Cheap piglet shelter

We raise pigs in the woods using 3 strands of electric fence.  We used them this year to clear a spot that we want to do some other stuff with.  We just buy what I call “north country hillbilly cross” weaned piglets locally.  Most of them have never seen electric fence.  We find pigs raised in the woods that are slaughtered late fall don’t need shelter but when we bring in a group of little piggies we like to keep them locked in a shelter for about 4 days.  We feed and water them there and later when we turn them loose if they happen to get out of the fence, they will return to their “home”.  If you just turn them loose and they go through the fence without having a “home” they will just run and run and you won’t ever catch them.  This piglet shelter was built from scrape pallets and free slab wood from my Amish neighbors.  All we had invested was the screws.  After we turned them loose they never got out.  We let them forage, fed grain, bread, milk, and garden produce and apples.  They cleared the spot well.  

Congratulations to you and your family - based on our own experiences this was a great solution.  We are no experts but have experimented a lot.  Our Bulgarian friends and neighbours were surprised with our open field shelter type pig houses - we made sure they had plenty of materials for building and filling their beds - e.g. old/new leftover hay (which they would eat and use the leftovers) cereal straw (mainly wheat, barley, alfalfa), sunflower and corn stalks, a variety of twigs and sticks from pruning bushes, roses, mulberry, fruit trees, acacia, pea tree - anything really that they might eat, dig in or use - and they would throughout the year periodically rearrange, remake their bedding.  Farrowing sows were definitely the most educational and entertaining and architecturally savvy bed builders.

Love the pictures too, especially what i guess is your son and pig - this is so good for making them easier to handle.  My son and i actually slept with some of our farrowing sows mainly to test the temperatures in their pig houses in snow winter with temps at -11C to -20C.

Very very best wishes to you from Bulgaria for the new year and lots of continued fun and learning and successful breeding/meat processing with your pigs.

Nick, Jane & Toby