Do pigs kill trees

Sean Govan wrote:

This reminds me of something Joel keeps saying on the YouTube videos I listen to: "we need more trees and less forest." I don't understand that yet.

I wonder if he means that we need more "Savannah style" farmland vs our current "no trees" or "full forest" approach. Have you looked at Mark Shepard's work? (Restoration Agriculture. There's a review of the book here: https://permies.com/t/20119/Restoration-Agriculture-Real-World-Permaculture ) He's done some interesting work about planting trees on contour with crop land in between. I know he used cows for some mob grazing, but it's been too long to be sure about pigs. I think he used them to pick up dropped fruit from the trees.  Again, it would have been well monitored, short term, controlled access situation.

Nature used to keep animals moving through the actions of top predators. Apparently, bear used to live where I am, but when Europeans arrived, they killed all of them in my area, and fairly far north of me. They've been gradually moving down to our area over time, and we will need to adapt our behavior to coexist with them again.

Jay, thanks for the link, I think I had heard Mark Shepard's name but that's it.

I just finished Joel's oldie but goodie Salad Bar Beef. At the time he didn't seem too keen on silvopastures (for cows at least) because it's hard to make hay with tons of trees in the way. And also, cows lounge under trees for shade, depositing unnecessary amounts of manure and urine there, instead of out on the sunny grass where it will be used to make a LOT more grass. Thus pulling nutrients from the surrounding area to the area under the tree.

But if those trees are crop trees, and you have another strategy for hay (scything, buying it in, cleared area, etc) then perhaps it's good to fertilize the tree.

Joel's solution is the shade mobile. He moves it to the least fertile part of the paddock so that that part gets more manure.

Another solution he suggested was, sure, have shade trees, but cut off all the lower branches. That way there's grass directly underneath, and the shade moves in an arc over the pasture next to the tree so they aren't always directly under it.

Here is a thought. Joel speaks of the perennial polyculture, meaning the HERBACEOUS perennial polyculture, aka pasture. A forest is another type of perennial polyculture, a woody one. So if pigs in nature open up the canopy by killing trees, and create a seedbed for disturbance-loving plants (many of which happen to be annual crop plants, or biennial root crop plants), then I have a vision of a savannah that drops fruits and acorns on a groundscape that is partly a "herbaceous perennial polyculture" and partly a "herbaceous ANNUAL/BIENNIAL polyculture," with potatoes, thistles, Jerusalem artichokes, etc., depending on whether they grazed or rooted the last time they were there.

So a combination perennial/annual herbaceous/woody polyculture. At that point we have to determine which annuals/biennials have the most feed value for the pigs, and come back best after rooting. I guess.

The non-perennial polyculture would need more rest in between to regrow too I guess.

I'd love to see a place where feral pigs have been established for a while, but there are none up here. What high-calorie annuals/biennials come back best after rooting? Is this realistic or too theoretical?

I think I read this somewhere here on permies, but Sunchokes apparently produce better with intermittent disturbance. Apparently, the way to kill a patch is to stop harvesting them. I read that some research suggested that Sweetgrass was the same - it grew better if it was partially harvested. Many plants that evolved with humans, or specific animals, have characteristics like that. There's a bug somewhere in the US that's young eat a specific plant, but the bug is also a significant fertilizer of that plant's flowers. The bug and the plant co-evolved.

You're doing a great job of researching this topic. Here are some more bread-crumbs to follow: I know that there are trees that can be harvested and dried as "tree hay" for cattle and goats - not so sure about for sheep, and haven't a clue about pigs. However, pigs are very similar to humans biologically, so I suspect tree leaves that humans can eat, may well be pig compatible. They might make good trees to plant.

Follow this link: https://permies.com/t/210634/FREE-book-edible-tree-leaves
and you can download a free book on the subject (I've done so and it is worth reading - Eric Toensmeier is awesome.)

Sean Govan wrote:Another tidbit from Joel Salatin on pigs' relationship with trees, around minute 30:15

https://youtu.be/WXiAIgvXFng

Joel claims that American forests are suffering from a lack of disturbance or "ecological exercise," which he implies used to be accomplished by the Indians regularly clearing the forest floor with fire to create silvopastures and manage them for game.

The story he tells is a bit too compacted,

first you need to know what kind of animals did naturally the disturbance jobs and how much space they occupied per animal when they were roaming through...
Also how many natural created wildfires are going through and how long are the breaks between?

There comes holistic management again into the game,
disturbance? Yes, 100% agreed, but only so far that usefulness getting not taken over by destruction..

destrution can be splitted in two kinds:
Immediate destruction
Long term destruction

Jay Angler wrote:You're doing a great job of researching this topic. Here are some more bread-crumbs to follow: I know that there are trees that can be harvested and dried as "tree hay" for cattle and goats - not so sure about for sheep, and haven't a clue about pigs. However, pigs are very similar to humans biologically, so I suspect tree leaves that humans can eat, may well be pig compatible. They might make good trees to plant.

