(upbeat music) - Hi, I'm Christine Hernandez, livestock specialist for Heifer
USA, here at Heifer Ranch in Perryville Arkansas. Thank you so much for joining
us today to talk about how we raise pigs outside.
(pigs oinking) So we will be raising roughly
350 pigs here this year. Or we do larger batches of
around a 100 pigs per batch. And so we will touch on the topics of how we receive piglets, on how we feed and water them, in their receiving barn
out here on pasture, how we transport feed to them and then also how we move them
(pigs oinking) from place to place around the ranch and then within our forested areas. Behind me you can see one of the batches of pigs
we currently have here. So there's a 100 pigs out here and they are just doing an excellent job with our regenerative
agriculture here at Heifer Ranch. And so pigs are very smart creatures and we need to give them credit for that. They're gonna be the
smartest animals you have on your farm. And so they are very strong and relaxed and sensible creatures,
(pigs oinking) if you work with them properly. And so pigs have pros and cons with having them on your farm. Some pros are you can
raise them all year long as long as you have the
proper infrastructure and care for them properly in the heat of the summer and
in the cold of the winter, you can raise them 12 months a year. Pigs are very easy
animals to manage as long as you have the proper infrastructure. And we will show you the different types of infrastructure we use
here at Heifer Ranch. And then to get into that, there's also just gonna be a minimal cost to acquire that infrastructure. The day-to-day chores for
pigs is also very minimal. It's not very labor intensive. It can be done with one to two people. It's really just checking your pigs, giving them feed and water and making sure their fence is hot and everyone is happy and healthy. Some cons to raising pigs is that if you get pigs that get out or get loose, trying to manage just one peg and get them back in
can be a huge nightmare. So being able to work with
your animals properly, know how to handle them
is gonna be very important for when you have pigs on your farm. Loading them onto a trailer if you don't have that
proper infrastructure can be a little challenging. Pigs can also hurt you
or cause harm to you if you're not working with them properly and if you don't have that proper infrastructure already set up. It does take a few months, so you'll have those pigs about five to seven months on your farm until they're ready to go to processing until they're grown out. So the amount of feed
that the pigs will consume and the cost of that can really pile up if you don't stay on top of that. And so your return on
investment is going to be that five to seven months
until you can get money back from selling your pigs
or your cuts of meat (pig oinking) (upbeat music) Welcome to our piglet receiving barn, this is just an old barn with an attached piping corral system. It has a roof and two sides. The rest of it is open to fresh air which is important for ventilation. When you're receiving new piglets, it's important to have a place for them to get out of the
different weather elements, whether that's going to be the
heat or the rain or the cold. So what we have set up here
is inside under our roof, we attach a few pieces of plywood just to create a windbreak 'cause we are up here on the hill and so we get some
pretty big gusts of wind. We wanna keep the piglets
out of being exposed to that. Inside the barn, before
the piglets get here, we'll put a fresh bale of hay and bed down a very large area so the piglets can go and snuggle
up in there and stay warm. Up here we also bring them the
feeder that they'll be using throughout the rest of their growth stage. So we use the Osborne bulk feeders, we bring one of those up here so the piglets understand that that's where they get some of their food. They'll be too small to use it properly, to use their nose to spin
that pedal and drop the feed. So when we do chores a
couple of times a day, we'll have to come up here and manually get that out for them. In addition to that bulk feeder, we also have a few wood troughs and we'll just bring five gallon buckets of feed up here and hand feed them. And that shows them that we are the ones that bring them feed. So that's a positive interaction. And they will be more
likely to approach us and that will make getting the
pigs out of the barn easier in the next few weeks. In addition to using that
five gallon bucket for feed, we also just flip it over and
sit on it and observe the pigs for a couple minutes a day, making sure that everyone is healthy and eating and drinking, others know major fighting going on. And then just sitting
there allowing the pigs to come up and explore you and that will help them to
have that positive interaction. Having fresh clean water for your piglets is going
to be a very important part of your receiving barn. So just trying to think ahead for that, we've done a number of
different techniques here, and this is the one that
works the best for us. We just went ahead and plumbed in a water. This is a Ritchie waterer
specifically for pigs. The pigs will just come up
