Joel Salatin Teaches Pasture Pigs (for Profit)

here's a free sample from my course permaculture pigs premium edition if you guys are interested in more of this kind of content check out the link I'll leave it in the description I'm Joel Salatin at Polyface farm snack grime dish I'm a kind of contract from her ok nice nice to meet you nice to meet you we produce about eight hundred nine hundred hogs a year on pasture so you know this isn't backyard ish but it's very scalable to about scalable to a backyard he's all alone you're gonna move these fifty pigs by yourself they're fifty in here panic usually the first couple moves you need a few people because they're just not used to it so you just get like two or three people walk down to the end and then push them up okay these guys are used to moving here you guys he's just walking him he's getting some stragglers there but they know the drill dialed in systems look are you serious it's like we're hurting cows right now are you serious I'm serious this is amazing one guy moving 50 pigs so the first thing is is training manok pigs really respect electric fence even more than you know even more than cows really because they've got that tender nose they want to sniff everything but the difference between pigs and cows is that their tolerance is way less in other words if you if here's the ground and here's the fence a cow you've got some pretty decent tolerances on how how high the fence can be a pig you don't because that because it's a lot closer tolerance and remember that a pig's nose is pretty low so you want the wire to be at pig height so normally the difference between the ground and the wire is going to be somewhere on a little pig we use two wires on a bigger Pig a higher wire but it's never going to be higher than about then about 14 inches about 14 inches is about as high as it's ever going to be even on a big pig that's not very high remember if a given a choice a pig would rather go under than over a cow would rather go over than under so if you're going to err on a cow make the wire high you're gonna earn on a pig make the wire low those are just different nuances of animals first is that like a room anomalies 10 gauge wire just from tractor supply or do you have a specific well we prefer aluminum aluminum high tensile wire for our permanence we use 12 and 1/2 gauge well for our pig pastures all we use 12 and 1/2 gauge that's big enough because you know we're in very remote areas and so you know we've got to be able to have a deer trip over at a bear you know it's not high so everything can go over it but it's just do they catch a foot that you know that sort of thing ss rebar metal posts with plastic insulators - others yes yes it is it is except for corners where we use wooden posts so so so when we're so the first thing is to train them to go out and so so we have what we have a ethical a physical you know pen in the you know it somewhere physical a physical fence all right and what we do is we just put we just cut a corner off with electric fence and there's a spring in the middle of this training wire and quarter you know here's your here's your you know here's your energizer over here and and it's very short and the pigs are here and of course as they hit this they get shocked we're training you want a really hot spark I mean like you know ten thousand volts is is good when you're training pigs you want their first you know experience to be memorable okay the reason for the spring in this training wire is so they can go through it and it won't break the wire without the spring they're going to keep breaking this wire and then you're gonna go out there you know ten times a day is gonna be pop-pop-pop this wire is gonna be sitting on the ground and you're not treating the pigs so the wire lets them you know lets them go through and be trained and and and and they're you know they won't break it okay so now we're gonna go out now we're going to go out to a field and our preference so so we've got you know we've got a field out here what did this look like before you guys guys start it out here there's pretty much a giant briar patch that was above your head okay that's crazy Oh cuz you know I would think if you're going to a landowner they're not doing much with their land they might be scared of pigs coming in right but if they could come and see that this is their work this is what's gonna happen yeah it's nice and peaceful and quiet yeah doesn't stink if landowner was to say okay you guys have to go this stuff isn't that hard to tear up the posts are the most permanent thing that you have out here that's right you haven't invested a lot or any in permanent yeah I mean you might come and pull up your post would you right I mean you could or I mean if you didn't care you could just leave them it's it's not treated wood or anything it's just a locust pose last a long time because it's locusts but you would pull up your wire you could probably pull out of here in a day or two and pull up the water line get rid we have a cistern up there this whole thing sort of is like a pressure tank yep and if you're leasing it and say your lease Atlanta in Virginia and for some reason Oh your your family the rest of your family is in Michigan and you want to move up there right okay you can find some leased land of Michigan yeah I mean tighten the post didn't cost Joel anything but labor