Our little farm...

The girls love the deodar cedar. I need to make a pen to separate the little ones so I can start milking again...

I love how goats can eat cedar. And as a bonus, if they need a worming, the cedar will do it for them.

I have also heard of cases where goats will intentionally browse cedar and other highly odourous, essential oil-bearing plants if they sense they need medicine, just in case your goats are trying to warn you of something.

Love the pics, keep 'em coming. Keep us posted.

-CK

We’ve used some pigs to help terrace beside our barn. We use electric fence to rotate them thru and replant after they move to the next. Before the space was over run with star thistle and nothing would grow. We replant daikon, turnips, clover, mustard, vetch and rye. We are about to rotate them back through and try and plant a summer garden and more cover crops.

These are great examples of farming with pigs, thank you.  They look very robust and healthy. Did I miss it in the thread... what breed are they?

Your goats are great too.  Love seeing the examples of them foraging. They look so happy and healthy.  Do you milk them?  Can you taste the cedar?

I'm very intrigued by how people incorporate pigs into farming.  They are such powerful and assertive animals, maybe the most impactful animals in modern farming... That's a debate that could be entertaining.  It always seems to me that their voraciousness could get out of hand quickly.  But there are so many good examples of successes like yours. Back in Oregon, I used to buy lard from a family who raised forest pigs in a very sloped oak savannah.  Those were really happy pigs and they seemed to make minimal impact.  The land didn't smell, for example, and being sloped, it didn't seem to be losing topsoil or creating little "rivers" of unmanaged runoff.  In Oregon, that says a lot.

On this thread Choosing What to Grow - What's Your Philosophy? Kyrt Ryder talks about using pigs as his tillage, and planting his garden behind them.  Similar to what you have posted above in your latest pics, but with his vegetable garden plants.  Also using pigs to plant in a really nifty way - feeding tomatoes to pigs, and the seeds then germinating in their poop.  I was amazed that he noted that the pigs seem to aerate the soil, rather than compress it as they are doing this field clearing process.  Have you found this to be the case on your soils?

In this thread Permaculture Hacks that Work Nicola Stachurski talks about pouring grains onto prickles (I think meaning prickly plants like thistles) and letting the chickens then eat them, decimating the thistles in the process.  That reminds me of the old farmer practice of putting corn or anything edible into holes in a stump, and letting the pigs tear the stump apart to get to it.   I noticed you mention above using the pigs to clear out the thistles... did you feel they worked better than goats would?  Would that be because the pigs eat the roots?

I just love seeing how people incorporate animals, and Salatin-style, allow the animal to have their "animal-ness".  Thank you so much for the pics.  Please do keep sharing!

Chris, I have heard that cedar will keep worms away also. The goats get Molly’s natural wormer, and we don’t ever see anything in the fecal samples. So I’m hoping it all works as a preventative.

Kim, I have to make time and read up on those threads. We do milk and you can tell a difference when they are eating the trees. We mainly use the milk for cheese, it makes it taste like our place.

The pigs, if you can keep them where you want them, do a really great job tiling things up. They are Red Wattle and Red Wattle Large Black crosses. Right now we are using them to try and terrace all around our barn, so we can plant a small orchard. We have way more than our land could ever sustain at the moment, but they are serving their purpose for now.

This was the work of 5 sows and 23 piglets at 5 and 10 days. This will be our summer garden. It was planted to turnips, mustard, rye, clover and vetch.

This is beautiful and very similar to what I am working on for our homestead! I will be following this thread, very excited to see how yours turns out!

Thank you, Anthony. I was intending to post quite a bit this last week but we did an update on our ipad and now the battery won't charge.  Need to get it working...

Well, my phone, camera and laptop all died in one week. I got a new iPad the other day, so i’m Back to taking pictures again...

I love the Mansfield Beard!!
And love No Cal and what your doing.

keep up the work and the beard!

Thanks Jim! It’s been pretty nice up here lately, in the upper 40’s at night and mid 70’s in the day time...