Pastured Pigs - Act One - At Last

The girls enjoying the broomsedge. They love broomsedge roots, a new benefit to that "noxious weed"!

We've long detailed the onboarding experience of the Ossabaw pigs at Little Seed Farm. What was once envisioned as pigs rooting through the pasture quickly turned into a pallet-pen welcome package that was to last for many months. The escape (and general rowdiness) of the piglets made me question whether Ossabaws could ever work on pasture. If not, they weren't going to fit in the system we envisioned for our pork operation and they'd all be eaten, sold, or cross-bred.

So as the pigs grew fatter and gained experience in their wise old age I tested and monitored them. I already knew that as young pigs they were scared and excitable. Being Ossabaws (a still feral breed), that's to be expected. Each day I would get in the pen with the pigs to feed them and pet them. Luckily, they still ranged in the 25-100# weight-class and weren't yet big enough to really mess with me if they felt like it.

By the time November rolled around I was feeling very comfortable that the pigs knew and respected the electric fencing and that they knew (and not quite respected) me. They were ready for the ultimate "electric-fence-only" test. I am planning to breed the pigs in January, so I figured I might as well wait until then to set them loose inside an electric-fence-only paddock and risk the chance of them escaping. 

But as usual things didn't quite go according to plan. Also as usual, things turned out alright in the end.

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Pig Pen Expansion


Pig Maze?

While we're on the topic of letting wild animals loose, I might as well write about what the pigs have been up to. They aren't yet roaming in electrically fenced areas like the bucks (and the rest of our animals), but they're getting there. 

A few days ago I expanded their pallet pen for a second time. This time I wanted to create a chute so I could easily sort them and also give them a little more space. During the rennovation I realized it was a great time to test their willingness to plow through the electric fence.

For a little background on the pallet pens you can check out my prior posts: Pallet Pen for the Piggies and Revised Pig Pallet Pen. If you haven't read about The Great Ossabaw Escape, you should start with the Ossabaw? More Like Lostabaw post.

During this particular pen expansion I left the interior electric fence in the same place and I removed one pallet from the wall. The removed pallet will serve as the "chute" and also as the fence testing area. Right now there's a whole separate area of pasture that the pigs can see, but only the electric wire stands in their way.

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Revised Pig Pallet Pen

New and improved pig pallet pen

A few weeks ago I wrote about the temporary pallet pens that we built for the pigs to train them to the electric fence. My expectation at the time was to release the pigs into larger paddocks within a few weeks. To my dismay, that hasn’t happened. I wrote a bit about the frustration with the pigs in a couple posts during my weekly column on Farm Dreams. You can find them here and here.

The short of it is that the pigs remained very small and tightly wound. I wasn’t making a lot of progress with getting them to calm down and/or respect the electric fence. Sure, the electric fence was inside the pens and it would zap them if they touched it, but I noticed they were touching it a lot. At first I thought they might not be respecting it the way it was intended. I figured I’d give it a couple weeks and see if they learned better.

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