yeah cut him off his own farm it's it's a pretty simple system beautiful model yeah okay does it matter how many acres doesn't matter how many acres what we like to do is put a a central a central alley so this is the way it goes it comes out here to a gate all right so these are all gates and then the other side of the alley is going to have opposing gates are you with me yeah okay be a forest you can be a forest a pasture I mean it works great in like old cropland old crop fields yeah like wouldn't a soften here no no yet wouldn't know okay so then so then you have each of these has okay okay like this alright these paddock sizes will vary depending on your scale so if you're only running you know ten pigs these paddock sizes would probably be well we're running 35 to 50 in a group half acre paddocks so if you're running 10 pigs you probably want what's a what's a fifth of hit fifth and a half is whatever it is a you know a fifth of half whatever we're having trouble figuring if if a half an acre is 2500 square yards a fifth of an acre would be 500 square yards okay which 500 configure it however you want to I mean you know 500 square yards could be could be 10 by 50 it could be 25 by 20 okay right so you know it can be configured any number of ways all right but the point is you're going to you're gonna lay out these these paddocks lines so far actually electrical lines these are these are electrical lines and I'm gonna I'm gonna fill in something here in just a minute okay radically you wouldn't have to have all these necessary set up if you only had the infrastructure you could actually move this right you could well the reason that we have set these up you know the reason that we don't move the pig fences on these on these Pig pastures is because the pigs actually do a fair amount of landscaping okay so over time they actually route up you know here's the wire going okay and the you know and the stakes and insulator and they actually they actually mound up they make mounds because they're routing here routing here they actually create berms under the wire so you know over time you have to raise your insulators a little bit as they burn it up but once once that Burma up it vegetate s-- it it grasses over and it becomes very very stable so that is a real great protection for erosion and things like that you're almost creating a bit of a you know a rice paddy idea that's what people people have actually terraced with pigs use pigs to terrace a hillside make real narrow strips make real narrow strips and the pigs will move the soil you know enough that it kind of flattens and you can make it you can make a like a you know an eight-foot-wide terrace i wouldn't make it less than eight because the pigs would be yeah no animal likes to be forced to be real close to the to an electric fence so so although they will walk up to it close they never like to be forever confined where they can't get you know more than a couple feet away from it so you know I wouldn't make a I wouldn't try to make a six-foot wide terrace but you know eight to twelve foot wide terrace on the hillside absolutely pigs will do that someday I want to do that just just to just to show because there are a few things in my view as pretty as as terraces agriculturally they really make a beautiful landscape alright now you'll notice that I haven't connected these so each one of these gaps here each one of these gaps here so remember this all of these are electric fence and so all of the corners have a wooden post all right I won't put them all in but but you get all of these have wooden posts these are electric fence gates I'll put dots in so these are your access these are your access you know with the like the track the feed buggy the you know the pigs you know if you need to get the pigs into an alley whatever but these are equipment access we have we have portable pig shelters for example so you got to be able to get you know your shelters so by having the so these are big wide electric fence gates you know 30 feet nice and wide you can get your turn in and stuff like that okay maybe you're in a wood situation and you to be able to turn in here with the with the tractor to maybe take out some Deadwood or clean up you need equipment access into these paddocks now this one here we use a different color these this little gap here is going to be a wooden gate okay and the reason for the wooden so what we do is is we come here to the to the wooden post wooden post here and we put in a little and this wooden gate can be six feet doesn't have to be very wide six feet but the point is that way when the pigs are over here and we want to move the pigs over to here they don't have to cross an electric fence the one thing about pigs is because they're so intelligent they're they're time to trust us as humans for their well-being they never trust us like a cow and so when we say hey pigs you know come through here and this is an electric they come up to it they look at it I'm not sure I'm not sure I wanted that was electric yesterday it's been electric for a week and I I can't see it but I know it's there they're trying to pull a fast one on me right and so by making these little wooden wooden gates it makes a physical barrier so the pigs are you know they're used to up there scratching and all this on this wooden gate we take that aside and there's no reticence there's no reluctance