After the frustration of last week, I'm happy to report that the pigs are now much more behaved. In fact, they're doing work for me! We've moved them onto the food plot area where we'll be growing all the herbs and veggies for the Dinner Basket. I tilled this area up last fall with a middle buster plow followed by an antique John Deere offset disc. That broke through the formidable sod, but didn't really create a very good planting surface. I seeded in cover crops, harrowed, and let the area be for the winter. The birds mostly ate the cover crops, but the seedbank in the soil allowed a rapid sprouting of grasses, forbs, and plenty of bull thistle (curse you invasive weeds!) It's now a jungle of rapidly growing greenery that the pigs are quickly eating and tilling. Pigs are built like a steam shovel: they have massive neck muscles and a sturdy snout that allows them to root through the soil looking for tasty morsels. From what I've observed in our pastures, their favorite activity is to get their nose under a piece of sod and pull their head up, turning it over and onto the adjacent grass. Nose rings are often put on pigs to discourage this behavior, but we want to let them express their natural pigginess (to quote Joel Salatin). If you leave them on a piece of pasture for a single day, like we've been doing, the rooting behavior is kept to a minimum, and I've found that it only takes about 5 minutes to flip back over the sod clods they do get to. Of course, where they are now, there is no sod, so I'm encouraging them eat and till everything up as much as possible. In a few weeks, the area will be completely tilled. All I'll have to do is run it over with the harrow and add a thick layer of compost with my manure spreader. I'll have used less fuel, compacted the soil less, and gotten a good meal for the pigs to boot!
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