Hau James, where are you located on our earth mother?
On Asnikiye heca we raise American Guinea Hogs, these are pasture hogs and we are continually building more pastures. We use a mix of grasses, clovers, buckwheat, brassicas, daikon radish, kale, seven top turnip, rape, oats and will be adding barley and several other plants to the mix this coming spring.
For pasturing hogs it is important to have a broad variety of plants growing in the pastures, rotation should be done so no pasture is taken more than halfway down before the animals are moved on to the next paddock.
We are building broad areas that have a permanent perimeter
fence and then we use
cattle panels to define the paddock areas, it makes it less expensive and easier on us to move them around this way.
Chickens do well free ranging with the hogs, they would also do well free ranging with goats. our paddocks are all about 180 feet per side (we move them once a week) so you are looking at being able to build a space that uses 720 linear feet of fence (tape) per run and for electric tape you need three runs.
Goats, being browsers don't really need pasture as much as they need fodder trees and vines. If you try to do combinations, you will be able to have the shrubs for the goats provide shade for when the hogs are on that patch.
the shrubs also provide
shelter from predator birds for the chickens and ducks.
While electric netting works well for chickens it will not perform so well for hogs or goats, they will tend to just charge through the netting. We have seen this at some of the other AGH breeders places. Electric tape works far better for both hogs and goats, it is stronger and three lines will keep both these critters well contained.
The hogs don't go near it once they have been shocked a couple of times, one breeder didn't even have his tapes charged when we were there and hadn't turned them on for over a week but the hogs still gave the white tape plenty of respectful room. Goats will test this several times but if you were to use the peanut butter trick on the tape, it would probably only take them one or two zaps to learn to give it respect.
If you are going to have 10 hogs (the chickens will use the same space with no hassles) you will need to figure on a paddock the same size we are using (@3/4 acre), you could use less by moving them more than once a week but then you will need
enough paddock area to not have them back on the first paddock sooner than 3 months so the pasture can fully recover between grazing times. If you were to have hogs and goats, you would need to increase the size of each paddock to around 1 acre or perhaps even larger. We are going to add goats but we won't be doing that for another year and we have forest paddocks and pasture paddocks going in so we will end up with 25-35 paddocks when we are ready to add goats to our animal mix.
For a charger you want one that can charge the fencing and still have some spare. A 6-10 joule energizer would be good for that, keep in mind that any grass or bush that touches the fencing will ground it and it won't be able to deliver the shock to an offending animal. This is why we are using real fencing now, to many things to ground an electric fence at our place plus we have a pack of coyotes that run the fields behind our farm, so the only electric line we use is at the top of the perimeter fencing.
As far as supplemental feed, 80% of your animals feed will be from your pasture. Currently we give each hog about 2 lbs. of pellets per day and about 1.5 lbs of vegetables and grain combined and these are hogs that are weighing in at 100 lbs. now. They are our breeders and will end up being around 250 lbs. each. We will be keeping them for at least 10 years. When we get our goats, we will start with 2wethers then we will buy a billy and 2-3 milkers, that will be the breeding/milking stock. from that point kids that are males will become food wethers and girls will either be sold or replacement milking goats.
We are planning on having hogs, chickens, geese, ducks, guinea fowl, goats,
rabbits (not in that particular order).