for the pigs to flow through what's really important about this setup and I'm sure Joe Lafont or Daniel probably told you guys is the wooden gates yeah so pigs you saw how I had that fence down and they wouldn't cross it it's even even if I completely chop that away and that that wire wasn't there they wouldn't cross it's like a mental barrier it's like it's like the elephant that gets chained to a little post when he's young and then when he's older he still doesn't he doesn't shame he could just rip it right out of the ground so the the reason we have those wooden gates is because if they can physically touch it and then see that it's not there then they'll go through me if if try to make the pigs move over electric fence all the time you'll lose your religion and have a heart attack you know in the process so so by putting the physical gate in here now fortunately so the pigs are in this paddock and and all we do is we we take this gate so let's say now we've moved the pigs and they're in this paddock and now we're ready to move them into this one all we do here is we take this gate and we walk up here and we reinstall it here and after the pigs are in we go back and we take the old gate where they were so so this gate this gate has been has been removed okay and it moved up to this side then we go back and we get this gate and we carry it over and put it up here so you only need two gates you don't have to make a wooden gate you know for all these all you need is two gates because when the pigs come in they will never beat you to this opening they're gonna immediately quit you know start eating grass and clover stuff they're gonna they're gonna start eating so they stop they come in here and just kind of plug up here you can take the gate and just walk on up here and and set it up right there and then you can go back and get this one because they're not going to go back through because they're yeah they got new I got a new salad right and so so the wooden gates enabled us to move them from paddock to paddock to paddock but it can it doesn't have to be very wide because our machinery access for feeder tractor you know firewood different things all that access is going to come out of the out of the alley now the beauty of this is that at any point in here so the pigs are up moving you know this is paddock one two three four five six seven eight nine ten we generally try to like like to run somewhere between six and ten paddocks because that gives us enough rest period that by the time they get out here to the end all right so they get out here to ten then we put them in the alley and run them down the alley and they can start back in paddock one okay and and ten paddocks has given us enough time at somewhere between we never leave them in a paddock more than 12 days and generally they're in there more than five so what happens is as they grow because we're giving them the the self feeder so they're they're eating out of the cell feeder that becomes a constant a constant measure generally in wet areas you know you you you want to move them faster than in dry areas because the wetter it is the more the pigs will dig and tear up so so what we've found for us that two tons per half acre two tons of feed per half acre gives us about the right you know amount of disturbance if you over disturb it turns to weeds if you under disturb it tends to go toward brambles and and you know blackberry vines and things like that do you have a measure for what's under disturbance and over disturbance or do people just need to I I think I think that's where each each ecosystems going to be a little different and you're gonna have to customize this but you know you'll be able to see very quickly within you know two years you'll be able to see are we maintaining good vegetative cover and and and if it's if it's going differently than you expect or than you planned then adjust your time you can either you can either make your paddocks smaller make your make your group of pigs bigger I mean they're there any number of ways that you can make adjustments here so that you may know that you move your vegetation in the direction you want it to move I want to show you guys the succession the half acre paddock okay grass plenty of it this is where they just got moved there this is where they were so some moonscape not a whole lot some more where they're feeder was there are some briars and weeds about to go to seed but he said they're gonna go in with a bush hog and mow those down that is what this is gonna look like so they were in there for a week this is a week ago this is just a week old this is a we go there's there's still Madhu on the ground they're still visible manure hasn't even been absorbed yet butterflies now look two weeks you guys ready to see two weeks boom oh my gosh look at the line I just crossed two weeks what Matt did you guys mow in here so they didn't know this so that's why the libraries are still here you won't know this or Willie it's too late to mow this no I think it's it's still mobile see most of these haven't seated out yet those have a little bit about them but I mean at some point you don't you don't want to cut the grass right or do you um so like most animals they don't really like the super stemming stuff okay they like that fresh you know yeah three-week old grass nice and green so if we came through here and you you can raise and