Follow this link: https://permies.com/t/210634/FREE-book-edible-tree-leaves
and you can download a free book on the subject (I've done so and it is worth reading - Eric Toensmeier is awesome.)

Interesting, I've been tasting every species I've seen my goats eating and I've been surprised in more ways than one.

Also, before I discovered how to rotational graze my goats, I would cut brush and feed it to them. They would eat it and so would the pigs.

See Hes wrote:first you need to know what kind of animals did naturally the disturbance jobs and how much space they occupied per animal when they were roaming through...
Also how many natural created wildfires are going through and how long are the breaks between?

Based on other things from him, I am certain he was talking about man made disturbance by the Indians, using fire to purposely create a silvopasture.

However, I have heard that the Indians killed the last of the wooly mammoths just a few short generations before the Europeans got here, and they told the Spanish that their extinction changed their whole ecosystem. I've been wondering if the ecological role of pigs is similar to that of elephants: kill trees, open up the canopy, restart succession; allow grasses to grow by allowing sun to hit the ground. Surprisingly similar to pigs, elephants prefer tree roots rather than leaves. They don't tip over trees to reach the leaves, they do it to chew on the starchy roots. Maybe Indians started prescribed burns to fill the void left by our native American elephants. Google "why do elephants tip over trees."

Pigs uproot pine tree seedlings for the purpose of eating the rootstock. They also ate the rootstocks of oak and tupelo seedlings in this wetland restoration project: Selective Depredation of Planted Hardwood Seedlings by Wild Pigs in a ... https://www.osti.gov/servlets/purl/750117

Of interest: Feral Pigs and Oak Woodland Vegetation https://oaks.cnr.berkeley.edu/feral-pigs-and-oak-woodland-vegetation/

I'm trying to find out how they raised pigs in the middle ages. Why? Because apparently, William the Conqueror taxed community forests based on how many pigs they could support. (Google "pigs in the Domesday Book"). I somehow doubt that Medieval peasants were feeding grain to their pigs, which means the pigs were living off the land like their other livestock, whenever they weren't eating household scraps (probably not a lot of table scraps back then). This means they were working with and imitating nature, raising domestic pigs like wild ones. Sort of like grassfed beef honoring the nature of the original aurochs. And medieval peasants apparently ate a fair amount of pork, so we are not talking about small numbers of pigs. Whatever they were doing must have been fairly sustainable for the trees and the land, if it went on for hundreds of years and was stable enough that the woods could get taxed.

Apparently Joel's pig book isn't actually about pigs, but about religion and philosophy.

Somewhere I saw the title of a book that detailed the history of pigs, swineherds, and pig-raising in the middle ages. But now I can't remember the title and I can't find it. Grrr!

One big reason why I want to keep pigs in the woods, besides the fact that I think it's more natural for them, is that I want to raise pigs to live off the land like my ruminants, without off-farm inputs. There is very little info on this. "Grassfed" pigs usually fail, that's why they talk about PASTURED pork not grass fed.

Joel Salatin mentioned a guy (in Tennessee?) who turns 5 pigs loose in 200 acres of woods every year and feeds them nothing. It seems he doesn't rotate them. He harvests them when they are big enough and grosses 5 grand per pig for grain free pork. (I'm not in it for the money--if we have enough, we're happy).


Feral pigs obviously thrive, grow and multiply in many parts of the world, like their native counterparts in Europe.

Walter Jeffreys raised 2 batches of pigs on nothing but pasture and alfalfa hay. They were very lean, like feral pigs, and they took longer to hit market weight, but they did get there. Well, grassfed beef is lean too. What's wrong with lean pork, if the fat that it does have is just as nutrient dense? Especially if it stores less toxins than grain-fed fat?

The Meatsmith on YouTube says he's harvested pigs which were "grass fed," which came up to his knee at the age of 18 months and were very skinny.

I tried to do "grass fed" with my pigs when I first got them at the age of 3 or 4 weeks. I just supplemented them with raw milk. They got terribly skinny within a week, so I started feeding them a pail of high-moisture corn in the evenings.

Pigs, like rabbits, horses, and chickens, have a humongous bag near the end of their gut called the cecum. It's like a rumen for non-ruminants. People have a very small one. The point of the cecum is apparently to digest cellulose, by giving the cellulose a bunch of extra time in the body before being expelled, so that the rumen-type flora there have time to turn the cellulose into fatty acids etc. These types of animals are called "hindgut fermenters."

I know a farmer who rotational grazes his pigs like cows. He says hindgut fermentation really starts to kick in after the animal hits 250 lbs.

When my pigs were smaller, their poop was FULL of grass and hay, even stems. But now that they are pushing 350 lbs I barely see any fiber in their poop. I think they are digesting it better now that they are bigger. They're still eating lots of forage, and now they're only getting 3 buckets of corn a day even though they weigh 10 times as much. That's 6 lbs per pig per day. Before they had piglets and started nursing, it was 2 buckets, or 4 lbs per pig per day.

