Forest Pigs with a Permaculture Expert

hey there got another video for you guys today at o'fusky farm and this one is all about managing pigs in the forest and some of the ways that bobby uses pigs to help clear land regenerate things and really set it up for more diverse uses in the future really going into really raw uh really thick wooded areas and getting them ready to do some more pasture management and moving sheep through in the future and all those sorts of things so hope you enjoy all right bobby thanks for having me out again today and we're going to talk all about pigs and sort of management in the woods and what you're using them for yeah yeah we've we've raised pigs pretty much the whole time we've been farming and you know we first started doing it as a way to get rid of sod areas that we wanted to transition into more perennial diversified perennial systems and then that moved into using them these are bigger breeds at the time to dig ponds and do shallow earth works as well as increase the fertility on our lands that had been cropped and had a lot of at a low level of mineral nutrient fertility so with the pig rotations you can kind of in all the feed you're putting into them for that enterprise you're then building up fertility for a next level of perennials at our farm now over here what we're going to talk about is how we're using pigs on other properties that we don't own we haven't put all the permanent infrastructure in yet but using them as a tool to create silver pasture out of unmanaged woodland all right so there's a lot to talk about here what are some of the things that you want to want to show the audience today yeah i mean we'll do a quick pig move to this spot and then we'll just show different um before after kind of situations where the pigs have been and um the before will be like right before and then something that was done a few months ago just kind of see followed by some of the post pig management practices that we're doing as we thin and and take some of those uh those um trimmings into other useful products sounds great we're about to move our pigs um from about a four day three-day paddock to a new paddock here in the woods um on a property we've been we've been managing with these swine for uh i don't know they've been over here for probably a year in this case we're jumping across an access road so we're not um just opening up a gate into a connected paddock so we're gonna lure them with a little bit of food they know the drill just down this path and into this this new paddock here [Music] all right bobby so in terms of the setup here i mean we got um portable fencing and this is your water here this is all you basically need for them yeah we're in a pretty um remote property you know this is something that we've just taken over management of the past half a year year or so so we've yet to put in permanent infrastructure like perimeter fencing and any water line so we've been everything's been kind of portable and hauling water you can see we've we've got a tote on a trailer we'll fill up um from our farm and bring it down this sort of center access road and use it to fill these these waters it just has a a gravity nipple a stainless steel nipple that the pigs can can pull water from it's very uh efficient when it comes to water usage all right so in terms of feed what are they eating right now see right now they're eating a mix of a lot of cold fruit from our farm stuff that was bad or ground fallen fruit we'll just pick up and feed them or stuff we call out of when we're sorting they've got their base feed is a non-gmo uh grain swine feed that we get through country farm and home and a coal trail mix that comes out of some some plant that i don't know what it doesn't meet their spec and so it's relatively cheap way to add a little fat um towards the end of their their life cycle and what and what percentage i mean they're obviously foraging while they're out here too is that like a good percentage of their diet oh yeah we we um we've sort of taken a a rude hog or die approach with this second phase of hog production that we've been doing i don't know the past five years you know we started with large breed sort of tamworth old spot berkshire breeding program filling up a feed band getting them to market as fast as possible so the phase two we got back into the smaller breed which is american guinea hog way more efficient on um you know putting weight from forage and um crossing that in with with the aussie ball so both of those are are sort of unique both um heritage breed we could you know both are interesting to look into they real high quality uh fat different kind of darker pork and really good in this system we were looking for you know a small breed that did well in pasture with not as many feed inputs so throughout the most of their life span you're looking at the last eight or at least the slowest growing of a group of between like 30 or 40 when we stopped our breeding program this is sort of the the last group that's going to the processor in in a couple weeks and you know we're kind of finishing them out now but you know like i said it's been limiting their feed that really forces them to you know forage for as much of their food as possible you know pushing into some of the the less desirable things that we kind of want to eradicate as we're taking um clearing out these unmanaged woodlands into silva pasture so do you regulate the amount of feed you basically give them or what you're feeding them based on like what you want them to eat out here does that make sense yeah yeah i mean for the for the most of their life or the past their adult life they've been getting you know how to translate this into pounds you probably have eight mature pigs we're getting five to six pounds of feed a day so it's like eight yogurt scoops plus whatever other scraps were able to amass at that time all right so part of your workout here is regenerating the landscape building pasture and so do you often follow the pigs with some seeding pretty much pretty much always we're using that this this ground disturbance to