lower a bush hog so we could chop all these off maybe six inches up okay and then it would give the grass or really good head nice and ideally maybe three weeks before they come back in here right okay yeah so they started up here okay so then this is what this is two weeks in here we called with the thistles two weeks old three weeks ago okay this is three weeks and then the fifth one down there you guys got to see four weeks old right here four weeks old it looks like if you came here you wouldn't even know if you were a landowner you wouldn't even know pigs for been in here it doesn't sting does it stink right nope doesn't smell here this is five weeks old static and that wasn't that fat grass that's growing there wasn't there when they started in here it only came in after they left because they they they brought it a rag Missy Bank right yeah is this and that's good stuff everybody show me this good stuff this is Timothy you said okay okay so will you mow this before they come in here this one is not that bad the thistles in here pretty much nothing so you're saying it's okay alright well thank you for showing me this is five weeks five weeks oh my gosh five weeks if i graph progressive your shoulder and that's that's this beautiful stuff is it fair to say this is richer than when you found it definitely okay the pigs that they're pigs are are bringing up the value of this land not taking it away right how does your electricity source I imagine is from yep to the black wire oh they wouldn't gate okay so here's the energizer okay so what we do there is let's do it let's do a do a side view here so we've got we've got a wooden post here a wooden post here there's a wooden a wooden gate here between them okay you know we'll say we've got braces here and and so this this gate is just you know between these two wooden posts so will will draw the electric fence in red so here here comes the electric fence up to here and here comes the electric fence up to here and remember this gate don't have to be very tall three feet 3 feet splenic you know so it doesn't have to be heavy doesn't have to be tall you know it can be a pretty light gate so what we do then is we just take a electric fence um a gate handle you know with with a hook and we just hook it to a piece of extension cord it's got an extension cord and we just hook this over here with a gate handle and run it and just let the extension cord sit on the ground run over here to another I'm sorry another you know gate handle and we hook it up on this side we just let this be a jumper on the non Pig side yeah let me see this let me see this jumper he talked about it I couldn't quite imagine how so this is actually an electric yeah it's yeah it's insulated a way that this system works is it's a big you it goes from back there all the way down across the driveway that we came up and then all the way up that side and then we can select which paddocks we actually make hot it's because we have jumpers on the end of each line we just hook the jumpers in and the paddock that they're on remove the one that was that they were in and now we can so now this one has no heat it's not hot no this one is hot so how the power is down there and then we jumper it from this one to the gate okay okay you don't want this to be on the pig side you want this to be on the knot wherever whichever side then the pigs are not and that just becomes a real long jumper cable and we just hook it on one side the other and extension cord remember when you do an extension cord you know because usually you use a like a you know an older junkie piece of extension cord just remember if it's a multi you know if it's a multi wire extension cord make sure that you hook your white on you know your same color wire on both in it you're cutting it and accessing the wire inside this extension cord I guess you could do an insulated wire as well you can do an insulator wire we just like extension cords because they're mate they're real malleable you know you can you can roll them up real quick the under the underground wires that you buy from you know came from electric fence supply stuff they're pretty stiff if they're they're made with a single wire and they're pretty stiff to go I guess you're not actually burying this no on the ground with your gates yeah because you only need to have you only need to have it too hot that's right that's right so so here that so that that extension cord that extension cord is going to be when the wind the pigs you know if the pit if the pigs are in number three here okay will will say that will say the pigs are now in number three all we need is we need to go over here and over here and we're good to go yeah yeah now you know this this perimeter might or might not be electric depending on your situation you know if it's a good robe and wire boundary fence or something like that it might or might not be so we can't always count on the power to go down here over here and up this the purple may or may not be electric but all the internal is so so the other thing is that by that by having these not necessarily continuous here but with jumper cable with with jumpers here it helps you to isolate each of these legs to find shorts you know if you've got a short he's found that these insulators tied to a post like that worked better than say a plastic energizer that Susan well see these are these are actually