I've noticed that they don't swallow all the grass. Some of it they chew thoroughly and spit out. Same for the grass hay in winter, when their poop was full of hay. But they ALWAYS swallow the thistles. It seems they like forbs better than grass?

Dr. Steve Gundry's "Plant Paradox" book, or maybe his "Longevity Paradox" book, says that elephants now die of cardiovascular disease because they are forced to eat grass instead of their natural diet, trees; and grass has different lectins than trees. Maybe this is another similarity of pigs and elephants. Maybe pigs need broad leaved plants like trees and thistles to be healthy, and grass is only a second-best.

People seem to think that if a pig doesn't hit 250 lbs at the age of 6 months, then you're starving it, and it's not a healthy pig. I don't think that's true. Feral hogs, and European wild boar, apparently grow very slowly in their natural environment. What's wrong with slow growth?

I understand the economic reasons for fast growth--you get quick cash turnaround. Better cash flow. I think that's why Walter uses whey, besides the fact that it's free and improves the pasture.

But aren't there economic reasons for slow growth as well? You can get by with no supplemental feed; you are immune to changes in grain prices; you can advertise grain free pork; the flavor is apparently intensified according to those who eat feral pigs.

If we are content with a slower turnaround time for beef, then why not pork as well?

The first colonists in America released pigs in the spring, let them live off the land, and caught them in the fall for harvest. It wasn't exactly pastured pork or grass fed pork, but it was "wild fed" pork. I think Charles Ingalls did that in Little House in the Big Woods.

Another reason I want my pigs to live off the land: I don't believe in organic grain from the feed mill. 80% of the organic-labeled grain that is fed to American animals is from other countries, and even many American farmers cheat. Most are just conventional guys who got a label for the money. If I'm buying organic grain raised by someone I don't know, then in my book it's not organic.

Also, I think grain is for people not animals. If we stop feeding animals grain, then all that land can go back to pasture and start building soil. I don't think our ancestors 1000 years ago were feeding much grain to their animals, because they had to do all the labor without modern equipment. In other words, most farmland was pasture. If I'm wrong then please correct me. (Joel says somewhere that calves were fattened in ancient Egypt by locking them up to prevent exercise, and bringing them all the forage they could eat, fresh-cut with a scythe. Now THAT I bet was awesome fat. I think that 1000 years ago in China, people were doing something similar to fatten pigs. Now how about that, a fat pig on a feral-pig diet).

This may be what Joel was talking about:

https://www.fairfaxcounty.gov/publicworks/trees/oak-decline

"To understand why we see oaks dying in Fairfax County we need to look back at how humans have shaped today’s hardwood forests over the past three centuries. Prior to the arrival and expansion of European settlers in Virginia, fires from lightning and controlled burns created forests with diverse species and age classes. By the turn of the 20th century, most of the land had been burned and logged for wood procurement and agricultural development, which favored fire-resistant species like oaks. Enactment of fire suppression and land conservation policies during this time allowed the existing oak forests to become dense with fire-intolerant species. Fairfax County was mostly agricultural until the mid-1900s when the land urbanized quickly. What remains today are mixed woods with a generation of mature and overmature oaks from the turn of the 20th century, which have survived devastating spongy moth infestations and droughts. These old oaks may appear to die suddenly and without reason, but, in fact, they have weakened over many years of stress until they could no longer defend themselves from otherwise harmless pests or diseases."

Still, rooting is a far different disturbance from fire. Oaks may be fire resistant, but that doesn't make them pig-resistant.

I just googled "plants found in disturbed soil" and found that such plants are referred to as "ruderal."

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruderal_species

I'm looking for plants that could grow in between the trees, provide an underground food source for the pigs, and recover quickly after rooting.

I just got Sam Thayer's new 736-page foraging book. Near the end he has a section on finding edible wild plants by habitat and season. Quote:

"Regardless of the habitat, astute foragers learn to look for fertility and disturbance, because both of these factors tend to increase the abundance of edible wild plants. Disturbance is any event that kills plants, resulting in gaps or empty growing spaces where new plants can colonize. These rapidly growing pioneer plants are more likely to be edible." (p. 690)

A couple thoughts:

1. Pigs mix and aerate the surface organic matter, causing it to rot faster and potentially release nutrients faster. So temporarily more fertility, as well as disturbance. Therefore they create ideal conditions for edible wild plants to grow. This is good for a permaculture food forest, right?

2. I guess another word for "ruderal" species is "pioneer" species. The pioneer plants are the first ones to show up after a disturbance, like brambles after logging. Maybe another term would be "early successional."

3. This strengthens my thought that natural pig activity helps create more food for the pigs, similar to natural bison activity helping create more food for the bison. They eat whatever we can eat, but they digest the cellulose parts better due to their big cecum.

Depends on the pig, depends on the trees. This is a big reason why I really recommend small-breed pigs for homestead or permaculture operations. Small pigs root small. Little saplings get damaged more, and the leaves chewed up. I have 12 pot bellied pigs in my copse right now. They're not hurting anything. Bigger pigs would damage the roots some.