go ahead and move the plant species population more into something that is desirable for for our animals we don't want to let if you just let it sit undisturbed yeah stuff's going to you know grow but is it going to be what we necessarily want to be there the disturbance what we're seeing here is kind of an odd case where you're getting heavy disturbance along some areas and them not really really going at the this this this weed i hadn't identified that we've seen sort of grow up down here and the sheep haven't eaten it because this is really part of this greater sheep pasture [Music] so we're kind of moving them out of here a lot of that depends there's typically a five day is the max duration for any paddock that will keep the pigs in you know we keep them moving and they would wouldn't be back for a year or more in some cases they don't come back and it's the right amount of disturbance that lets us come in and do any hand management hand thinning or mechanical stuff following the pigs but yeah i would say with the pigs we're usually always seeding something depending on the time of the year now that we're kind of pushing in towards the cool season planting window here being late august we're doing a mix fescue which is something that does well in these shaded understory silver pasture environments not a great ecological species but you know there's there's certain benefits to it and then a brown top millet is just sort of a help get some short cover biomass all right so you're using the pigs for disturbance obviously and then you're following with what you would like to try to get growing here yeah and we will we will we will often always put out like a a native seed mix of things just as we diversify just to just to take advantage of that opportunity and disturbance and a lot of times it's seed that we just collect off our specimens around our farm it goes into a bag and we throw some of that in to our feed bag and you'll you know and we've seen we've seen all kinds of things spread throughout the properties so this is the first time the pigs have been on this spot we decided to go ahead and move them prematurely just because of the soil wetness and the rain we've had into a new paddock and like i said they're only got a few weeks left of their life we're trying to march them back down cover as much ground as you can yeah i mean it's been been a wet year so one of the benefits of that you know is the amount of you know fungi that's growing up in the woods and you know also benefit of with the frequent moves with the pigs and being out in the woods is you can come across some good finds these are chanterelle mushrooms they're pretty easy to identify by their color their false gill and their their smell it's kind of similar to apricots but you know there's usually a perk you're always foraging and finding something else out there where you're attending livestock and you know take the time to sit and sit and think being in the woods is a peaceful place to be so yeah i just pigs is a vast topic in terms of using them as a tool on the land so just to add you know specific context of what we're doing over here so we've got unmanaged woodland there's a lot of mature hardwoods there's some you know some pines that are kind of at the end of their life cycle need to be harvested and you sort of have a instead of some monocultures of species as part of the herbaceous ground layer and what we're trying to do is to get in and get more carbon flowing through this system by moving it towards a more of a savannah system so we've got more grass species in the understory that are more efficient at storing carbon than trees they need a lot less rest every time you you know graze it and get the root die back so we're using the pigs as kind of a way to to knock out what's what's here so we'll take the pigs usually you know one or two strand poly wire not the netting that's a different story but most pigs pretty much be managed with one or two strands of polywire which is a huge advantage there makes it easy to get into scrubby woods let the pigs take that first like cut you know again you're trying to stock them dens you know get the right stocking density so they can give you the amount of disturbance you want within a certain amount of time because you know soil compaction and disturbance is a function of the duration of time more so than the number of animals in that one area so we don't want to completely turn up all the soil we just kind of wanted to to eat all the good stuff or the stuff we're trying to get rid of take a bunch of energy away from that rough up the soil enough where we can then seed in and at the same time they've kind of soaked up all the ticks they've the pigs go for poison ivy right away they love to eat poison ivy and so it makes it so much cleaner than come in with a chainsaw you know and we'll sort of we'll thin out and cut the less desirable things either bucking them up and set and stack them for firewood or making you know chip piles that will come in later when the soil conditions are right to chip leave on site or to haul back to our farm for fertility all right so this area behind you this is you have not moved any animals through this is this is this is land that hasn't been touched by the pigs yet and then we'll go see sort of what it looks like okay and sort of you know to compare like what happens in nature right like the animals don't stay in one spot for too long yeah absolutely i mean pigs can be a they can be a liability or an asset from an ecological standpoint so you got to keep your animals moving you know rest and rotation is is crucial to everything and and and the and with the pigs uh soil moisture is important so it's nice if you can raise a pig just through the growing season when it's typically drier you know stop pigs over the winter but obviously if you're breeding them it's it's a different story but you know so so soil moisture does affect the amount of damage that's happening and how fast you ought to move them like like up there we decided we need to keep we need to go ahead and move them okay so eventually what