The Transformative Power of Pigs
If you could pick any natural system to model agriculture after, what would you assume would be the most productive? Temperate forest of the eastern United States? Green rolling hills in Scotland? Flat grassland in Australia or Africa?
If you’re like me, you said something like the Hawaiian islands or the Amazon rainforest. They’re teeming with life and have plenty of precipitation and year-round warmth, but I was surprised to learn that many bio-inspired farmers don’t choose to imitate the dense forest model. When trees grow close together, their branches form a canopy that blocks sunlight from reaching the ground. Since the sun is the driving force behind all life, having a tall layer of tightly-planted trees isn’t the most effective distribution of solar energy. It would be better to have trees while also having sunlight reach the ground so that grasses and shrubs can grow.
It turns out that is the exact definition of a savanna: trees that don’t form a closed canopy, so smaller plants can grow underneath. That model is what Bobby Tucker at Okfuskee Farm is shooting for, and he’s using pigs to help him get there.
A friend of mine was interested in seeing firsthand some of the things I’d blogged about, so I brought him on my second trip to the farm. Bobby took the time to talk him through some of the methods and practices he uses, just as he did with me on my first day. And just as before, we started out by heading out to feed pigs.
There had been a question on my mind since my first trip late last month. Rotational grazing for sheep, cows, and goats make sense — they eat some grass, you move them before they eat too much, the grass grows back. The problem with pigs is that they use their noses to dig through the ground to find food — a process called rooting — and they’re very good at it. Ground that’s been plowed open by pigs will take a much longer time to return to normal than grass that’s been trimmed by some sheep. So how does a farmer manage rotational grazing for animals that turn over ground?
Answer: it’s complicated. Pigs will root more when the ground is soft. They’ll root more if there isn’t grass to eat. They’ll root more when they’re bored. Some breeds of pigs will root more than other breeds. Even after addressing all these factors and more, pigs will still root, and the rotational grazing system will simply take more recovery time than it would for animals that don’t root.
However, Bobby’s answer was even more interesting. He isn’t trying to set up a permanent pig system. He’s using them as tools, while profiting from their sale in the interim. He sets up small paddocks for a few days at a time in the woods for the pigs to root through. They trample the leaves (accelerating decomposition), fertilize the soil, and root to their hearts’ content. They’ll eat everything from poison ivy to honeysuckle to grubs. After a few days the area is cleared out and the dirt turned over, and Bobby throws out grass seed behind them. He’s also going to have loggers thin the woods out. All of this is to move towards a productive, maximally-photosynthesizing savanna.
The idea of using pigs like this is touchstone ecological agriculture. The pigs are delighted to be in the woods, avoiding direct sun and getting fresh ground every few days to root through. Bobby not only profits from the pork production, but also gets effective ground clearing and fertilization for free as he terraforms the land. Both parties benefit. Consider the alternative: tractors, weed-whackers, and synthetic fertilizers. All work-intensive, expensive, and pollutive. When ecological agriculture is done right, the farmer, the animals, and the environment all win. Consumers win as well, since we get to eat food that was raised healthy and humanely.
After feeding the pigs and discussing some fascinating ecology, we rotated the sheep to new pasture. We then spent the better part of two hours whacking away brush, saplings, and weeds away from a permanent electric fence, since if the wires are touching a plant it grounds the system and then you’re just pouring electricity into the dirt instead of keeping the barrier charged.
To accomplish this, I was entrusted with a brutal-looking medieval weapon. I recalled the knife Gordon had handed me at Ten Mothers farm a few weeks before — child’s play compared to this deliverer of death. It was basically a scimitar, I was basically a pirate, and it was awesome.
A tree had fallen on another section of permanent fence, so after the brush-clearing Bobby chainsawed while my friend and I sorted the pieces into firewood and a pile to be chipped into mulch later.
As the sun was setting, we headed over to a flock of sheep that had to be rounded up for weighing. Bobby was selling several for processing the next day. I had never attempted to herd sheep before. They’re very skittish, so it isn’t difficult to get an entire flock to move — just walk towards them. The trick is getting them to move where you want them to. They generally move as a single crowd but they’ll split up if they need to, so the three of us attempted an organized corralling towards the gate of the barn.
I over-corrected and stepped out of my position in our triangle and we lost control of them — I’ve never seen sheep move so fast or jump so high — so Bobby pulled out the food bucket and baited most of them in. Several got away but it just so happened he didn’t need them anyway.
One-by-one we weighed the sheep Bobby selected. Bobby would funnel them out of the holding pen, my friend would hold open the gate you see in the middle of the picture, and we’d get the animal on the scale. His butcher doesn’t want the sheep to be too big — eighty-five pounds was too high, and the mid-sixties were just right. Bobby has a master clipboard of every animal and a row of information such as birth date, different weigh dates, and so on. He entered in each animal’s weight based on its tag number, then shuttled them into another holding pen. Occasionally they wouldn’t want to get off the scale, so I’d slide open the door in the bottom-left corner of the picture and herd them backward with my knee. (Again, it’s not hard to get a sheep to move. Just walk toward it. Although that’s not entirely true — the lead ewe, Susie, walked straight toward me several times, not aggressively but certainly not scared.)
This experience is the closest I’ve ever been to meat processing. It’s obviously different than actually killing them myself, but the mere fact of weighing them, knowing they’re going to be killed the next day, was sobering. I don’t think it’s wrong to eat animals, and I will never be a vegetarian or proclaim that anyone should be. However, it’s worth pondering about how all meat was once part of a living, breathing, moving thing. It’s a trivial fact, but we so often ignore it. Looking into a sheep’s eyes and seeing it move and live, knowing it will die tomorrow so that humans can eat it, is just a sobering thing, even knowing there’s not much going on in that little brain (“Pigs are smart. Sheep are stupid.” — Bobby Tucker, 2019).
