THE TRUTH ABOUT PASTURING PIGS - what to REALLY Expect

this is actually a perfect intro spot can you just introduce yourself and tell us your farm name this is like you can see the barn the piggies this is perfect like what do you want me to say hi i'm kirsten bordener this is mouse creek farm and i raise idaho pasture pigs you are perfect you're ready for youtube that was perfect one take done [Music] how'd you get into i know you told us in the last interview but we'll put it back in this one how'd you get into idaho pasture pigs purely by accident a friend of mine was raising idaho pasture pigs told me i had to have this pig actually let's do this later okay sure because we're going to do it in front of bart that's my fault oh there we go let's do it we'll save that yeah get down there we'll do it in front of bark perfect how i got started in idaho pasture pigs was purely by accident a friend of mine was raising idaho pasture pigs and thought i needed to have a pig and i thought yeah bacon love bacon bacon's good so i bought a piglet and when i went to pick it up she said oh by the way we didn't castrate him because he's breed quality and we think you should raise idaho pasture pigs so i brought him home and i'm like named him bart the bacon hater because he was going to be bacon i called my uncle up to hey can you help me castrate a a boar yeah sure so he came over he said oh man because it would be a shame to castrate him he's such a nice bore i think you should raise idaho pasture pigs so now i'm raising idaho pasture pigs that's called a bait and switch [Music] so here you have four paddocks they're constantly divided by this fencing here i'll use the fencing in between so i can make four into seven so it's being used hard for the last four years so what we're looking at here the six tenths of an acre that's in this woven wire this is six tenths of an acre this is the first place you know and so this has had pigs on for four years pretty much non-stop i mean i rotationally graze them i put the fencing as the grass gets pushing i'll divide these in half again depending on what where i am in farrowing depends on where i am and feeder pigs but there's always pigs rotating through here for the last four years and this is all the more damage there is in four years of pretty much constant pace constant yeah yeah that's that's impressive as far as like change of the pasture over time what have you seen with what we see here did was it always like this you mentioned it was a yard it was a yard so it was yard grasses so it was your kentucky bluegrass whatever the yard grasses were so what has come in now has been the clovers and the orchard grass and as you can see there's a lot of clover so my frost seeding worked really well i was really happy with that because you never know when you're just spreading seed is it going to work or are they just going to rip it all out and and you're not going to have it and the bear patches when you when you leave what happens what do you notice they should fill in with what usually comes back grass and clover it depends on what was there now that's interesting to me what we had last year um when i ran ours up in the field our bear patches came back a lot of weeds in the bear patches i'm not getting not anymore so what initially thistle ah okay but then it turns out they like thistle so they ate it ah a dandelion thistle that type of weeds yeah initially that's what it came back as but now they've pretty much decimated that type of weed yeah you don't see a lot of dandelion or thistle in here now thistle hasn't pushed yet but um you won't see too much in here so they over time eliminated the weeds might have come back in the bare spots they came and took care they isolated them rooted them up and now i mean i just said that a few minutes ago like you look out here you don't see a single dandelion that i don't mind a dandelion i'm a homesteader yeah i like dandelion it's like that's what i'm like darn my dandelion patch is gone i gotta look somewhere else for dandelion it's a it's it's just a nice green pasture yeah yeah what uh what do you find happens in the in the like dust bath there well they'll leave they'll keep that a dust bath so is that something that you just when you're pasture and pigs you say you know what i'm going to have some of those yes and that's just a gift it's just a given if if i could set ideally if i could set my place up ideally i do a wagon wheel approach feeding wallow water housing in the center and then jump off to the different pastures yeah and you would not get this i think because i haven't tried it yet in every pasture you don't need a ton of acres to raise a pig i have six sows two bores so i'm firing twice a year so this six tenth of an acre i use is my nursery wow and my feeder pigs then the the breeding stalker are out behind us and at this kind of overkill it's more than they need but it's what it is right now so someone that just wants to raise two feeder pigs a half an acre is more than enough just divide it up and rotate them around and then clip your grass you you don't want your grass real tall you you don't really want it over 10 to 12 inches at all eight six to eight put them on at six to eight off at three move to the next field and do you suggest the setup here where you have like permanent paddocks and then you can adjust the fencing as you go i like to lock them down you know that that even if they get through what i have as as my division fences basically because that's what i had on the farm it's it's horse tape and i had horses so i used it perfect yeah it was already here it seems like a good fit for pigs because it's real visible right like right i like it it's phys very visible but a little feeder pig will go right under it okay so that's