here and use their snout and lift these doors and they
can drink the water from that. They learn that very quickly. We put it on a cement slab to help reduce them trying to wallow and root around this water. In the past we've also just
use the rubbermaid totes and different watering buckets like that, and they always seem to
make a really big mess and try to get into them
and create a wallow, and then you get fight issues and just a really big strong
pig smell using that system. So in addition to having your piglet
receiving barn be a place to keep your pigs comfortable and out of the weather elements to develop that relationship with the pigs when they first get to your farm, a third reason is to train
them to the electric fence. And so we have this old
corral system connected to the barn, which is
a huge benefit for us. And so when you're training your pigs, you wanna make sure that
you have a solid back fence that will contain your
pigs no matter what. So we have this piping and
then just some dog wire or a field fence, or some
hog panels back there. Any of that will work. And then a few feet within
that permanent fence, you wanna set up your
temporary electric fence. We just use polybraided wire, you can also use a luminal
wire or high tensile wire, whatever you have available. Anything that's electrified
so that you can train them to what that wire means. And so just a few feet
within your permanent fence, you can just use poly posts or T-Posts with T-Posts
insulators on them. We use two strands when training our pigs. You wanna make sure that you
set them at the proper heighth. So you want them to be
at the pigs nose level then also at their eyes or their ear level so that when they are
rooting around or exploring, they go up and they are
bound to touch that fence. Two things are gonna happen when they encounter that electric wire. One, they're either going to squeal and go through that wire. In that case, you have that
permanent fence behind them to keep them contained. Or two, they're gonna squeal and run back and go back into your receiving barn area. The piglets are bound to
touch this electric fence. You want them to touch
these electric fence. You want them to know what that means. And so for the first few days, you're gonna come and
you're gonna do your chores, and your electric fence
will probably be awesome. The T-Posts, they may route up some dirt onto the bottom strand, so your wiring will be grounded out but that shows that the pigs
are interacting with that wire. So it's gonna take a
few days or a few weeks for them to realize to not
touch that wire and to behave and to stay within your
piglet receiving barn. So once your piglets are
trained to your electric fence, you need to think about
taking your piglets out of your receiving barn and putting them into their first pasture. So it's something to think about even before you receive your piglets. Where are you gonna be
moving them the first time? What we do here is we
set up an outdoor paddock for the piglets because they are gonna be
so used to the perimeter of our barn and our outside
area being electrified. It's gonna take them a little while and a little experimenting to
actually go through this gate because we currently
have electric wire set up in front of it. So what we do is, about a week before we wanna move them out to pasture, we will set up an outdoor paddock, completely outside of our
piglet receiving area. This does two things. It allows them to go
in and out of the gate which is how we will be
getting them out of the barn and moving to their first pasture. For two, it really shows
if your piglets are trained to the electric fence
system that you'll be using. So what we'll do is we
will open this gate, we will roll up this electric wire that's in front of our gate, and we will just give them access to the smaller outdoor
paddock for a few days. It's gonna take them a little while to even venture out there. And so what we do, if it's gonna be nice out,
we'll take their wood feeders and we'll move them outside
just to help entice them to go through that gate. So on a typical batch, we will have the pigs with
them the receiving barn for an average of two weeks. So they will first be
just inside the barn, trained to this electric perimeter fence, and then a few days
before we're getting ready to send them to their pasture, we'll give them access
to this outside paddock. Something to think about in
addition to that, is going to be how are you gonna get your pigs from your receiving barn
to their first pasture? I know some farmers will
set up a little alley to their first pasture
from the receiving barn, depending on how far away that is for you. What we do is we just
collect everyone outside in their paddock and we'll shut this gate. So they don't have access
back into the receiving barn because this is their safety zone. This is where they feel comfortable, it's where they sleep, where
they eat, where they drink. So we'll lock them outside of here, and then we just have a couple of us and we literally just
walk them down the road to their first paddock. (upbeat music) So here's an example of
one of the shelters we use for our pasture pigs.
