Why Pigs are Integral to Climate Farming
By Oscar H. Will III
When one thinks of sequestering carbon through soil building, it may come as a surprise that animal interactions with the land are key to that endeavor. It used to be that grazing animals were vilified for everything from desertification to methane pollution. So, too, with the pastured pig, because feral hogs have a reputation for tearing up the landscape.
In both these scenarios, what’s lacking is proper management of the animals to elicit the soil building goals. Let’s consider some of the roles that pigs on pasture can play in the Climate Farming enterprise. And while we’re singling out the pigs here, we should mention that, when they’re part of a diverse, integrated livestock rotation, the positive impact is even more profound.
Pigs Plow
We all know that tillage in the conventional sense is more likely to decrease soil carbon and damage soil structure and microbiota – and left to their own devices, pigs like to plow! A little plowing can be useful, particularly where the existing vegetation is not desirable or is a tangled woody thicket that adds little in the way of productive growth or desirable carbon capturing and soil building.
Pigs, when confined and moved in a systematic way, will help clear these areas along with some soil stirring so that you can replant the matrix with a mixture that produces human food directly or forage for subsequent generations of carbon-capturing animals, including pigs! And to top it off, pigs will do this work for you without any need to invest in machines and the fuels to run them.
Pigs Graze
When offered lush and diverse meadows, pigs will quickly move through, eating plants, seeds, nuts, fruits — you name it — all with minimal rooting. The key is related to density and duration, which is to say, management.
Every group of pigs will have a fixed amount of forage that they will consume before they begin to root. Once you establish that, you place them in a fresh paddock where they will consume what they want, trample some of last year’s growth and help integrate any thatch into the growing topsoil. Then, you move them to the next paddock.
Additionally, their hoof action will aid with pressing seed into good soil contact, which will increase the chances of germination. In a woodland setting, pigs will help keep underbrush in check in this way, and they will make a great living on any nuts that the squirrels don’t get.
Pigs Glean
When you’ve finished harvesting all of the fruit, nuts and vegetables from your food-producing areas, you can turn in the hogs for brief periods to consume the excess, blemished or otherwise unneeded leftovers. Again, timing and duration will affect how much negative impact the animals will have on those plots — and the negative can easily be a positive if you manage for gleaning without soil structure disturbance, which we highly recommend!
Pigs Make Compost
Once the field work is completed, you can move the pigs back to a semi-permanent enclosure, or a thicket needing to be cleared. You can then take all your compostable materials and pile them in that pen. The pigs will eat, churn, root and eventually leave you with a lot of fiber and manure that will compost and make an awesome soil amendment.
You can even send non-pig kitchen scraps, chicken cleanings and any non-pig carcasses through the system to convert it eventually to composted manure, energy for the pigs, and of course, more pigs.
Say you have a cider business as part of your Climate Farming operation. All those tons of apple pomace will become value-added fertility if you run it through your pigs. Same with those pecans that didn’t make the grade or slightly too-ripe blueberries. The possibilities are almost endless, and the complex, carbon-rich compost will feed the soil microbiota and help capture nutrients for slow release as the plant matrix requires.
Pigs Entertain
Finally, part of the fundamental basis for the Climate Farm is that its operations need to be healthy for the folks doing the work. Pigs offer a good deal of entertainment with their behaviors and habits. Spend a little time to watch them and feel your blood pressure go down — no doctor bill or insurance company to contend with.
Mix your pigs with a few of your chickens and watch the inter-species interactions! They’ll also work synergistically to help fulfill your soil-building goals.
Oscar H. Will III is a business leader, academic and agricultural practitioner devoted to conservation and small scale, sustainable agriculture. He's currently the editorial director at Ogden Publications in Topeka, Kansas, publishers of titles such as Grit, Capper’s Farmer, Mother Earth News, Farm Collector and many other print and digital properties. Hank’s small-scale, high-cash-flow farming experience spans more than four decades, with plant and animal crops as varied as native perennials and heirloom laying chickens. Hank has also authored or co-authored 9 books and hundreds of articles, and enjoys maintaining open-pollinated corn varieties his great-grandfather developed in Bismarck, Dakota Territory, under the Oscar H. Will & Co. brand.
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