He DESTROYED his HOUSE! Our First Month with Idaho Pasture Pigs

hey everybody welcome back to living traditions homestead well it's been just about a month now that we've had our Idaho pasture pigs and I wanted to do a video to show you what we've learned about these guys in the first month that we've had them we are just absolutely excited about having them here on our farm and I really do think that these are gonna be an awesome solution for us and hopefully for you guys as well we're gonna go around today I'm going to show you the three pens that we have these are our two solves we have a boar so we're going to be breeding we're gonna have piglets born in the spring but we also have three piglets that we're raising up for food this year we're going to go over and see them as well because I've learned different things about each of the pigs and I want to go over those with you so you can make a good decision a wise decision for what will be right for your homestead all right let's start with the girls so let's start by talking about our girls here this is Mildred and that's Myrtle these are the two pigs that we bought as breeders so that we can have babies in the spring right off the bat the one thing that I've noticed about these guys is that they definitely live up to their reputation of not being big rooters since we've had them here they've really done minimal amounts of rooting around in the ground the stuff that they have rooted up is just kind of been on the surface but I can tell you in comparison to other pigs that we've raised for me by the time they got to be this size they were doing so much damage to the ground that by the time they were gone for the year it they had just destroyed pretty much everything these guys aren't doing that at all they're just they're really grazing they're going out and they're finding the few things that are already alive already and they're they're grazing and they are rooting up just the very surface but not much beyond that the other thing that I've noticed is just how gentle these guys are other pigs that we've had when we've gotten them to this size you know that you get in the pen with them and they're kind of pushing you around and they're being you know they're being kind of ornery but but these girls are just so gentle and you can be in with them and other than trying to eat your shoes every once in a while they're they're really just gentle pigs they sleep a lot I think they sleep probably more than other pigs that we've had but then they get up and they spend you know some time I'd say every couple hours I see them out you know walking around finding something to eat we're not free feeding them now we're just feeding them twice a day we're giving them both about two to two-and-a-half pounds of feed in the morning and about two or two-and-a-half pounds of feed in the evening it's about 5 pounds per Pig total per day [Music] [Music] okay I want to talk to you guys about the feeding stations that I built for the pigs I built one for each of the three pens and now that we've had them for a while and we've been using them everyday I want to show you how they're working out and tell you my thoughts on the design let's go over by Charlie I want to introduce you guys to Charlie our boar and we'll look at his feeding station okay girls you can go back to sleep now well we showed you guys in the first video we did before we even got the pigs about the shelter's we were building for them Charlie didn't really like his too much he toured the top off of it we used this really heavy vinyl material which I thought would be fine and he just tore it right off now the baby pigs they haven't touched theirs but for some reason Charlie I guess he didn't like those people smiling at him on the inside these used to be billboards and there were people smiling so I don't know he didn't like it so we had to move something else in there for him I'll show you that in a minute Charlie likes to use his feeding station here as a bed this is where he likes to sleep when I come out here he's known to sleep on us I don't know if he's just waiting for the next time I bring him food or if he likes being up off the ground here a good boy Charlie this is one thing I really love about these pigs is just how friendly they are Charlie is super friendly and he loves to be scratched all right let's go in by Charlie and take a closer look at his feeding station we do need to make sure we lock his gate is he really wants to get over Illinois one thing that I love about these pigs is how vocal they are none of the other things we've ever raised have been nearly as vocal as these Idaho pasture pigs it just cracks me up they're just constantly making noise Charlie is quite a bit bigger than the girls but just in general I mean every day I come in and spend time with him and he just I mean he never turned to push you around he doesn't he's not trying to chew on you I mean just really a really gentle pig especially for his size and you can see his area here you know there's not a lot of things growing because it's been winter but he has not done a whole lot of rooting in this area once again his size I would have thought by now he'd have this place completely torn up but he just hasn't done let's talk about the feeding stations I got the idea for this design from actually from the people that we bought the pigs from they had something very similar to this I came home and made some that you know based on what I had seen it their place and I absolutely loved it so thank you Cindy and Duane for the awesome idea basically it's just a platform to get them up off the ground just enough that when you're feeding them they stay dry they're not routing the food into the dirt you're not having to feed them in a pan that they can tip over and I mean this has just worked out so well so it's basically a wood platform I built the trough here where I feed him and then we've got these watering cups now there's one change that I've made to the watering cups originally my plan was to run them off of a gravity feed with these barrels but there's just not enough pressure so I have run hoses over here to run them but basically the way it works is that Carolee will come up all the pigs are trained on them even our feeder page and they just come up when they push their nose against this little button here can't see it cuz he's in the way charlie think that's funny I think you did laugh a little bit Charlie you want the scratch I know you want your but scratch again okay so basically they come up and he'll push his nose against here and that will fill this little cup up with water and that's what they drink out of and you can see that it keeps things nice and dry he gets just enough water and it doesn't make a big mass which is the problem we've had with our pigs in the past in the past we've used the nipple motorers on the bottom of a barrel but the pigs what they would do is they would learn that if they stood there and kept their mouth on it that they could make basically a big mud hole right below the waterer and so they would do that on purpose to make voila this keeps things much drier and muggy cleaner and I think it's gonna be much healthier for the pigs as well so I'm super happy with that I think down the road I will try again with gravity-fed because I don't like having to run it's it's literally probably a five hundred feet of hose to get it over here so I'll need to build some stands though I think if these barrels were up higher there would be enough water pressure but having them just like I have them here there just wasn't enough pressure the water did come out but the problem was that the pigs would have to hold the button in for a long time because it just came out so slowly so if we had the barrels up and there was more pressure