(pig oinking) This is just a simple port-a-hut, we bet it down with hay,
especially in the winter time. And then if any bad weather is coming some rain or some cooler nights, so the pigs can get in their
bed down and stay warm. Pigs really like to be
together as a group. So there'll be mornings
you'll come out here and you find 10 or 12
pigs in one of these huts. They also put out hay bales so that the pigs can go
and bed down in there. And sometimes you'll find all
of them just cuddled together in a big old pig pile. But shelters are really important so that the pigs can get
out of the weather elements. We have our pigs on forested land, and so we also use the
trees as part of shelter especially in the summer,
(pigs oinking) it gets them a lot of shade and gets them out of the direct sunlight. These port-a-hut shelters
are good for the winter time and when the air and the
temperature is cooler but in the summertime, these
aluminum huts get really hot. So don't use them as pasture shelter if that's your only source of shelter in the hot summer days. So we ordered these port-a-huts
online through Port-A-Hut, the company, they're based out of Iowa. We were originally using
these as farrowing huts when we were farrowing on pasture but they are versatile and can be used for different age and
different size groups of pigs. Here is an example of the bulk feeders
(pigs oinking) that we use used to feed
our big groups of pigs. So these are as born outdoor pig feeders. They will hold 45 bushels of feed, and with our groups of about a 100 pigs, we put in three feeders,
(pigs oinking) even though one of these feeders is rated
for 90 head of pigs, we just wanna decrease the competition before getting to the feed. What's nice about these feeders is that with having three in there with a group, I only need to fill them up once a week. And what's nice about these
is that the pigs can come up and feed themselves. So they have access to feed all the time. And what they do is
they go up to the feeder and there's a paddle at
the bottom of the trough and they just push that with their nose and that allows feed to
drop down from the inside so they can eat that. And then it prevents the
feed from getting ruined if it's raining or them wasting feed just by pushing it out with their nose. Every time I come out here to fill up one of these bulk feeders, I take the time to move the
location of the bulk feeder. And that just helps spread out
the disturbance of the pigs 'cause they're gonna have so much impact from spending so much
time around the feeder that we want to change that
location as often as possible. So I just do that when
the feeder is empty, it needs to be filled. And an important part of that is putting skids
underneath these bulk feeders. We just used a four-by-four and connected it with long bolts, that way the tractor pallet
forks can get underneath there and lift it up without causing any damage to the bottom part of
this fiberglass trough. - [Speaker] Pigs love grain. Depending on what size they are and how old they are, they're gonna eat anywhere between five pounds and
10 pounds of feed a day. So planning ahead to make sure that you and your farm are capable
of holding multiple tons of grain at a time is very important for your long-term planning process. Currently, we have a 10
ton grain bin for hog feed. Right now, the way that we feed our pigs, for one, when they're up
in the receiving barn, we just fill five gallon
buckets out of the bucket shoe on the grain bin. And to fill up their bulk bins, we take it out of this auger that's located on our grain bin. We have a two-tier bulk container that we purchased from
Bulk Container Express. It has the capacity to hold
roughly two tons of grain, depending on how high you fill it and how much your tractor
can handle moving it. And so the way that this bin works is that at the bottom of it it has a sliding door
that you can pull open. And the inside of the grain,
this bulk bin, is funneled so that it all just falls
down like a hopper system. So you can open and close that door to determine how much feed is coming out when you're filling your bulk containers. So we just use a tractor, we take our double-decker bulk bin, fill it up with our augering system. When it's full, we just take
this out to the pasture. I drop it down and I
move the pig bulk feeder within the pasture to a new area, just so that I can change
where the pigs are disturbing with their hooves and where
that feeder is gonna be located. Once I have the feeder
where I want it to be, I open up the lid of our bulk container and I just use the tractor
and bring the black bin, raise it over top to the feeder, I get off the tractor, open the door, watch all the feed fall in, and then once it's at the level I want, once the bulk bin is full,
I can just shut that door and our pasture bulk
container is full of feed, ready to go for the pigs. I can usually fill two feeders
to the pasture bulk feeders with one of these black bulk containers. So I'm able to feed two
pasture feeders at one time which is a great time-saver. It's very efficient. - This is the most
current water setup design that we are using here at Heifer Ranch. And so watering pigs is one of the things I struggle with the most. Keeping their water clean,
keeping them out of their water and then keeping their waters moving to help move around the
disturbance that they have on the ground.
