Finishers in South Field
As you can see, we don’t ring our pig’s noses. This picture was taken in the spring showing some of our finisher herd in the south field under the quaking aspen saplings. I read about pigs rooting, but see little evidence of it in our fields. Based on my observations:
Things that encourage rooting:
- Wet or clay soil
- Penning
- Grubs in the soil – goes away with pasture maturity
- Tubers in the soil – goes away with pasture maturity
- Lack of grasses for nesting
- Overheating – to get in contact with cool soil
Things that encourage grazing:
- Well drained soil
- Managed Rotational Grazing
- Mature pastures with plenty of legumes & other forages
Basically, if there are plenty of grazing forages our pigs tend to graze instead of root on established mature pastures. They tend to root more on newly created pastures because there are interesting tubers and grubs to dig up. They generally graze first, root later. Rotational management thus encourages the grazing by moving them to new pastures before they run out of food and begin digging.
Interestingly I’ve never seen them dig the deep 1′ to 3′ craters that some people describe. When they do root it is just a couple of inches down. We do have some places with deep soils, down to even five or ten feet of dirt, so it is not simply that our mountain ledge prevents deep digging. Rather I suspect their shallow activity is because our top soil layer is fairly thin. Once they’re through that marginal layer they stop because what is lower just isn’t interesting. Instead they switch their attention to the leafy forages up on the surface.
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I agree with this. When we move our pigs with the cattle’s daily pasture moves they do very little if any rooting. However, when we park them to farrow they begin to do significant shallow rooting once they’ve creamed off the best forages available.
In this photo I would think this forage might be described as sparse? How much of their daily intake would you hazard is coming from this paddock and how much from the whey and other external inputs that you have?
This photo was taken in the spring before the grasses had gotten long and it is under a stand of aspen trees so there is less light. Later in the year, right now in fact, it is lush. We just today opened up that area to fall grazing. The pigs are loving it. There is a tremendous amount of clover in there – something they dearly love.
As a general rule, looking at their feed consumption over the course of the year in dry weight they get somewhere around 80% from pasture/hay, about 7% from the dairy and we’re now up to about 13% from the vegetables and boiled barley we occasionally get from local brew pub. We also get a little bit of bread which is primarily used as a training treat so they load easily every week but that doesn’t make up much of their diet. How much of each thing varies greatly with the season. These percentages have changed over the years and they change with the time of year depending on what’s seasonally available. For example yesterday they ate several hundred pumpkins as well as squash, immature watermelons, corn stalks and other things when we let them onto the south field plateau. Today they moved onto the broccoli, turnip and cabbage patch. But they won’t have those things again for a while. We’ll probably hold the other pumpkin patches back for later eating. In the fall they get a lot of apples starting in mid-August through late October. When the beechnuts, hazelnuts and such drop they get a lot of those. The grass and clover are pretty consistent through the warm season but then in the winter they get those in the form of round hay bales. In a pellet diet livestock get the same thing day in and day out but we see a lot more seasonal variation in what they get to eat. It does make some flavor difference. Chefs tell me they can taste the flavors of what the pigs have been eating and I believe them. The good news is they like all the flavors of the year. To me, the biggest flavor difference I notice between ours and other pork is that the fat is sweeter and delectable to eat. I like eating the pork fat from our pigs. I don’t like pork fat from factory farmed pigs. Breed? Management? Feed? I suspect that a lot of it is the pasture/hay and dairy diet.
How deep do your pigs root in the farrow paddocks? I was watching one of our sows, Torn, nest this morning. She plowed up a dish about six feet in diameter about three inches down creating a bowl with a rim about 8″ high and then lined it with grasses she gathered from the field. She’s now resting in it and looks like she’ll farrow any moment.
They don’t go very deep. Just a couple of inches to the subsoil layer. They do, however, root around small brush ‘n saplings to a deeper depth.
If you didn’t have the whey, what would you feed in its place to get the lysine?
Do you track how many farrowings each of your sows has had? If so, what is Torn up to?
Torn does about 2.5 farrowings a year. Two to 2.3 is pretty typical. Blackie does three farrowings a year and has large litters. Several of her daughters have also been superbe. One had 22 piglets, exceeding Blackie, Jill and Lady Diamond.
We started with whole milk, then got cheese too. Mostly we get whey now but sometimes it is milk, butter, cream or cheese. If we couldn’t get dairy at all I would get cows and milk them to get the milk for the pigs. I can make more money selling milk pork than I can selling milk. The milk industry is highly price fixed by the government with little to no margins. Our pastured/hay + dairy fed pork has no price fixing by the government. I produce premium product and get to charge a premium price in a competitive capitalistic marketplace. That’s the way it should be. If I didn’t do cows then I would do goats probably. There are other sources of lysine, milk is easy and makes the meat sweet.
Your pigs rooting sounds very much like ours, just a little down but more so in the new pastures where there are tubers and grubs to dig up. Still, we never get the deep crater like holes that I hear some people talk of. They even make machines specifically for grading soil after pigs so it is apparently a real problem in some places. Or maybe it is a feature. Come spring we plant behind our pigs in the winter paddocks.
Interesting. I think I see where this is going. What we really need to work on is training the pigs to nurse directly from the cow herd! That’d be awesome!
I think I’ve also read that you culture your milk products before feeding to the pigs? Is this to make more nutrients bio-available and/or reduce the casein impact on the pigs?
Aye, we’ve joked about teaching the pigs to milk the cows. :)
Yes, we make up five gallon pails of yogurt which we periodically add to our 1,000 gallon dairy tanks. There is always some yogurt in the tanks helping to culture the incoming whey, milk and cream each day. But I like to re-culture the tanks time to time as well. Yogurt is good for the digestion, helping add beneficial gut bacteria and preventing mold in the tanks.
Why go to all the effort of digging if there’s enough to eat on top?
You’re thinking like a pig. :) Smart!