movable so if I need to make a new one I say this one breaks I can just make a new one with lyre or I can take these and just scoot them up the post mm-hmm with the plastic ones they're stapled in so you have to pull the staples and possibly get a new insulator get more staples and hammer it back in taller and these are just locusts wooden posts that Joel cut off the farm yeah so you may need to replace the post or it just it's a little more efficient I guess this is where you pull tight on this thing isn't it so if I need I pretty much tighten a lot on every yeah right if I need to work on a certain paddock I just go disconnect the jumper fix the fence and then hook the jumper back up and you just hand tighten these right yep if she keeps talking about making sure these pins are tight squeeze it okay twist it up we like to run at least 4,000 volts on this for pigs as a normal thing if they're really well trained 2,000 will hold them you know if they're really well trained but as a general rule you want over 4,000 and really not that much labor right there labor with pigs is specifically here is the the paddock crap and that's the paddock prep is key to keeping pigs you mean the paddock practition all this up no or doesn't maintaining the daily like so the weekly I guess you would say so I move these pigs about once a week okay what I do is I come in well you saw they weed whack it tighten all the fences and Electrify it and then a lot a minute like this needs weed whack that needs weed whack so that will drain your battery like crazy okay so when you're gonna need that weed whacker they won't be back on this end for a while so none of this is hot I always weed whack the charge lines which run on the outside of the paddock okay so how you didn't get how you wouldn't make this hot is there's a jumper line right there yeah somewhere down there you've disconnected the jumper right right okay see this actually this is this can be this is fine here it's the hot line so the lines that we actually make are the ones that run deep this way they may actually run to the one that's always hot which runs the length of this entire field okay so these once once you use them you could disconnect them and you don't have to mess with them anymore until you come back for the next round okay and you take your Pig you get your piglets into the holding area as you shared before train them how long does it take this long when they don't go when they don't go over that training wire for four days you're good to go and then you how do you get them men up to this area you trailer them we we we normally trailer them to to that area and and then when we bring them hot it'd be depends we we have some of these are on some of these pig pastures are on rental ground you know that's five miles away from the farm so it's hard to walk them that far down the road but here here at home even if they're a mile away from the house up in the woods when they're done we just let them walk home we drive them home yeah and you drive and that brings me this question so they're done here this is electric fence on right right so it's pretty easy to drive yes your Pig boards yes that's called yeah yeah sort short boards pig short board time why did you draw this side oh if we're if we're going back here oh well because over this side there's another set of pigs okay yeah well I do just one row when you'd be able to write well well I mean it again this is an ideal set ideal setup but not every one of our pig pastures are like this I mean we have we have one for example and you're only talking about maybe going through really only hitting this twice and a Caesar at the most three times often twice but at the most three times so yeah we have we have one we have one pasture for example we have a that has a it's a valley in the center like this and and and this is this is all this is all woods in here okay we let the and and and so the the pig paddocks the pig paddocks come out and oh okay and and then and then the so the outside is like this that's the field okay okay and then the pig paddocks yeah are like this okay and then of course you know again the the the you know the the the wouldn't in these cases the we because because our our access road this is this is then becomes our access lane right through a year so these gates here again they're portable portable gates but they're sixteen feet or twelve feet maybe they're twelve feet rather than six feet because we've got to get not only pigs but tractors through here too and they're wood gates and they're heavier actually actually I think what we have there are two six foot gates that we can maybe you know that we can set up with a little bit of dog leg and that dog leg helps it to stand up it's a little easier if you if you just kind of set up a 12 foot gauge cz for it to be a little bit flimsy but if you put a dog let you know here's your here's your gate posts and these gate posts are small you know they're little little short you know wooden posts when you put a dog leg in it gives it rigidity and so the pigs could come up and scratch arm stuff if you have if you have a long gate here and it's straight the pigs will come up here they'll scratch on it and it's gonna it's going to bend a lot you're gonna put a lot more pressure but a dog leg gives it some some rigidity and all I saw was water or not water chain yeah one change that's