permaculture

[Cory Brennan <cory8570@yahoo.com>]

We set up a pig tractor this summer at Pine Ridge reservation, and it worked 
great. The pig ate all the weeds except vervain, tilled the soil, and 
replanted squash seeds and curly dock for us - when we noticed that, we 
started feeding her stuff we wanted planted and that worked pretty good too. 
We planted cover crops where she dug, and that worked good too, tho it 
started getting too hot and dry, and with no irrigation, the pioneers we 
didn't want (like goathead) were coming back in so we moved her back to a 
permanent pen. But I would do that again in an instant to clear a field 
rather than manually doing it. She worked really fast too - in only a few 
days, her pen area would be cleared. We were using her to clear a fairly 
large space for a food forest, but only got a small portion of it done. What 
I will do next spring if we still have access to her is put some composted 
manure and straw in the pen, let her dig that in while she eats the weeds (she
 doesn't leave enough manure herself in the few days it takes her to eat 
stuff, though there is some), then plant cover crop and nitro fixers as soon 
as we move her. It would be a relatively labor free way of turning the 
compacted clay pioneer soil into food forest material...

Cory 


________________________________
From: Robyn Francis <robyn@permaculture.com.au>
To: permaculture <permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org>
Sent: Monday, October 10, 2011 5:56 PM
Subject: Re: [permaculture] PIGS AT WORK

Just posted this article & photo journal on my website which some of you
might find interesting...

http://permaculture.com.au/online/articles/piggies-at-work-%E2%80%93-feature
-article-photo-journal

Pigs are amazing biological ploughs ­ their snout is exceptionally strong
and designed for excavating the earth in search of tasty morsels buried
underground, especially tubers and roots, and also fungi and insects. In
Permaculture there is frequent reference to use of pigs as tractoring
animals and I¹ve always been intrigued as to how effective they would be.

In 2006 I was gifted a pair of 4-month-old piglets for Djanbung Gardens,
supposedly miniature, though now fully grown are about half the size of
commercial or large pig breeds. The pigs, named Polly and Pudge, were
initially kept in a mobile pen (made from 6 old metal bed bases) to get to
know them and their behavioural patterns to inform the design of an
appropriate system to integrate them into the scheme of the gardens.


Robyn


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We're learning about pigs as plows as well on our farm here in western
Wisconsin. We have 8 pigs in a movable pen made with hog panels and an older
sow in a pen. It's a lot of work moving those hog panels around every few
days, so next year we're probably not going to raise pigs since we have
other stuff we need to focus on. Unless our sow is pregnant, in which case
we'll give it another go.

You certainly learn a lot about the soil watching pigs root around. We've
had excellent late yields in the gardens that our pigs tilled up for us this
summer. Now I'm trying to figure out how to get these pigs all the way over
to our cabbage and potato patches to plow those under, but they are on
raised beds and a few acres away from where they are. Anybody have any
experience with larger tractor pulled pig tractors?

Here's a blog post about some of our pig experience:
http://ltdfarm.com/?p66


Andrew French
LTD Farm