permaculture

["John D'hondt" <dhondt@eircom.net>]

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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