Raising pigs the natural way - outdoors

Wednesday, August 10, 2011

That's what Jeff Linton is doing, after studying a farrow-to-finish operation in Scotland. And, so far, it is proving a cheap and healthy way to operate

by MIKE MULHERN

It has the feel and look of a small subdivision. The houses are all the same and the neighbourhood is awash in noisy youngsters who chase through the grass while their mothers sit around the pool.

The difference is that this subdivision is on 2.7 acres of seeded pasture, surrounded by three strands of high-tensile electric fence, and the residents are all pigs. The pool is a wallow and the mothers don't so much sit around it as lie in it.

Jeff Linton's experiment raising pigs outdoors, once a common sight in Ontario, is enough of a novelty that it is attracting visitors – Jeff's friends, mainly, and others who just take a Sunday drive to see the pigs and the six little six-by-eight huts that line the single, grassy, muddy street.

Linton, 26, has been in the pig business all his life, working with his parents, Dave and Brenda, on their farrow-to-finish operation near Blyth. Jeff wanted to raise a few pigs outside, so he went to Scotland to learn how it's done.

He spent a couple of months in the winter of 2010 on a 500-sow, farrow-to-finish operation one hour north of Aberdeen. That's where he learned about huts and grunts, especially grunts you should worry about.

"You've got to know the grunt," he says, "whether it's a happy grunt, a safe grunt." An unsafe grunt is a low, menacing grunt. When you're in a small hut with a 400-pound mother and her litter, that's something to pay attention to.

Jeff has six gilts, first-time mothers, and 58 babies for his first try at outdoor farrowing. Each sow has a hut and the design prevents the babies from getting out for the first two weeks. After that, they are in and out, exploring the neighbourhood and playing with their friends. They are apt to run away from visitors, but the mothers are more likely to show curious interest.

On the day the pigs are born, Jeff crawls in with the mother and her litter, clips the eye teeth and castrates the male pigs. If the mother objects, Jeff has the option of coaxing the mother outside with feed, putting a board in the opening and doing his work. Most of the time, the mother tolerates Jeff in the enclosure.

"I'm around my sows all the time," Jeff says, "so they know me. They treat me like another pig, it seems."

When the gilts started farrowing in April, Jeff didn't castrate and clip teeth until the second day. That was a mistake, he says. Two pigs in the first litters developed greasy pig disease and died. He believes it was because there was too much biting. That's why he moves in now on the first day to clip eye teeth.

The first litters also got an iron shot, but later litters didn't because, Jeff says, they get the iron they need from the natural environment. The only other losses during the first round of farrowing were two pigs which died when their mothers lay down on them.

Jeff's experiment began with the crossbreeding of the six gilts. They are Landrace, Duroc and Yorkshire crosses. That was done primarily to get darker skin colours, so they would be more likely to tolerate sunny outdoor conditions.

"The colour was mainly what I was concerned about. If they were white, I'd be a little bit concerned about sunburn." But he is finding that babies which are white have no problem. They either wallow, seek shade or both.

Jeff expects to have two litters a year, one in the spring and one in the fall. Next year, he plans to expand to 18 sows. To accommodate the increased number, he will cycle farrowing so that there are six mothers with their young in a farrowing area that includes the huts and 12 gestating sows in a separate part of the pasture equipped with a run-in shed.

In this first cycle, he is weaning at five weeks. The weaned pigs will be raised in a barn before being sent to market at six months. The sows will be bred again and stay outside until November, then winter inside in an unheated barn with a generous straw pack.

The outdoor huts sit on the ground with a straw pack for a floor. The huts are fitted with hooks, so they can be moved with the loader tractor after each farrowing cycle. The sows are fed a mix of corn, soybeans and wheat.

"They eat a lot less than they would inside," Jeff says, "because they are eating pasture and roots and everything and they are not even hungry." The sows in Scotland are fitted with nose rings to prevent rooting, but Jeff does not plan to do that with his sows.

Though it's early days, Jeff thinks the experiment is going well. "It's working amazingly," he says. "It's cheap and they (the sows) are all milking great. They milk better than any sow I've ever seen. Even after five weeks, they are still dripping milk." He says they are weaning naturally and generally figuring everything out on their own, which also seems better.

"It's a natural way, without everybody controlling everything to maximize productivity," he says. "It's not maximum production, but there are cheap input costs, so I think it will work out in the end."

One of the things that has concerned others, but not Jeff, is predator pressure. He says there are coyotes in his neighbourhood, but he expects the sows will be able to protect their young. It is less of a problem at night because the sows and their litters go inside at dusk, somewhat like chickens going to roost. Unlike chickens, they don't get up with the sun, not emerging until 10 or 11 a.m.

Jeff's dad, Dave, who is looking over the fence at the babies as they scoot about and mothers who are in and out of  the huts and either wallowing or grazing, thinks out loud about last month's energy bill for his barn and compares that with the zero cost Jeff will face for energy this season

"Maybe we made a wrong turn somewhere along the way," he muses. BF