(pigs oinking) And so we came up with this
water guard, is what I call it, and so it allows multiple
pigs to drink out of the water at the same time, without
trying to fight each other off. And you can see it
instantly gets dirty as soon as they put their snouts in there 'cause they've been rooting
around on the ground. And around here, we'll show
you some different examples of the type of impact they
make just around their waters. And so we come out here
a couple of times a day and fill up these waters,
dump them out, rinse them out so they have access to nice clean water. (upbeat music) Here's an example of
the very first pig fence that we built here to do pastured
hogs that at Heifer Ranch. And we had the expectation that we had to have a very sturdy, well built, expensive fence. And so we put in lots of new age braces and ran high tensile electric fence, but come to find out which we'll show you here in a little bit, that pigs you don't need
all that much infrastructure to keep them where you want them to be. And so this is a little overkill, (pig oinking) having so many H-braces
as corners for your fence. This is the most recent pig
fence that we have built here at Heifer Ranch, and this
is going to be the model that I continue with as
I add more pig paddocks. So we are using just old
recycled rebar that we got from our garden. You could also use fiberglass
posts that are rods, anything like that,
that you have access to that you can pound into
the ground will work great. And you can purchase these rod insulators. The only downfall with this rebar, is this is a 5/8 inch rebar and that's as big as these insulators go. So sometimes it can be
a little bit difficult to get the insulator over the rebar and at the height that you want it to be. What's nice about these rod insulators is that you can adjust the heighth along that rebar or along that
fiberglass post depending on the size of your pigs if they're rooting up under
it, like we looked at earlier. And so you have a lot more flexibility with how high your fence is
going to be using this method. We've also gotten away from
using the wood H-braces or wood corner posts. You can see over here,
we just use T-Post now. We put them in at a slight angle and just put them where
there's gonna be more pressure on the fence than where this rebar is. And so it's a lot easier, it's low cost, it's low maintenance, it's very easy for one person
to set up by themselves. When we do rotational
grazing with our pigs and even when they're up in
the piglet receiving barn, we rely solely on solar chargers. We are too far away from electrical outlets
to use a plug-in charger. So we either buy Stafix chargers or you can buy Gallagher chargers, it's a ton of different brands
of solar chargers out there. Just make sure that you
purchase one that can power and push enough jewels
through your whole fence. And that's going to depend on
the distance of your fence. And so part of our chores
is to come out here, make sure that the charger is working, make sure that our fence is hot and we just use a fence tester for that. And then this also allows
us to move our pigs to different areas within
our forested areas, different pastures around the farm and we can just always
bring the charger with us. One thing I like about this Stafix charger and a few other chargers
you can purchase is that there's a spat in the back so that you can actually
put them up on T-Post so they're not sitting on the ground. I might just have this one, on one of our wood corner posts. And so always make sure that your red fence wire is connected to either your polywire or your electric high tensile, whatever it is that you're
needing to electrify. That's where your your red clip goes and then the green one
always goes to the ground. So having a good ground is
going to be very important for making sure that your fence is hot and that your animals will get
shocked if they touch it. So the more grounds you have, the better, we just have a lot of
these temporary ground rods that you can hammer in
as far as you can go. And then that always gives us
a good ground wherever we are. - [Speaker] When we are moving our batches of pigs around the ranch,
whether it's going to the corral so that we can get a weight on them or moving them to a new pasture or a new section within their pasture, we always use the low stress
animal handling techniques. Temple Grandin is a great resource on how pigs think and how they behave and how we need to behave
and work with pigs. So definitely check her out. When we are going to move our pigs, it takes a few of us
at one time to do this but we always have one person go out into the pasture with the pigs
and they'll stand at the gate or at the next section, depending
on where we're going to, and they'll start calling for the pigs. And then we have one or two people going within the pasture to get behind the pigs so that they can just push them and herd them forward to the
person that's calling them. It's very low stress where
you're just out there talking to the pigs. We want the pigs to know
where we are, what we're doing and that way they're comfortable with us. And so once we have the pigs
up and they're all starting to move towards where we want them to go, we don't want to open the
gate or the next section until we have all the
pigs up close together, everyone is paying attention so they can all move as a group. One of the hardest things
to do with pigs, is trying to move one pig by itself or a lot fewer pigs by themselves. If you have everyone moving as a batch, everyone is just following the
leader, following each other, it's a lot calmer and it's less work on the people trying to move those pigs - In regenerative agriculture, pigs are a highly valuable animal to use to impact the land.