is the what is this land going to be used for after you guys have done some work in here um i mean long term this will be this will be thinned out slowly into a silva pasture trying to get more light into that understory um get younger species we can let in another age of you know canopy hardwoods oaks and hickories selecting those maybe taking out the ones that fall or age out but yeah i mean it is a long-term our goal here this is land that we don't we don't own we're managing for others and they're fine us moving towards this vision um so yeah silver pasture for sheep primarily okay cool so for future animal grazing yes okay yeah so you want to look at some areas that you've already moved through sure let's do that yeah just here's an area that is was the pigs were on three weeks or so earlier we seeded out and you can see a pretty high density of grass starting to establish minus the the um previous ground cover that was here yeah you can obviously see like a lot of the plants that we're growing that they've been eating and then the ground looks a little bit disturbed obviously after being a few weeks but then again it's been wet it's been wet but also it's been planted too like the ground is covered pretty quickly yeah and we'll often seed depending on the size of the seed we're putting out we'll seed in like the last day the pigs are there to get some additional you know contact with the soil or soil cover but often it's like we'll seed out our cheap annuals you know after the pigs because usually we're going in and then doing any any cutting with the saw and we're kind of trampling that seed on so it'll be like several periods of seeding to kind of get it to a final mix at that point it's just using the sheep with their high impact rest system and if we want to seed in there but you know every time you're putting out seed you're spending money so if you can kind of you know establish some high priority areas with the good species and then coupling that with the bright grazing program you can take those desirable species and they will propagate out into the into the farm uh via wildlife okay so you were saying that generally this is the pigs come through here once a year or maybe they may not come again right well yeah they may not they may not come again so we're trying to you know it is taking a step backward you know to take two steps forward from a land regeneration process right but you're not thinking in terms of months or weeks worth of talking seasons and years absolutely yeah so yeah here's an area that was the pigs were on created their disturbance we've had sheep ran through here a couple times and we've been in with saws and chippers to do more thinning you know you couldn't see through this when we first came on here i mean it was super dense a lot of brambles a lot of other tree species that we've sort of pulled out we're leaving some you know predominant oaks hickories there's some pines that need to go to get a little bit more light in here and then you can see when the sheep come through particularly during the summer we'll cut down a lot of our our elms which have a pretty high protein in their leaf some go to the ground some get bucked up the tops chipped and depending on the size you can see we cut some up higher that's sort of coppicing or pollening back that will give us control during subsequent years to kind of come in and manage those those stems dropping those for for fodder okay so you've come through here mechanically and taken out a lot of these like trees and stuff and this really what are the benefits of that i obviously see more light coming through yeah we can we can start to get grass species and stuff um established in here and it hasn't had its permanent seeding yet it's still just been been annual so when the sheep come back in this fall we will take down probably some of the rest of the fodder species and do a heavy seeding of perennial grasses so yeah i mean the goal here is to get light favoring the mass producing trees but get light for our understory species and kind of see what what things are going to come up and you can kind of see through here all these areas have kind of been been managed that was way denser before and now we've getting more light you know more carbon moving through that that system because every time you come in and you crop this a tree too you're also getting a lot of root die back and um and regrowth um you know you know the the way to sequester a lot of carbon in a forest is you need to have mix shade stands you actually need to harvest it short duration woody crops really do well for sequester and carbon in the system and that's kind of what we're doing with a lot of the species that we plant even with live steak or we favor with our pruning systems of pollening is to get a lot of short duration um uh woody crops or a dual-purpose spotter species they've got a lot of benefits in the system from mining nutrients that have leached down into the deeper soil profile providing shade to even helping open up poor draining soils because every time you're you're cutting those those plants back like willows that's a lot of like major root dieback and big macropores you're opening up into the soil to help increase infiltration and drainage okay so obviously coming in here with like chainsaws and chippers and stuff it's a lot of work um and so what sort of determines like if the areas you want to do that versus sort of letting it be a little more natural yeah we're certainly not doing this everywhere but you know there's a lot of unmanaged woodland and um you know it comes back to what resources what conditions can we get in at the time from from labor soil conditions you know hitting your high priority access first i mean we pretty much ran pigs through this entire forested system at this point and um we're certainly working our way in with with the chipper as as labor allows um just you know to keep in mind how this land was managed for thousands of years it wasn't just unmanaged forest i mean it was a more of a savannah system you know even on the east coast from you know native people