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Lucius_Junius
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Joined: Thu Feb 02, 2012 10:06 pm
Location: Nova Scotia - Zone 6a

I have pigs!

I made the next step. In addition to my chickens (and seasonal geese) I now have three porkers in my backyard, rooting around in their pallet-pen and biting at my boots whenever I do maintenance. I'm feeding them pig-feed, lots of scraps (from three households), milk and seaweed, and I'm hoping to get them onto some hay shortly.

Being the obliging hogs they are, they've also seen fit to furnish me with a seemingly-never-ending supply of manure. So not only are the scraps getting turned into pork, they're also finding their way into my garden and thus into vegetable matter.

However... I must advise against trying to fit three 125 pigs into a station-wagon trunk, or driving them home while your brother-in-law sits in the back seat fighting for all he's worth to prevent said noisy, angry pigs from bursting into the rest of the car...

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rainbowgardener
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Location: TN/GA 7b

Have you read Farm City: The Education of an Urban Farmer, by Novella Carpenter? Very amusingly written tale of her adventures raising turkeys, ducks, rabbits, and two pigs on a city lot plus the vacant lot next door. She fed the pigs mostly from dumpsters and stuff that restaurants and groceries threw out. I think after awhile, she was able to make arrangements with some restaurants so that they would just give her the scraps.

How much land do you have?

Keep us posted on how it is all working for you! Sounds like an amazing challenge. Do the pigs get tame?

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Lucius_Junius
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Joined: Thu Feb 02, 2012 10:06 pm
Location: Nova Scotia - Zone 6a

I've never read that, but I can certainly relate to her need to find food from elsewhere. I've got some family keeping their table scraps for me (one of the households is rather large - and wasteful! - so hopefully that will prove lucrative) and I'm going to talk to some of the restaurant owners here. A brewery opened in town in the summer and I was hoping to get their spent malt, but someone else beat me to it.

I've got about 2.5 acres, some of which is cleared, some of which is rocky hillside, briars and trees. I'm looking forward to this Spring and Summer because I'm going to get to spend most of it at home, which means lots of concentration on the gardens and animals :D

I don't know if the little joys are going to get friendlier or not. They're not terrible. I can usually get away with scratching their heads. When they're hungry they get a little bitey, though. They're very curious.

Bobberman
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Location: Latrobe Pa.

Thirty years ago I also had 3 pigs on a farm area of a girl I was dating! The farm people her relatives were to old to run the farm and had a small gas station! I starting doing some farming there with a old john dear tractor that was not used for 8 years or more. It had a fly wheel that had to be spun to get it started!

Getting back to the pigs. I would go to a Foodland store every week and find what I could in the dumpster. Cottage cheese was one of the best. Ant kind of cheese they loved and it put on the weight for them!I even fed then fish which they loved! For some reason their favorite plant was morning glories! I live next to the old Rolling Rock brewery and hops were always being hauled away in big trucks. Try not to feed the pigs meat. Fish to much of can change the flavor of the pork is what I hear. I would grow a field of sugar beats the big ones that get to be as big as a bowling ball! Thy can stay in the ground for a long time.

There was a guy that had a barn with way to much cow manure that was hard and about 2 foot deep. It was in there for a year with no animals! He decided to put a half dozen pigs in there for the winter. In the spring he had the nicest compost you could find since the pigs dug through the manure and straw and ate the corn that cows seem to just pass through!

My pigs seemed to always get out the the small pen and went about 200 feet over the hill to a motel and they would dig up the lawn and eat the grubs. Even the motel owner was mad and I had to fix the turned over grass! Pigs can eat foods that make other animals sick! Cereal is also a good food for them!

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Ozark Lady
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Location: NW Arkansas, USA zone 7A elevation 1561 feet

I was given a pig once, it was tiny and couldn't stand up at all. A trip to the vet proved it had a navel cord infection. The navel cord was drained, the piglet was to be given penicillin shots daily, bottle fed, and kept warm and clean. To accomplish this it became a house pig, pampers were placed on the piglet to keep it clean. I had an infant at the time, so the two were bottled and changed on the same schedule.
In about 10? days the piglet was up and walking. I had no other pigs so it graduated to a small doghouse out in the yard as it improved and got so that it could get around.
She was a very friendly pig, but she thought that she was a dog, she sort of barked at visitors and in general acted as dog-like as possible.
The day came, though, when all her pig instincts kicked in, and she was rooting up everything in sight, and in general causing a lot of destruction.
Lesson learned: Even a pet pig will wreck your yard, your garden, your flowerbeds and is like a small tank on legs! It comes down to... the pig, or everything else!

I hope that your pen is very, very secure!

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Lucius_Junius
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Posts: 71
Joined: Thu Feb 02, 2012 10:06 pm
Location: Nova Scotia - Zone 6a

Hahaha that's an interesting pig story. My pen is pretty secure, considering I built it out of pallets in about an hour. It's due for extension, actually. They routinely jump up on their hind legs and push on it, and so far it hasn't budged.

Man they eat a lot. It's amazing to think that people fed them almost entirely on scraps and what they could root up in the woods. The two of us don't produce enough scraps to feed one pig, let alone three.



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