Ok, the Lord and Master of the house has come up with an idea. Again. We have long talked about putting a pig in the back yard (mostly I try to talk him out of it) , but we kind of live in town. I have this HUGE garden in the middle of the back yard (we have about an acre). I have thought about building a hoop greenhouse over at least part of the garden. Now, L&M has come up with the idea of covering the garden with hooped plastic (like a green house) and sticking a couple of pigs in it for the winter. I have to admit that it has potential. I'd rather deal with pigs in the winter than the summer, they would be enclosed, they would till the garden and fertalize it. If we put them in at first freeze, they would still have about 5 months to mature before it was time to garden again.
Ok, here's the questions. How long does it take for a pig to mature? Can you get young feeder pigs in the fall? How sensitive are they to cold? Does anybody think this could actually work?
Boy, everybody ought to have fun with this one.
Anybody out there do pigs?
OH, My. You are going to have you hands full. Can't offer any advise,haven't had pigs in years (for a reason) My cousin raises pigs in GA (funny story, she was always so prissy growing up and went to a very exclusive girls college. All of her friends are CEO's ets.) She is always trying to catch them when they get out. They are really smart.
Pigs need to be kept warm. To avoid problems and expense for housing and heating and all that, we got pigs in spring after frost and all that was over. We got them at about 100 lbs, raised them till hunting season, and had them butchered. Oct first. They gained about 200-250 lbs in that time. Gave them a good worming about a month before butchering. It worked great. But I don't recommend keeping pigs over the winter unless you can keep them dry and warm. They catch cold.
Hope that helps.
Carolyn
Well, they would be dry in a green house. I wonder if there are cold hardy pigs. I'll have to look into that.
If you can find heritage breeds , they are more hardyier than other breeds.
The guy at Footsteps has Tamworth hogs. he lives in CT. He keeps his all yr long . They have little hutches for cover.
We plan on doing the heritage breeds if we can find someone who breeds them in our state.
There is a site called the Pig site.com
i found it very informative
sue
I am stunned. I did some research and it seems that our plan would WORK! There are actually people out there doing just that and in a lot smaller hoop houses than we had planned. I think the best bet would be half greenhouse, half pasture and then when there isn't snow, they could go outside. All I need is the covering and some electric fencing on the inside of my fence for insurance (and to protect my asparagus bed). Go figgure. L&M may have hit one this time. (of course I have fallen for his ideas before and regretted it)
It seems that just a standard Yorkshire will tolerate the cold quite well, though not gain weight as fast as in the summer. But then who needs a 400 pound pig? Well, we'll see.....
We have raised pigs during the winter and have had good luck. We have an enclosed wood shed which we keep pine shavings and a heat lamp. What is nice about this is feeding them inside makes them much friendlier! We open the door during the day to give them the option to go outside if they wish. The piggies that we have in the freezer right now were purchased in Jan 07. and we dressed three of them in June-650 pounds of meat! The fourth one was my borther-in-law's pig and he waited until Sept. She dressed around 300+/- One nice thing about waiting until warmer weather is the extra veggies in your garden goes towards feeding. Although your tomatoes will love the pig manure in your garden. Good luck and have fun!
jykgaskin wrote;"but we kind of live in town."
Check your local ordinances before you get too far in. In some places, the ONLY "livestock" you can't have is swine. I lived in a very rural equestrian area in FL, and there was controversy over whether or not a Vietnamese Pot Bellied pig would be allowed as a pet. Pigs were prohibitted in general, except for one person who had pigs before anyone lived close to him, but his "grandfathering" only extended to his current stock, he was not allowed to get more. He was protesting, and I don't know the outcome, but now I'm curious enough to find out. His neighbors were just as adamant that the piggies must go. BTW, all properites were 5 acres or more, the pigs were on ten, and at the back of the property.
The neighbors in back of me have 14 stinking horses boarded on less that 5 acres. Nobody lives on the other side of me, the other neighbor is not too close (and loves fresh pig) and the only other neighbour is my son. I think I can keep it without anyone even noticing. I already have chickens, bunnies and turkeys. So I will probably be ok.
Can you tell there are no million dollar homes in this neighborhood? (Well, the guy with the horses, but nobody speaks to him and he is doing so many illegal things on his property, he couldn't complain to ANYONE. Besides, the worst they can do is make me get rid of them.
Mother Earth New has a great article on greenouses and how to do winter crops. They guys does everthing in his greenhouse . Puts his animals in there in the winter. Does worm composting to keep the chickens happy, Fall crop and all kinds of stuff. IT is a great article. He has a big greenhouse but i m sure you could down size to fit your needs. The animals create the heat that is needed for the winter.
I think it is in the Setp / Oct one.
if you go to website www.motherearthnews.com you can look up the archives.
sue
At my fil's place, he usually had 600 head of pigs. I'm not sure what breed they were, but some were in the Tasco building, and the others were in a yard with open front sheds to go in. They had plenty of corn stalk bedding, and survived just fine in our South Dakota winters. They were just feeder pigs (he fed for some guy, so I don't know the details) but I'm assuming they were mixes...Hampshire sounds familiar, along with Duroc I think....
We no longer live there, and when we moved here, and had a conditional use permit to build, the only question one of the neighbors had was, "Are you going to be raising pigs there?" Lol! I can understand the concern though; we lived just west of the building/yards....like 200 feet west. Needless to say, I didn't open windows very often in the summer.
I know he had to cull the runts/deformed...I came across one the day the guy was out to look around. There was this one pig that had deformed legs/feet. She got around okay though, and wasn't getting sores on her legs. He wanted her pulled out/shot, so I took her, and put her in a pen with my 3 holstein bottle calves. She did just fine, and ended up feeding our family later.