I think it would be a good system yeah that's you know Charlie now I was showing you guys a little while ago that Charlie ripped the top off of his shelter that we built him the shelter is still here but he completely ripped the tarp off the top so I think what I'm going to do is I'm going to actually use barn tin to go across the top some metal across the top in hopes that he'll leave that alone but for now what I did is I moved in one of our portable goat shelters now that we've gotten rid of our goats we didn't need this one anyway and he's just been sleeping in there so like I said 99% of the time when I come over here he's sleeping up on his feeding station the only time I've ever seen him even in here is the other day when it was raining for a little while but otherwise he's perfectly content outside even if it's cold so I am super happy I'll tell you that before we got these guys I was very intimidated by the thought of having a big male pig and the size of these guys is just absolutely perfect alright let's head over to the last pen our feeder pigs I want to show you how well they're doing show you how fast they're growing and talk to you about just a few things that we're learning about them now we're down in our feeder pig pen we're still working to tame these guys up there not very tame yet but they're getting better they'll at least come up to me now and they'll sniff me and let me touch them a little bit so we're we're making progress I wanted to take a couple minutes to talk to you guys about first of all just kind of a review of what these Idaho pasture pigs are and why we decided that they were gonna be a great fit for our homestead so the Idaho pasture pigs are a registered breed of pigs they're originally bred from 3 different types of pigs they were a mix of Duroc Berkshire and Kuni Kuni pigs so the Berkshire and the Duroc are pretty classic meat pigs which give these guys their great shape the couny Cooney's are also a meat Pig but they're much smaller but the nice thing about the couny Cooney's is that they have more of an upturned nose which makes them a great grazing Pig by their nose being turned up they don't root nearly as much and instead they walk around and they graze on the things that are on top of the ground so that characteristic is what you're really looking for in these Idaho pasture pigs now the great thing that they benefit from being mixed with the meat pigs is that they still grow very fast that was the main thing that sold us on this breed if they live up to their name what should happen is that these guys should get up to the 200 to 250 pound range which is the perfect butcher size in about the same amount of time as a classic meat Pig about eight to ten months but they don't get as big as a regular meat Pig further down the road so like the sows and our boar that you saw that's about as big as they'll get about 300 to 350 pounds for the south and about 400 to 450 pounds for the boar unlike regular meat pigs or you know classic meat pigs I get more in the like seven eight nine hundred pound range these guys will stay smaller and are just going to be a lot easier to handle that was the one thing that it always kept us from wanting to raise pigs or breed our own this the sheer size and kind of intimidation factor of the really big breeder pigs it's okay see they're getting better they're getting better I feel pretty skittish when I move though I need to start bringing down some marshmallows if you want a fast way to tame pigs it's bring them marshmallows they absolutely love them I don't encourage you to make that a main part of their food but just for taming them it's a great way to do it so a couple characteristics of these guys that we are just really enjoying they're so playful we've had when we've raised you know other pigs for years now and every spring we get you know feeders and we bring them home but they never play like this these guys are almost like having puppies I come over here in the morning and I'm doing my chores and they'll just be running laps around here in and out of their house and chasing each other around and it's just hilarious to watch and you can see even at this young age just the nice shape that they have I mean once you start raising your own animals for food you look at them a little differently than you do as pets like when I see these guys I see bacon and those nice hams and man they just have such a nice shape even at this young age so I'm very excited about having these we've had them for about a month now and I can tell you that they've definitely grown they're not tame enough yet for me but able to get a tape measure around them to actually weigh them but I can tell just looking at them that they have grown quite a bit already in that month now two of these guys already have names that the blonde one is named pickles or daughter Samantha named that one the spotted one his name is Herbert our daughter Grace named that one and this black one mostly black one it's supposed to be Sarah as the name and she still hasn't come up with a name so give her some good ideas I named the three that were keeping for breeders so while Charlie already had a name when we got him but Sara needs a name for this one now their feeding station is working out well also but I think pretty soon I'm gonna do away with these automatic feeders they actually have such an amazing appetite that I haven't been free feeding them I've been weighing out their food every day I'm giving them about five pounds of feed each per day so about 15 pounds total for these three plus treats in between but with the automatic feeders it just seems like they're wasting a lot of food right now so I'm gonna build them a bigger trough and just feed them in the trough every day just like we do the other pigs and I think they'll waste a lot less I keep forgetting that I can't pet them yet pickles we haven't decided yet if we're gonna breed ourselves this summer so we have a batch of fall piglets or if we're gonna wait and first breed them for the first time in the spring they both already had two litters so we know that they're good breeders but we just haven't bred them ourselves yet I don't know if there will be enough interest in baby pigs in the fall if any of you are interested let us know that might help us make a decision what to do but we're excited to get our first baby piglets born on the homestead and you can see they're trained on the automatic water or the same way and it really makes things a lot less messy so there you go guys Idaho past your pigs is it possible that these really are the ultimate homestead Pig I think it just might be we're excited to have these guys here we're excited to watch them grow and we're excited to breed the other ones down the road if you have questions about these pigs let us know in the comment section below we'd be happy to answer questions as we go along I can tell you already that I'm just having a blast if you've been watching us for any amount of time you probably know that pigs are my absolute favorite animal to raise and to have them now as permanent residents is going to be a real blast if you're enjoying our videos I sure hope that you will hit that subscribe button before you leave don't forget as always the absolute best way that you can help our channel grow is by sharing our videos on all of your social media and until next time thank you so much for stopping by our homestead take care and God bless

Channel: Living Traditions Homestead

Views: 171,272

Keywords: Living Traditions Homestead, Missouri, Ozark's, homesteading, Ozarks, self-sufficient, homesteaders, unjobbing, Idaho pasture pigs, pasture pigs, homestead pigs, raising pigs for meat

Id: xVpbB787ytQ

Length: 19min 55sec (1195 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 14 2020