(pigs oinking) So here we run our pigs
in our forested plots and you can look through here and before we started
running pigs through here you were not able to even walk. There was so much overgrown brush and briars and just dead trees and logs. And you can see the type of impact that the pigs have made
over just a few seasons of having pigs in here. So what we will do is we want
them to create some bare soil, to create some impact
through their hooves, through rooting around with their noses, by placing our feeders and
waters in strategic areas to cause impact there. And then before we move
them out of this space, we will take some seed,
(pigs oinking) most commonly we use is ryegrass. We're gonna start implementing, a few other experimental
seeds like brassicas and then we'll just
broadcast those seeds in here so that we will get new forge, a new seed bank coming through for the next batch of pigs
that run through here. Here's a great example
of what pigs do you best and that is rooting the ground. So they use a really strong snout and they are digging in
the soil looking for bugs and roots and different things to eat. And so you can see here that they will route up
to the electric fence and that causes the ground
underneath the electric fence to rise up and pile up a little bit. And what's nice is with
the electric fence, you can either just
raise your insulators up or you can come back and rake the soil back into your pasture. But anywhere you have
electric fence like that, the pigs will challenge that and route right up to that line. Here's a great example of a wallow that we have in our pasture. This is just a natural wallow that the pigs have created over times since they come in and
out of this pasture. And it's very important for pigs have access to
wallows in the summertime and when it's hot out, pigs can't sweat. So they need to cool
themselves off with water. (upbeat music) - [Speaker] So here is an example of the current record system
that we use for each batch. I just made it on an Excel file. So at the top we have a location where we can add what group number it is because here we are going to
be running multiple batches throughout the year. And so just being able to keep track of those individual batches,
especially if there's more than one batch on the farm at a time that's really important to
keep that information separate. So on one side we have information
for when the pigs arrive, the number of pigs that we receive and the date that they get here, where they're at. And then following that, we have information for the number of pigs that are leaving that area, the date that they're leaving that area and where they're going next. So that helps us with
our rotational grazing. We know where animals
have been, for how long and how many animals have
been on that piece of land. Next to that, we have our feed usage. So every time I go out to
fill either their bulk bins or their wood feeders, while they're in the
piglet receiving barn, I keep track of that. I wanna know how much
feed my pigs were eating while they are here. And then in the end, you can figure out how much feed you used to
raise out X number of pigs, in X amount of time. So I have the date that
I filled the feeders, how much feed went in
to out of the bulk bin or how many buckets I
put in that wood feeder. And then what feeder I used, for example our big bulk
bins, I have them numbered. So if they're not eating out
of one, as well as the other, maybe they're not able to spin it as well, maybe feed isn't dropping as much. Could be a number of
different factors there. And then what ration we're feeding. Right now, we are just feeding one ration, the whole time the pigs are here and depending on where things go, you may be feeding one
or two different rations. On the back of it, we have a section to
keep track of mortality. And then the reason why
the mortality occurred whether we had to euthanize that animal or if it was a natural death and the reason associated with that and then the date. Below that is an area for treatment. So if we do have to give
an animal antibiotics, they can no longer be sold to Grassroots Farmers' Cooperative, the date that those antibiotics or whatever medication is giving and then the reason why. If we have to give antibiotics any of the pigs in our batches, we will give that pig an ear tag so that we can keep them
identified separately from the pigs that have not been treated with any type of medication. And then that way they can
still all be raised together in one pasture as a group. But we can still identify with the ear tag if
your tag gets ripped out or falls out there's still that hole or that rep in that pig's
ear, where we can identify that the animal has been
treated with something. And then we have an area to
keep track of the weights. So we tried to take weights on the pigs once a month or
once every other month just to keep track of how well they're growing, how much weight they are gaining. So we'll have the date
we take their weight, the average weight of the whole group and then the highest
and the lowest weight. And then that will help the
production team determine if they're on track for their
scheduled processing date. Below that we just have the dates that they are scheduled
to go to processing and how many head are
scheduled to go at a time? Since we do batches of around a 100 pigs, we send in loads of 20
to 24 pigs at a time. So just being able to know the date and how many we send in at
one time, is beneficial. (upbeat music)
