Two weeks of Andrew and Sue volunteering comes to an end and another article in the post, it’s time to catch up with some blogging:
Our pig farming neighbours, Paul and Christiane, have
retired this year. Ever since
we’ve kept pigs ourselves, we’ve done an exchange with them, whereby I manage
the English-speaking guests in their gîte and they give us all the cereals that
we need. It’s an elegant
solution. What I give is just a
small thing for me (a few minutes on the computer replying to emails, preparing
contracts and cycling down to translate on their arrival) but enormously
important for them (most of their rental income comes via me). En revanche, considering the
scales involved, a few bags of ground mixed cereals is nothing for them but of
considerable value to us (compared to the price we’d pay at the local
agricultural merchants for similar).
We overfed our first pigs, and to lesser degrees the second
and even third year before we got it right. The key point was a little bit of advice in Starting With Pigs by Andy Case, “feed
pigs by eye”. It’s good advice but
requires a level of expertise that only years of experience, and a few fat
pigs, can give. In the second year,
we started weighing out their food, following a regime from the breeder. The ‘problem’ is that, as they live
outdoors, they have access to a whole lot of natural nutrition and we can’t
measure how much of it they eat; so one has to learn to feed by eye. We now give our pigs about a third of
the cereal ration of their barn-raised cousins … but we do still give them some
cereals.
There has been lots of building work going on as the new
owner brings the buildings into conformity with the latest welfare
standards. When I went round to
collect the last few bags of feed, that would see our pigs through to the day
they left for the abattoir, the machine couldn't be made to work and I left
empty handed. What could we do?
I was missing the oakey obvious: When we give holiday guests the introductory tour of
our permaculture smallholding, we come to the pigs, where I point out what a
lovely area they have to free range in.
I explain that the pigs eat a surprising amount of grass, root around
(for roots!) and benefit from excess of cherries, plums and apples as they come
into season, and finally acorns from the four mature oak trees that surround
the paddock. I even tell them that
in Spain, there are pigs that are fed exclusively on acorns to make the very best quality jamón
ibérico.
It’s been a very good mast year
and there is an abundance of acorns.
We bought a clever rolling basket device (called a nut wizard) from Martin
Crawford at The Agroforestry Research Trust
and started to hoover up the acorns.
We’ve also been making lots of apple juice. So we finished our three pigs on a diet
of acorns and apple pulp and they seemed very happy and suitably heavy.
There are so many acorns, we’ve carried on collecting and
will try to store them to feed to next year’s pigs before the acorns start to
fall again.
