Some people say that they enjoy watching pig videos. So here are three of them that show pigs acting like pigs.
In the first, they have spotted me bringing their evening food and are greeting me with great enthusiasm, to put it mildly. You’d think that they were starving but they have been grazing and rooting for food all day and had some whey to drink. We don’t feed them their corn, whey and cheese mixture in the morning because we want them to be motivated to graze and root all day. They should be much healthier and their meat more wholesome by having grass, leaves and roots as well as the grain and dairy products.
Once the food is in their trough, they dive in. No matter what kind of container they have, they like to get their feet in so I decided to give them a big enough trough that the little ones can fit in and not have to wait for the big ones to finish. The food is a mixture of ground corn from a local farm, whey from a local small cheese maker who uses sheep’s milk and cheese from a larger cheese factory that closed down a couple of weeks ago and gave us 1,000 pounds of cheese that they couldn’t sell. It is great food for the pigs, full of protein, fat and calcium and, like whey, contains lysine which is lacking in the protein the pigs get from grass, roots and leaves.
And finally, here is what pigs love to do and were made to do: root in the soil. It is amazing to watch their snouts plough through the dirt in search of roots and other goodies. Some people try to stop them from rooting by putting rings in their noses to cause pain when they root but that seems to us to be cruel. They just love rooting and we are happy to have some ploughing done in our old, long abandoned pastures which are full of course grasses. After a number of days in their 1/4 acre paddocks, we move them to the next paddock and then plant some good quality legume seeds (birdsfoot trefoil, currently, and soon some sweet clover). So, not only are they doing what they were created to do but they are helping us improve the pasture.
One Response
jenny goshulak
Loved the rooting..I never understood why some pigs have rings in their snouts! Who knew!