Emile Spore wrote:
Ugh, feeding bear meat to pigs? Ugh. Well I guess the offal...
If you are that daring, why not feed road kill deer?
Try planting sunchokes. That's a great feed pigs can self harvest.
I have heard of pigs who are ranged year round, never hand fed. They plant corn and the pigs self harvest for 2 months out of the year and then after the nut trees are finished dropping, slaughtered.
Irene Kightley wrote:
We manage to find food all year round without having to buy in food but we grow our pigs slowly. In the summer it's easy because we just give them what we have in the garden plus some corn.
At the moment (Autumn here) they feed on chestnuts and acorns in the woods but we also give them corn cobs, brambles, apples, pumpkins and anything in the garden that didn't quite make the grade. Later on towards yuletime we'll also feed artichokes, potatoes and beetroot but we have to cook that. My partner is a hunter/trapper so we too feed wild meat from time to time and the pigs love it and do well on it.
NB Permie wrote:
Hiya all,
We raised 3 Berkshire hogs this year for the first time. They were raised free range on organic food, fenced in with 2 strands of 16 gauge wire and a 10 joule fence charger. We used Story's Guide To Raising Pigs as our main source of reference, and bounced questions off the breeder from time to time. All in all, I would say they were easier to raise than chickens, and the meat is unlike anything I have ever tasted.
Anyway, that's what we have going on right now. Thanks for reading, and I hope it wasn't to boring.
"Limitation is the mother of good management", Michael Evanari
Location: Southwestern Oregon (Jackson County), Zone 7
Emile Spore wrote:
Though I love bear meat, I don't know if I could even bring myself to kill a bear to feed myself. The native americans considered the fat and meat to be sacred. I think that it is folly to waste any usable morsel on a pig.
Irene Kightley wrote:
I think it's worse than folly, it's disrespectful, wasteful and sad.
Everything can be used, the blood can make a wonderful black pudding, the skin can flavour so many dishes. In the depths of winter there's nothing nicer that making a quick soup with pigskin and beans - it's a very special dish in France !
SouthEastFarmer wrote:
Not boring at all! thank you for sharing some of the things you learned. It's very helpful to hear how things like this work out when people try it for the first time.
I can definitely understand wanting to reduce that feed bill - sounds like some expensive pork!
Thanks again
NB Permie wrote:
And...
How is feeding what I won't eat to something I will eat wasteful? I live in an area where bears are everywhere. I can't walk 100yds in any direction without finding bear scat. Should I allow the bear population to grow to a point where they eat my pigs, my dog, and do damage to my property just because people like you think that is more acceptable?
Americans come to Canada to hunt black bear so they can get a picture of them kneeling by a dead bear, which is then landfilled because all they want is that picture. I respectfully suggest you save your self righteous indignation for them.
d
Emile Spore wrote:
I don't think it's wrong to eat them, but feeding bear to pigs is about the most far fetched food source for pigs I have ever heard of. Is there no one to take these excess black bears off of hunters hands? I would be a happy candidate if I lived there, cause like I said, I love bear meat but I don't think I could bring myself to shoot one.
NB Permie wrote:
In the wild, pigs are omnivores. Obviously, they would not be capable of taking down a bear, but if they came across one that was already dead, you better believe they would be all over it. Far fetched? In comparison to what? Have a look at what commercially farmed livestock is being fed these days, and then tell me how far fetched my idea is. Ever see cows eating ground up dead chickens, chicken feces, corn, or anything else that didn't look like grass in the wild?
As for not being able to shoot one, I believe it is my responsibility as a meat eater to take part in the harvesting of the meat I eat, instead of pretending it magically appears on store shelves wrapped in plastic. I take no pleasure in killing an animal for food, but when I do, I make sure it is done in the quickest, most efficient manner available to me. Regardless, people like me are looked down on by the anti-hunting crowd as if we are cruel to animals. Meanwhile, they're chomping on burgers made from animals that lived a life of pure terror.
d
Emile Spore wrote:
I don't want to dwell on the subject any longer, but I just don't get making less out of more.
"the qualities of these bacteria, like the heat of the sun, electricity, or the qualities of metals, are part of the storehouse of knowledge of all men. They are manifestations of the laws of nature, free to all men and reserved exclusively to none." SCOTUS, Funk Bros. Seed Co. v. Kale Inoculant Co.
