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  • From: "John D'hondt" <dhondt@eircom.net>
  • To: "permaculture" <permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [permaculture] pigs at work
  • Date: Tue, 11 Oct 2011 23:10:06 +0100


We used to train our pigs from an early age to follow a bag with food and we walked them over some distances to where we wanted them. Even at six months of age untrained pigs can still be trained in less than a week to more or less do what you want.
We never had a tractor.
If you don't have a boar I would not think your older sow would be pregnant for to a sow size matters. She would never stand for a young and smaller male in my experience. But if you have male and female young pigs together one of the slips could very well be covered by one of her brothers from 8-9 months onward.
john

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/?p=1966


Andrew French
LTD Farm
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