right the bottom top right because that's we're gonna put the pressure in that yeah yeah that's right and actually this was attached for the chain that's right that's the catch for the check you had used to hinge them but maybe that dinner no no well what we used to do yeah well the the key here is when I when I'm saying wooden gate on purpose because we've tried other kinds of metal gates things like that and they always it's too it's too fragile here there's too much whatever the pigs moving on it's tough you can short out if you use metals so we say wooden gates because that way when we first started we used plastic chain to to put around here so there wouldn't ever be a short but the pigs ate the plastic chain and so we had to go to metal which meant we had to go to wooden posts wood wooden gates so everything is insulated and there were nothing fancy about those gates they mess up and pine boards yeah it's cabbage cabbage cabbage lumber yeah and I like that you drew this cuz this is more you know the square is nice because we can get the concept but this is the reality yeah that because nobody has a square it's like the permaculture principles the zones yeah yeah perfect so right yard so this to measure it out are you just walking and because that's that's not even a square so it might do the math on that figure oh you just kind of by guessing by golly yeah yeah I mean yeah you'd you walk it and you've got a little bit of a bit of a parallelogram and people might be surprised how accurate they could actually estimate oh yeah you can come here within 5 percent within five percenters is plenty close for this for this kind of thing you didn't talk about and I didn't see shelter for these picks are you relying on the woods yeah okay so so trees yeah generally all of our pig pastures are Silvo pastures so they've got trees in them we have a couple that aren't there on like old corn ground and there we do have portable shade for the pigs so it's a trailer it looks just like it looks just like the turkey gobble to go except it doesn't have perks words in it so it's the same thing it's it's a trailer with just nursery shade cloth on top pigs love to get wet I mean pigs love water okay so you don't have to keep them dry like you would a chicken okay and so so the you know shelter we want for chickens we want we want an opaque roof an impermeable roof but for the for the pigs pigs and turkeys cows they're perfectly happy to get wet on a you know on a hot summer day yeah yeah okay yeah it's just to get them out of the Sun we shed many I'm thinking talk water how do you get water to your system okay so so here for example there's a water line that lies right along the edge of this fence all the way around okay and at every other so so here there's a valve so that serves this paddock in this paddock and then let's see and then here there's a valve okay and that serves so you've got one two that serves paddock three and four and then here there's another valve and that serves paddock five and six okay so every other paddock is a valve and and the thing about water of course pigs love to play with water and so what we'll do is we'll put you know we use the we use the Brauer the Brauer water so I always move your water last specifically with this type of water when you pull this plug it's going to drain it's gonna dump all that water and if those pigs are still in here they're not gonna leave so I mean it's going to create like a giant water slide here and they're just gonna lay in and then you're gonna have real trouble get them to go into where you want those especially right here at the door right where you want everybody to go crazy muddy I mean it's heaven for them yeah yeah you gotta reach down and unplug it yep do they make smaller ones of these I'm sure that they probably do this one works best for us just going to the size but I guess that you don't waste water to automatic water Peters right and you need you need a lot of water in there because one big pig could knock this over if it wasn't heavy right yeah it's gotta weigh a lot of you if you're just eating one or two pigs you still move the bolt yeah and it's it's super important that they can't actually get access to water on the ground so why is that if if the water is dripping just a little bit if there's any flaw and your system they're gonna expose it so if I have water dripping in the mud right there they'll dig until this entire thing tips over yeah I noticed that this is this was pretty dry around there there's no like even splashing right yeah and I keep it to where the water doesn't come all the way up to here it's me this is maybe only a quarter full so they can come up and drink it's unlimited water but it's not all the way up here where they can splash it out and then once they make mud they're just gonna start digging and it'll tip the entire thing over and it'll flood the entire paddock okay so you always make sure there's no drips do you ever have to clean this out like I mean we're seeing some algae or something in there that's not gonna harm them no that's better than drinking out of the pond I imagine right Yeah right it's not stagnant water it's complete always flowing and it comes from a cistern it's fresh water it flows in there once in a while all good get in there I'll scrape those out where they're actually putting their nose they'll get feed and stuff in there