Pregnant Porkers

There's very little to report about on the farm this time of the year. I'm spending a lot of my time thinking and re-evaluating the business and the future. In the meantime, we have three pregnant sows that will be farrowing in the next month or so.

The video above shows the winter housing for the sows and the barn. It's a small corner of the barn that leads out to a relatively small paddock delineated by electric fence. The barn has a dirt floor, which I've learned is a pain to clean. Instead, I've been adding lots of stockpiled cheap local hay every day to try and make something of a deep litter system. As you can see in the video, the pigs eat a lot of the bedding. They also tend to move it to one corner where they sleep. They won't urinate or defecate in their sleeping area, but they will go everywhere else inside. I was hoping they'd do all their business outside, but that apparently is too much to ask.

The outside paddock is a big ol' mud pit right now. I wish I had a source of cheap/free carbon (wood chips, straw, hay) to put down in the outside area, but I only have enough to bed the inside. I've tried contacting a few local arborists, but it's a lot easier to get free wood chips in the city than in the country.