How to house, feed and keep pigs

Why keep pigs

Easy really.  Once their areas and housing are sorted they pretty much take care of themselves.  They provide us with Liver, Kidney, bacon, Pancetta, Roast dinners, Ribs, Chops, sausages, salami, ham, prosciutto and a variety of other great food besides all the manure.  We manage, with skilful rotation, to maintain enough pigs to keep us supplied with everything we need and they are also a fairly useful waste disposal facility.  If you are worried about the smell don't be.  If you clean them out every day you probably be totally unaware of them.  That said they can be a tad noisy especially females in heat or a male who can smell a female in heat.

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Type and General Information

We have smallish pot-bellied pigs, not sure of the actual breed but they are either pink with black spots or black with white feet and have a straight tail.  They get to a maximum of around 50kgs although we rarely let them get to that size, especially the males who can tend to become aggressive when they get to 18 months old.  If you spend time in and around them they are quite friendly and will welcome a back rub, if you just see them at feeding time they will scatter when you come near.  Pigs are creatures of habit (aren’t we all really) – establish a routine and stick with it.

Pig Shaming

Some shaming for you....a drugs bust in the pigsty and major excavations

Housing

We have been through many iterations of housing for pigs.  We started out with a simple pig ark that Jarvo designed and built which sadly turned out to be woefully inadequate.  It would never have kept them warm and they were able to move it where they wished and even started to eat it.  The next step was to construct what was effectively a wooden barn around the ark….they ate it.  At one stage we wanted to separate a male from a female who had just given birth so made an extra entrance on the mothers’ side and built a divider between the male and that area.  He went through it in days.  Basically, the lesson is that a wooden structure will not do it for you, these buggers are strong so build something they can’t destroy.  All our pigs houses are now constructed from concrete blocks, they can’t eat them, move them or even do minor renovations.

Area

We learned that if you wish to continue with pigs and we mean breeding for food, you need four separate areas. In one area you keep your male and a female, the female when first moved into this area should ideally be in heat.  We will cover the signs to tell if a female is in heat later.  At first they will fight so we created two areas within the male area so that they could be initially separated by a fence to get used to one another, then after a few hours we open up and let them get on with it.  It can be very messy, they will go at each other like prize fighters but will eventually settle down.  Be aware and be ready just in case it gets too physical and one of them dies, either from a heart attack or injury, to slaughter immediately.

The second area is for a female who is about to give birth, the maternity area.  It is a secluded area close to the male area so effectively a simple move across.  Inside is a cosy house with 2 separate feeding troughs.  The first is close to the house for the time before she gives birth and the second is close to the gate.  After she has given birth we shift feeding to the top, well away from the house so as not to disturb the piglets.  When the piglets have started moving onto solids we switch to using both troughs.  The water can be refilled from outside again to avoid disturbing the piglets.
 
The third area is solely for fattening up.  In this area we put the pigs that we don’t wish to keep, either males or females who have failed on two occasions to produce and keep a litter.
 
The fourth area is what we call our main pigsty.  This is where we keep only females either weaned piglets or older females having a rest as it is unwise to breed them continually.  The main pigsty is as far away as possible from the male area as when the male smells a female in heat he will go through walls to get to her.

So, basically we have a rotation system.  When a female in the male area is near to birthing she is moved to the maternity area so that she can be alone to give birth in peace and solitude.  Once she is safe in the maternity area a female, preferably in heat is moved from the main pigsty to be with the male.  Once the pregnant female has given birth and the piglets are weaned, the males are moved to the fattening area, the females and the mother are moved to the main pigsty the female that was in with the male is moved to the maternity area and the next female in line is moved from the main pigsty to be with the male, about a 4 month cycle.

This is very important…….pigs dig so be prepared, concrete every fence line so they can’t escape.  The fence only needs to be small gauge and a minimum of 1m tall but ensure that if you join 2 pieces of fence together that you overlap by at least 60cm and cover the join with a bar of steel sunk into the concrete otherwise they will go through it.  Also consider your gates, they should open towards you so that you can clear snow to get inside and also they should be easy to open with one hand especially when you have food or straw in the other mitt.
 
The maternity area should have an additional perimeter of chicken wire up to a height of 30cms as the piglets are so small that they will walk through normal fence and we got sick and tired of pushing them back through fences.

If you have trees inside any pig area, protect them with fencing around the trunks to stop the pigs eating the bark and also place rocks around the base to stop them digging up the roots and rubbing themselves against the bark.  You may also have to drive in metal bars to stop the rocks being moved.  We have watched a pig flip over a 50kg rock with ease.
 
In all our pig areas we have made a simple wallow which is normally a meter square in area with shade over the top which we wet down regularly in the summer for them to lie in, they love it.

Food and Water

We feed our pigs a mixture of dry bran, dry farinaccio (a by-product from flour production high in starch) and rabbit pellets into which we will add anything we have lying around such as dodgy tomatoes, cooked potato peelings, fresh or winter hard zucchini, stale bread etc., etc.  They get about off a cup and a half per adult pig twice a day.  It's best to give them either a long trough or two separate ones as they love to rotate between eating locations.  We also supplement through the year with excess fruit, especially apples and figs, weeds and in the winter we gather acorns.  We tend to scatter the acorns and other supplements around the pig areas to give them something to forage for.