but generally when I pull this plug every time I move them that all fills up with water and then once I start rolling it it'll all fall out anyway okay it's the only one we've found where the pigs can't waste water because if you give them a nipple a nose thing any kind of other water I'm confident that the pigs actually draw straws or make a schedule and somebody's in charge to say okay back you take the you take the 10 to 12 shift Jane you take the 12 to 2 shift and the pigs sit there and they rest there their noses on whatever the water you know outlet is and it just drains and then they get a big Waller and then the pigs are really happy and then and then you've got a big hole and they gouge it out and your whatever your water system is at all you know collapses and falls over into the new hole and you've got a mess and so pigs will play water so what we do is we have so normally we can you know we can kind of hang it up in a tree so this you know this this water this water pan okay has has let me just you know it has two access ports on it and actually is you know indented here with access ports so that the you know pigs can drink there and and so we have a you know we have a float valve here in the top you know here's the here's the water level float valve here in the top and as long as it stays full it's heavy enough that pigs can't push it around and and so our water line comes in from the top and we just you know if there's a if there's a tree over here you know we just we just hang this water line in a tree top you know and here's the here's the main line and we just you know we just run it up so that the point is to bring it to have it near the edge of the paddock the the fence the electric fence have near the paddock hang your water line so it comes down from the top so the pigs can't come up here and play with the water hose if we don't have a tree nearby what we've built what we've made are a couple of tall rebar pigtails okay that we can tall I mean there are six feet tall and we can push these in the ground right next to the side electric fence run our hose through this pigtail you know over into the over end of the tank and that again that keeps that that keeps the water line from being down close enough where the pigs can play in it because if they if they can play with that water hose they will eventually gnaw a hole in it yeah and you just move that with them and we just we've just won we just move that with our big system yeah we just need that 1 1 / 1 / Group one flip of pigs and I noticed you don't create wallows for them do you no we don't but they they make Wallace I mean if they're if they're in a if they're in a paddock when it rains they will make a wallet so if there's no tree here next to the border in your field that you can hang the hose up in a branch or something to drop it down in the water we make up we make a a rebar like six foot tall pigtail step in post thing holder then we can run the hose through and run it in and of course this would this would sit right outside the Pigpen and the waterer would be you know three feet in and so the hose is kept out of the pigs reach because the pigs if they if they absolutely if they can play with a water hose they will eventually gnaw a hole in it every time they will do that this custom well tell telling they get the waterline over this fence but I imagine you could use a I don't know some sort of tea post yeah even a small small [Music] you want this thing right here to be uphill okay it'll leak if these aren't perfectly even you have to make sure that the float is is downhill so the water reaches it first you get your first customer buddy I probably need to put it up further this groans you guys have got this system bow cheap system - yeah Polyface really wanted to get high-tech yeah they could yeah they have the means but they're still in the area showing people that they can just yeah like the big expense here is land but you could also lease land for $50 in August so your interns are you train an intern they're gonna leave here what do you think is the biggest mistake they're most likely to make what I'm the big yeah the biggest mistake doing yeah the biggest mistake most people make is not moving them frequently enough okay and so your moon scaping your moon scaping the the outdoors so we don't want it so you leave them too long so we have a hard and fast rule they never stay in one place more than 12 days here's what happens you say well you know why is that well because in 12 days they will they will create a very heavily impacted campsite of some sort either a wala a campsite something and so so even if they haven't disturbed everything they will have disturbed a portion and then they start making brick that you know what what is beautiful and nice and and and loose soil you know then becomes then becomes hard pan Brit and other so if if they haven't disturbed the paddock as much as you want in 12 days then reduce your paddocks or increase the number of pigs I agree you don't just keep them there longer than 12 days just no no no 12 days they're going on because in 12 days the thing is when a pig has a paddock when a pig has a paddock anybody's got pigs noses the pigs have a paddock they do not spend equal time on every square yard they will pick an area and they will pick 50% of their time in this spot and 50% all out here well what happens then in 12 