using fire to create um openings for grasslands that you had large you know herds of bison that were roaming this part of the country you know so it wasn't untapped unmanaged wilderness like we sometimes think yeah and instead of using fire we're using other other tools the tools of grazing and animal impact via the technology of portable electric fencing you know to replace that disturbance regime that you know used to be fire both managed and unmanaged by by people yeah pollarding is just a type of coppicing you know typically off you know a central trunk above a browse line where you can manage all the all the regrowth this is an old world practice you know there's a lot of uses for that top growth from you know fodder hay to doing basketry to fuel wood to even you know fruit and nuts so this is sort of what we're doing it's a pretty simple thing to do and most most hardwood species here are prone towards being able to coppice to regrow when they're cut back because when all this land was clear-cut well the things that that survived were things that could could cop us for the most part so coppice is re-growth after a cutting uh yeah i think it's more of a technique but things that ability to to re-sprout and regrow from the main trunk after being cut back so i think coppice would be more of a general term or palleting is a specific type of coppicing so for sheep this is fine i mean you know they're going to come in they're going to eat the low stuff we're trying to move you know everything down to a more browse height but really the main point of regrowth is going to be concentrated here at some point and that'll give us management where we can cut that back every every uh with some sort of rope you know rotation every three years we'll cut one hard lay it down for the sheep while they're in here okay so so the benefit really here is you get that the benefits from that new regrowth but you get bring it to a height where the animals can eat it yeah yeah and again trying to get you know take advantage of this sort of like mid-story sort of range where we're favoring canopy species and herbaceous under layer where we can still get some additional fodder for our summer grazing but have control over it if we were just cutting it to the ground and we continued grazing at the same frequency for our grass species we would deplete the energy out of this this tree and and kill it and weaken it so if we can get stuff higher where then we can allow a little bit more rest we can keep this thing thriving for many many years okay and you're also getting a lot more control of shade as well yep you get controlled shade to that tube yeah so this is an area and we've like said we've ran pigs through this whole chunk of woods uh part of the reason is sort of getting up and marking the property line so we can put in perimeter fencing um this year uh this winter and starting to really you know take a first punch first cut it at opening up this woodland like i said this was all mostly that sort of um wild grate kind of ground cover which the sheep will eat a little bit of but it's just it was a monoculture so the pigs have been through here um and we'll come in and you know cut up some stuff and put it in chip piles a lot of times the the junkie or cedar the tops they don't chip well put those in piles burn it like right here and you know that stuff will get raked out we'll take the cedar poles that within a certain size uh for doing um top post on our corner bracing so we'll set those aside or for other building projects um and then we also use cedar as a lot of our um like kenlin and initial fuel wood for our our stoves in the winter time it burns real hot and clean so you can see you know piles like that that gets stacked up and crotches of trees off the ground so when we come back through with a small trailer we'll just load it up and take it to the barn you know we don't really waste this is too shady to invest in um like summer annuals in this system so we just will put down we won't do much so there's still some disturbance this was a lot drier when the pigs were here so there wasn't like uh as much soil disturbance happening there's still a lot of organic matter on the topsoil to protect the soil and you had good you know tree canopy to intercept the rainfall but you can still see the young cool season grasses starting to flush but we will bring the pit the sheep through here in a few months or at least when that fencing is up and then we'll just trample seed in our are more permanent cool season seed because you will get once all these leaves are down you're going to have some really nice spring um you know late spring grazing during a kind of a not that we need to forge at that time but you know you'd be surprised how how green this this this opens up with the initial thinning we've been doing cool well a lot to show here bobby and this is such a complicated topic obviously um it yeah i think that's the thing is like you learn and you um your experiment and um there's a lot to to learn and share here and appreciate sharing this with everybody and you know just using pigs and uh basically in the forest here to to use it for future purposes so yeah trying to you know again they're not a long-term thing it's a very short-term one-time tool and move on to something better very cool well at the same time we're growing we're growing pigs for food but we're also yeah tasty pig we're also generating the the landscape here so yes sir thanks for sharing thank you

Channel: Josh Sattin Farming

Views: 120,519

Keywords: farming, farming for profit, farming business, micro farming, urban farming, urban micro farming, urban farmer, regenerative farming, regenerative agriculture, sustainable farming, sustainable agriculture, no till farming, no till garden, no-till gardening, no-till farming, organic farming, organic vegetable gardening, market gardening, market gardening for profit, suburban farming, suburban farmer, permaculture, homestead, homesteading, garden, gardening

Id: o53nJsHvmVo

Length: 25min 12sec (1512 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 06 2020