Never give pigs standing water as they will either tip it over, stand in it or just dunk their snouts in it which creates a stinky mess in no time at all.  We use pig nipples connected to 20 litre tanks which we refresh on a daily basis.  The nipple has a drain below which empties into a French drain.  Ideally the drain should be concrete covered as they will quickly dig it up to find somewhere to wallow in.

Care and Maintenance

If they have a decent area to wander and forage around in, a wallow and regular food and fresh water, pigs need little attention.  Be careful, as mentioned before, when introducing two pigs to one another as they can be very violent.  We have had two pigs keel over from a heart attack after a fight so be ready to slaughter at very short notice.  Pigs don’t smell if you ensure that you clean out their poop every day as we do, it either gets spread on the veg patch or goes into compost.

Breeding and Birthing

The gestation period for our pigs is 115 days which is bloody handy really.  It means that if we move a female in heat to be with the male we will know almost to the day when she will give birth.  Incidentally, you can tell when a pig is in heat a number of ways.  Firstly, there is an obvious pinkness and swelling to the lady bits at the back.   She will also make a horrendous squealing noise for up to five days and most disconcertingly she will follow you around and just stand next to you sometimes butting her rear end against you.  They will also show great interest in K’s poop bucket, especially if she has cleaned out the male first.   They come into heat every 21 days so you can check if she has been got to fairly easily by the male’s level of interest.

When we are sure that a female has been knocked up we wait until about a week before she is due and then move her to the maternity area for some peace and quiet to give birth.  Just before birth they will nest which is fascinating to watch and gives you a clue that things will be happening very soon.  If they have materials available such as trees and plants, they will rip them up and move them to where they intend to give birth.  If you are on top of things and know when they are due you can dump a load of straw over the fence and leave them to it.

The next female in line is then moved down to be with the male, they are social creatures that do not like to be alone so this is best done as soon as possible.  After birth we allow a maximum of ten weeks for weaning as males can be sexually mature very quickly and will knock the mother up at the first chance.  We move the mother and female babies up to the main sty and males to the fattening area if we don’t have freezer space for a suckling pig.  The next female in line will then be ready to be moved to the maternity area and the circle continues.

Pigs are great parents and will sing along to the piglets and fuss around them until they are almost weaned when they will do everything they can to avoid the things.  One thing to be aware of is that a pig who was your best friend will turn into a monster when she has babies in tow.  JC our favourite pig who Jarvo used to scratch every day turned into Margaret Thatcher after giving birth and marched up and bit him on the knee.  We give all our females 2 chances to have a good litter.  Some are brilliant and will have 5 or 6 the first time while some will only have a 1 or 2.  However, some of them seem incapable of milking the piglets and let them die, we don’t keep those pigs.

Catching and Moving Pigs

If you wish to catch a pig, especially the smaller ones, you need to get them into as small an area as possible.  We have created a small catchment area between the male area and the maternity area where we can pin them and grab the one we want with ease and as quickly as possible to avoid heart attacks for both parties.  When picking up a pig go for a back leg, lift it up and then grab the other back leg holding it belly away from you.  The noise will be horrendous….you have been warned.  Try not to alarm your pigs when you are getting ready to catch or move one. If they know something is up, they will be much more difficult to catch. Also, try not to have strangers about when you are moving them. They should be used to you, so don’t distress them by having a stranger loitering about when getting ready to make your move.

After a few years of adrenalin, chasing and sweating we have developed a system where we can quite easily segregate a pig and move it where we wish in seconds.  All you need is a corridor that leads to the new area, get the pig in that corridor and then keep it moving by running along behind it and clapping.

Just to re-emphasise, introducing pigs can be a tricky moment so make sure that there is a strong fence between them while they get to know each other, even then it can go horribly wrong as we have mentioned.  There has only been one occasion where they didn’t eventually settle down.  We moved a female to the main sty to be with two others who were well established there.  They fought continually and the new female took over the house and refused to let the other two inside.  We let it go for 3 days until we figured that they would freeze to death and moved the obnoxious female out again, she now lives in the freezer.

Problems

This is a recap really. They dig, boy do they dig so protect your area by concreting all fence lines.  Keep males and females well apart unless breeding.  Ensure fence joins are secure.  Do not give them wooden houses or troughs or standing water.  Protect trees.  If they charge at you, stand your ground and raise a foot, if necessary give them a kick on the snout, that normally deters them for a while.  Older males will become aggressive, especially if they can smell a female in heat.

Bonuses

It’s quite easy to bond with pigs if you spend time with them as long as you are always wary of them.  They produce a lot of shit which is great for the compost. The main bonus is the sheer variety of meat products you can get from the things.  We get liver, kidneys, roasts, chops, ribs, pancetta (they are too small to make decent bacon), pork steaks, many varieties of sausage, sausage patties which we love, burgers, lard and fancy stuff like hams and prosciutto.

You can actually train pigs – they are quite intelligent.  We taught ours the “Bucket Game”.  A month later, it was very aggressive so off to the freezer he went.