days they have to heavily impacted this relative to everything else so if if you're not disturbing if you're not getting if you're not harvesting the grass blah blah blah what you want in 12 days then either reduce your paddock size or increase the number of pigs so here you and I are both used to 30 to 40 inches of rain a year right impressed does this it's 12 day rule in all this to apply in 12 inches of rain at California I don't think so I think as you go drier that that the that the stay can be longer no but the rest period also has to be longer so I I absolutely I've seen you know plenty of dry areas and I think because they're so dry they can you know they're they're more forgiving on the length of stay but they're less forgiving on the length of rest would it be a good rule of thumb to say we got 30 inches in this system of rain somebody gets 10 inches when it would it be exciting playing three times well certainly double just just as a general rule daughter mm-hmm so instead of 80 days rest 166 days so maybe just go through this one season yeah okay all right I noticed there's trees in every paddock and that the pigs are enjoying them it's not a there's not a wallow in this paddock they don't create wallets if they happen because of rain and whatnot then it happens but they don't go sitting about creating them anything else you think we should add oh well you were asking about what's the number one mistake yes that people make so the number one mistake is leaving them too long that kind of got us on to this this 12 in the other biggest mistake they make is failure to maintain the electric fence a hot spark and it's got to be visible so you know I would like I would like to tell people that these electric fences you set up you set them up today and they're good for ever but vegetation grows up weeds grow up stuff grows up and so once a year or twice we have two weedy okay and the pig you you can't hold the pig responsible for something you can't see and so so there is some maintenance here now electric fence is cheap you can set up a lot real quick but it does require maintenance that's the offset you know that's the offset so you have low capitalization low input cost but you have annual maintenance costs to keep it visible the second thing so visit visible keep the vegetation off keep it clean keep a hot spark and the final thing is to keep the wires at the right height and tight the looser the wire is the more pigs can play with it without getting shocked if a pig and come up to wire and they can and you can kind of kind of shoulder up to it you know and the wire hits his hair first because pigs are airy right here is insulator Hera's insulator it's not like the nose right so they can come up to it and if they can if they can rub on a little bit play with a little bit of hair and they start pushing on it before they actually make enough skin contact to get spark you're gonna have trouble because those pigs you don't want them to play with it so tight taut nice tight knot piano wire tight but enough that that you know if you if you touch it it's not going to want to move away where you get good skin contact anything else no I'm I would just I would just tell people one of the beauties of this system is that it you aren't you are substituting the drugs the concrete the fans the stitch the toxicity of manure and all that you are substituting that with a very beautiful yes it does take a little more labor for peg you know person hours with a peg but you're substituting all that negative was something that actually nests into the ecosystem and makes it makes a pretty landscape because you're not sure it makes a better pick your my back hey Jenny when somebody gets sick if somebody gets sick that's tonic for pigs that get sick is charcoal and if you read any swine swine they came for tea and it starts into the you know the disease and sickness apart but first part of it will say pigs that you think they're gonna die awesome given force be determined don't pitch insurance claims I don't have taxes they know how to deal with and so dr. Caroline so yeah and they don't watch TV so they know what they need because [Music] Thank You Jill how scary [Music] wasn't that amazing and it can totally be applied to any operation now I've learned lately it's not so much about what you know as it is about who you know when you want to learn to do something in this case learning to grow your own pork I've assembled folks like Joel myself cliff Davis Jordan green and others to teach you everything you need to know for raising your own pork from piglet to the plate that's available now down in the description under my course permaculture pigs check it out and their special incentive for checking it right now because until Friday what they November first up to midnight there's an early bird special so we're gonna be dripping out content through November so if you get in now you get most of the content and you wait patiently through November getting the rest but we give you 40% off so grab this by Friday midnight I mean technically that's gonna be Saturday midnight but just get in there why you can't link is down in the description

Channel: Justin Rhodes

Views: 426,483

Rating: 4.909194 out of 5

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Id: FafhRyKEVso

Length: 51min 50sec (3110 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 31 2019