at a local farm and tested for glyphosate residue.

While we do this task, we drain the pigs' water tank (which is simply connected to our gravity-fed water system) and enjoy watching the pigs explore their new setting.

During the fall, the pigs enjoy rooting through leaves and crunching on acorns; in the spring and summer, they enjoy the fresh grass and greens that each paddock offers. And if they are lucky, they will find or make some mud!

After the water drinker has been drained and moved (usually we tip this and roll it over the electric wires to the next paddock) and we have moved the tractor out of the new paddock we look for any last pigs that haven't moved yet and coax them to join their friends in the new space. Then we close the wooden gates again and electrify the fence. We then head back to park the tractor and feed buggy, leaving the pigs to enjoy their best life!

Polyface does not farrow (breed/birth) our own pigs but we buy weaned pigs from some other great farmers around us.

When we get new piglets, we keep them in a barn pen for a few weeks where they can be trained to electric fencing. Once the pigs are big enough to be out on pasture and are trained to the wire, we load them up deliver them to their pasture paradise.

After months of feasting on good feed and enjoying their roomy forested paddocks, when our pigs are “finished” and ready for the butcher, part of our team goes to “yeehaw” them down the mountain and back to the barn. (It sounds far more exciting and high energy than it is.) Carrying a stick or “sort-board” (lightweight plastic boards with handles) we gently herd them out of their paddock and down the gravel farm-road. Just don’t let the pigs get the best of you! To herd pigs, much patience and quiet coaxing are required to make the pigs think it's THEIR idea to go the way you want them to go.

Our pigs spend most of their time out on pasture but, in the cold of winter, when the pigs are bedded down in a hoop house or barn, we spread old hay over their bedding about once a week to freshen things up and give them something to play with and cozy up in. In the spring, the pigs also work for us in the barns, stirring the bedding (pigaerating) and turning the cows' manure into rich compost. As you can see, the Polyface pigs play lots of roles here on the farm!

I hope this has given you a small glimpse of the work and joy of raising pigs! If you're ever near Swoope, VA, come visit the pigs yourself and see them in real time - living their best piggy lives!

Priscilla

Food Shortages

I'm in Oregon today speaking at the Azure Harvest Festival and a question from the audience during a Q&A stimulated a lot of discussion: "What do you think about the possibility and preparation surrounding food shortages?" David Stelzer, founder of Azure Standard, answered that the issue is not food volume, it's food nutrition. That was an interesting answer that has a lot of merit. As a nation, we are overfed and undernourished. This is the crux of the MAHA movement and the epidemic diseases we see in our country. At Polyface, we know the pastured meat and poultry we produce is far superior in essential phytochemicals and other nutrients due to the carotenes, exercise, and stress-free habitat we offer. You can taste the difference, feel the difference in texture, and measure it empirically. Perhaps my most poignant affirmation was our cat test. We purchased meat from the supermarket and offered our own for the four cats. They wouldn't touch the conventional meat (ground beef). Even though two plates and four cats would be much easier to accommodate if they spread out, all four crowded around the plate with our meat, eating it all and licking it up, before later sniffing and gingerly eating the supermarket counterpart. Since cats don't understand TV ads or USDA propaganda, they know what's good and what's not. We encourage anyone dismissive of food differences to ask their pets: you can trust them far more than doctors and experts. Yes, I get the nutrient deficiency angle on the shortage question. But I'd like to explore it a bit further. Right now, the world throws away more human-edible food, as a percentage of production, than at any time in human history. The planet is awash in food. Some 40 percent gets thrown away because it has a slight blemish, exceeds the sell-by date, or is tainted in some way. We have a fundamentally segregated food supply rather than an integrated one, and that creates a lot of unusable waste. The vulnerabilities of our food system, I think, are much more subtle. When I was in Uruguay two years ago, speaking at a conference, one of the other presenters was from Germany and showed a soil map of the globe. Not a single commercial agricultural region had a stable or positive soil trajectory. Every single area on the planet is losing soil; some faster than others, but globally our soil depletion continues without any sign of abatement. This is not a good trajectory. As much as the technocrats promise food without soil, that's not the way to bet. Soil is the skin of the earth. When it goes, famine results. The main difference now compared to centuries ago is that we have the capacity to move food around. Nobody starves due to a lack of food on the planet; they starve due to socio-political unrest and dysfunction. But what happens when massive areas can't grow anything anymore? Even being able to move food around doesn't help when there isn't enough. The soil trajectory does not look good. But at Polyface, we're building soil. Areas covered with shale (layered rocks) half a century ago now have a foot of soil on them. That's not the 3-5 feet that 150 years of inappropriate tillage eroded, but it's a build-back start. In addition to soil loss, as a planet we're seeing hydrologic decreases. The Oglala aquifer, which undergirds the irrigated agriculture in five states, has dropped more than 100 feet in the last half-century. At its current rate, it will be unpumpable in about 50 more years. Imagine if all those circular irrigation pivots in Nebraska and Kansas shut down. What then? At Polyface, we keep building ponds to inventory surface runoff. By definition, surface runoff occurs when rains come too fast at once or too much at one time for the soil to absorb it. Holding that and using it strategically in a drought is a way to reduce flooding during rain events and grow grass when it gets dry. This is one of the most landscape resilient techniques we can implement. Finally, major animal and plant diseases threaten the world's food systems like never before. African swine fever, hoof and mouth disease in cattle, and bird flu in poultry appear to be getting worse and covering larger areas. Why? We believe it's because chemicals and factory farming compromise the immunological systems in both plants and animals. Monocrops and chemical fertilizers wreak havoc on immune systems, opening the planet's food systems to new levels of fragility. In contrast, at Polyface, we believe happy animals and biodiversity offer the best antidote to immunological deficiency. Stress from unsanitary conditions, mono-species density, or dietary deficiency (rations or fertilizer) invites disease. Nature uses disease to cull the weak. Predators pick off the stragglers. This is the way biology works. But at Polyface, we keep these vulnerabilities at bay with compost fertilization, pasture rotations, and lots of species diversity, including pollinators and wildlife. Here's the point: the basic long-term vulnerabilities in the planet's food systems could all be reversed with practices Polyface uses every day. Looked at another way, the entire food shortage question could be answered if eaters and farmers implemented these ecological and immunological protocols, working together to rather than completely separated. We don't need to fall into an abyss of starvation. If we all simply began eating food from farms that build soil, increase water, and stimulate immunity, we could deliver a hospitable, abundant planet to our children. Reversing these trajectories wouldn't take much time or money. It takes intentionally-minded folks who connect the chain of sustenance from their plate to the planet. Polyface patrons do that. Thank you. Let's heal the land together. Joel

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Moving Pigs

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