why i like the hard wire with an electric hot wire at the bottom that even if they get through these division fences they're still in so you really suggest the perimeter a hard wire you have the woven wire with the graduated bottom right right for the piglets because they are real small piglets and then also a strip of hot wire down at the bottom to prevent the rooting that's what i like for for feeder pigs or for piglets because they will run forward if they're scared they're running forward so if if they can get under a fence even though they're getting shocked they're running forward once their electric trained like once my feeder pigs are half grown i could then put them out on some of these other fences because they're electric train they know it hurts and they know where home is but especially when you're bringing a new animal home to your from my homestead to yours they don't know where home is so if they get out you've got a pig rodeo so you know my advice anybody getting piglets you know feeder pigs even breeder piglets is lock them down you know four four pieces of hog panel with t-posts and a little house water food and line that with electric lock them down to this they know who you are they know you're bringing their feet and then you can introduce them to a bigger area then at that point you can train them well actually one of the things we do and it sounds like this is the same thing here you train them within a hard perimeter right so when they like you said when they get shocked and they run forward they run into that fence and bounce back right after that as we can see over in the other paddocks where the your breeding stock is you're okay you're more comfortable with not having the hard perimeter yeah that's fine like i said i had all this tape because of the horses and i had had cattle so i reused it but i really do like it because it is very visible yeah do you need it no a lot of people use two-strand wire electric and they do just fine and it's a lot cheaper but i had it yeah so it's nice i like it what do you need for having a pig outside shelter however you want to build your shelter these are porta huts i think they're like 200 each i actually bought these used and rebuilt them i have two houses made out of fiberglass truck caps that i repurposed i have one house out of an old porch roof that i repurposed and there's designs for a-frames online to build a-frames so you don't have to spend a ton of money on housing just make sure it's dry high and dry if you were gonna try to build one thing that you could house and have uh them have their litters in what would you pick a-frame a-frame that's a a beat-up old a-frame but it was a porch roof yeah still going still going one of the hardest things one of the biggest challenges we found with pigs is water what do you do for water uh regular season and then what do you do in the winter so winter time well this is regular season and winter what i tried this year is that's a 275 gallon ibc tote that i fill from the hose from the barn and it held two weeks worth of water in the wintertime i wrapped it in double bubble insulate it with cardboard so it's not pretty but it's there and then i ran 30 feet of gutter cable to the metal pallet that's underneath these ibc totes and put it on the thermostat that it came on at like 38 degrees gutter cable i've never heard of that yeah it's it's pretty cool stuff and it kept this whole ibc tote completely ice free all winter long no way 30 feet of gutter cable and not a whole lot of electricity for that uh my electric usage was about the same but i also had more heaters in the barn this way oh no way so so pretty efficient it seemed to be but you know i hate frozen water so i'll pay the election so i put an extension on the valve that's in these i just went to a hardware store and this is some kind of rubber i don't know what it's for i just walk up and down the aisles till i find something that i think will work and then i can that's how it was all winter long the coldest night of the year we had it was 19 degrees and the plug came unplugged for this heater and i came out in the morning and the plugs unplugged and i thought oh man and it was still ice free no way yeah i don't think i would go a week doing that but i made it over over a 19 degree night by inadvertently pulling the plug and we were still okay in the morning it's like this little trough here they just break it up with their nose the ice the little trough catch here a little trough catch here they this guy here or do they just drink it and it's got like that doesn't ever freeze on you because i had five animals in here yeah i just filled it every day and they were fine now with just the two yeah it'd probably be more problematic but with the five pigs and it's out of the wind my wind comes this way that's one of the reasons it's set up like this it really helped and then i throw a disinfection tablet in it's a chlorine dioxide tablet so it keeps the water fresh this looks like the feeders that we used to use for our you know big pink pigs what do we got here what's this it's a 1960s pig feet cam or pig feeder came out of an old barn i bought it for 40 bucks and then i took out the dividers and extended it because these pigs have such a big head so i made the the feeder bigger at the bottom so it used to have six compartments for the feeder pigs i made it to three and then i put a roof on it and i tilt it up fill it from behind but i will only put a day's worth of feed in here but now if i'm going away for the weekend they'll get a weekend's worth of feed and then i go away for the weekend i actually fill it from the back side so i don't have to come in here and fight with very hungry feeder pegs so i can fill it from the other side but yeah the roof just tilts