Joel Hollingsworth wrote:
If you don't mind my asking, why Gatoraide? The electrolyte balance in dehydrated milk is very nearly perfect, and has a complete array of minerals, compared to the two in Gatoraide. Some table salt and potash and bagged sugar, with the right recipe, will get you just as far as those mid-century sports physiologists got, if you really want to go that route.
NB Permie wrote:We were winging it, really...It was touch and go for about 3 days, where he just laid on his side in the same spot, and didn't move. We fed him with a water bottle every 2 hrs or so, and somehow he bounced back.
"the qualities of these bacteria, like the heat of the sun, electricity, or the qualities of metals, are part of the storehouse of knowledge of all men. They are manifestations of the laws of nature, free to all men and reserved exclusively to none." SCOTUS, Funk Bros. Seed Co. v. Kale Inoculant Co.
Joel Hollingsworth wrote:
I just read that turnips, peas, and buckwheat can be a nearly complete diet for pigs.
Profitable Feed For Swine
An Aroostook county, Maine, farmer, who has great success with hogs, writes a farm paper as to his system of feeding. He says: "I raise peas, buckwheat and turnips for my hogs. I boil the turnips and peas together and mix the buckwheat with them. A few raw pumpkins are cut and fed each day in addition to the grain ration. I never had hogs do better than on this class of feed."
"the qualities of these bacteria, like the heat of the sun, electricity, or the qualities of metals, are part of the storehouse of knowledge of all men. They are manifestations of the laws of nature, free to all men and reserved exclusively to none." SCOTUS, Funk Bros. Seed Co. v. Kale Inoculant Co.
Joel Hollingsworth wrote:
from the 1906 edition of Dudley Leavitt’s Farmer's Almanac:
The permie way might be to let the animals harvest and eat whole plants, rather than processing the feed. Buckwheat, especially, seems like it would have a lot of nutrition still in the stem and leaves, as the first seeds are beginning to drop.
I've read that turnips, pumpkins, and winter squash store well in a clamp over the winter. I think hogs would be happy to open up the clamp on your behalf, if there's some elegant way of controlling their access to it.
Mangudai wrote:
Acorns - Best food we found, the pigs harvest themselves and seem to never get enough
Corn - We soaked corn on the cob, the pigs would consume about 2/3 of their diet in corn but they wasted a lot
Vegetable Garden seconds (eggplant, sweet pepper, tomato, squash, etc) - the pigs would eat all of these in moderate portions, but if they got too much they would refuse to eat any more of it. They would only eat squash if we chopped it up and soaked it.
Wheat - they loved wheat porridge with whey or meat drippings and so forth. Wheat was more expensive than corn, and they often just wasted the dry stuff.
Animal Carcass - they loved these. Importantly scavenging and hunting are two completely unrelated activities in the mind of a pig. We fed our pigs with dead chickens. On occasion they were mixed with live chickens but the pigs did not display predatory behavior.
Pasture Forage - pigs would eat all sorts of grass and weeds, but in our paddocks they would consume everything they liked within a day or two.
Single wire electric works. However we have not solved the problem of feeding slop over the fence, and having a movable feed trough that the pigs push into the fence. We had to walk into the pig paddock to deliver slop, I do not recommend this.
NB Permie wrote:[corn growing] would only be on a small scale, as I don't have enough land cleared for the amount of corn these pigs would eat.
"the qualities of these bacteria, like the heat of the sun, electricity, or the qualities of metals, are part of the storehouse of knowledge of all men. They are manifestations of the laws of nature, free to all men and reserved exclusively to none." SCOTUS, Funk Bros. Seed Co. v. Kale Inoculant Co.
Joel Hollingsworth wrote:
How well do you suppose wheat would do, sown in a section of pasture the pigs have just been removed from? I've read that it's competitive enough to produce fairly well even with some weed pressure, and I suppose you could time it such that the pigs could self-harvest during the "dough" stage of kernel development if they don't enjoy the dry stuff.
"the qualities of these bacteria, like the heat of the sun, electricity, or the qualities of metals, are part of the storehouse of knowledge of all men. They are manifestations of the laws of nature, free to all men and reserved exclusively to none." SCOTUS, Funk Bros. Seed Co. v. Kale Inoculant Co.
I yam what I yam and that's all that I yam - the great philosopher Popeye. Tiny ad:
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