up that i can fill it yeah this is this is it's set up for um like you're thinking ahead of the steps right every day you got to come feed them right every day you gotta make sure they have water and to have that access where you can go in and do all that without them messing with you and everything yeah i used to have a 55 gallon barrel here and the nipples froze all winter long and then i'm going for the hair dryer or whatever this worked great you know 275 gallons like i said it it would last two i filled it every saturday because i was doing that was my data to do work but literally every saturday i put maybe a foot of water in it i just kept it full yeah i mean a full tank is not going to freeze as fast as an empty one yeah so i just kept it full and then with the reliant tablets which is a chlorine dioxide tablet one tablet treats 128 gallons of water so every time i filled it i just chucked another one in when you feed them are you hauling a bag on your shoulder from the barn or just what they need there's oh right because they're not eating as much and like right talked about you it would only be if i was going away for a couple of days which i'm a farmer that doesn't happen that's a pipe dream now pigs are omnivores so they need grain but they'll eat grass a young piglet's gut isn't quite mature enough to digest the grass effectively until it the gut matures got it so when i started these feeder pigs in the wintertime i did not start them with hay they just got the grain and then i slowly added grain in to get the microflora and the gut to switch over to digesting hay we talked about this in our interview last time but for the people who maybe haven't seen that video your background is working with animal feed right well livestock i mean my degree is in animal production and i work i work in turkeys right now it's turkeys yeah the reason i bring this up is you know there will be people who would say the people who don't believe in pasturing pigs at all uh you work with animal feed you're not just going off of what something you heard on the internet somewhere this is what you do professionally right yeah what age and what kind of rate do you start transitioning your piglets to getting some forage at weaning they're still on the regular grain feed and they and they're getting hay like there's a hay rack in that shelter behind us so they can so when i start seeing they're chewing on the hay they're really kind of making use of it i just start putting it in at five percent okay then i'll go to 10 and i wanted to go to 15. yeah but they just dug it out so i stopped at 12. this is my bank barns 200 years old so i work with what i have yeah pick your boots up it's not really that great anymore okay at this far it's a disinfect because you're coming from your farm to mine remember i told you to wear boots yep that's why you need to spray him sure so my pigs are getting the custom mix that the registry recommends yeah which is on the website or should be on the website so that's in the freezers i store it in the freezers it's a little bit more protected from temperature change so it lasts a little longer so it's a high protein high mineral diet since these pigs eat about half of what a commercial pig eats the pigs have done excellent on it yeah once i switch to this diet um i have better litters what uh how much do you give like a full-grown uh full-grown boar per day right now yeah summer time just one camp one can thank goodness and then pasture in the wintertime it's more depending on the weather and then the hay rack you saw in barts right they get hay then wow so there's my these were born tuesday tell me about the uh farrowing what do what do you have to do for farrowing obviously i mean well normally i have him in a small panda pharaoh but she decided different she moved over there coming from a world where you know the big pink pigs you always saw they had to put in the some kind of farrowing crate or something these guys do pretty well all just just like this she fired right there in the bottom of the bank bar now she did lay on one and you you can have that's one of the reasons they they went to a farrowing crate is because of crushing problems the a-frame a lot of people will fire in an a-frame and and that design of that a-frame allows the piglets to get to the outside so the mom can't lay on them but i have a 200 year old bank barn so that's what i'm using and she did well she lost one so i can't [Music] complain [Music] we're taking a pic home today and uh if you are interested in a pig from mouse creek farm where they get a hold of you facebook we'll put a link in the video facebook link to mouse creek farm this has been awesome if you want to learn more about how to prepare piglets to thrive off of pasture and the feeder pig feed in the wintertime i put ground hay in oh okay so that kind of trying to mimic grazing and i got up to 12 percent learn more about how kirsten waters animals out on the pasture there's a bathtub stock tank from the pond overflow they can go down there and drink there's actually and enjoy the second entire half of this interview this was actually only half of our field trip with kiersten you can see the whole unedited version of this in the home city pioneer library click here to become a home city pioneer you'll get access to this entire full-length field trip 40 minutes long plus our entire library of extended versions master classes and homesteading and you can often join us live for our interviews you get instant access to all of that click here to become a pioneer

Channel: Homesteady

Views: 149,565

Keywords: farm, farming, homesteading, homesteady, homesteaders, backyard farming

Id: IMyGpAAHhOk

Length: 20min 12sec (1212 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 26 2021