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Post by Tim Horton on Feb 2, 2020 21:45:10 GMT
puts his pigs in his woodlands to intentionally root up the area. The pigs get 30% of their nutrition from found food, mostly acorns. They leave the are rooted up but turning that soil got a lot of seeds into the ground which eventually sprout to create new forest.
Interesting thought this is.. How to use a resource to till, with the "nutrient transfer" from a natural, renewable nutrition source.. The off set, down side to this is it seems it would require VERY good fencing, and monitoring to keep the herd contained.. If it works well, go for it..
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Post by DEKE on Feb 3, 2020 3:41:22 GMT
He barely fences the pigs in. He clears a fence line, uses insulators tied to trees or step in posts and run an electric wire one foot off the ground. When I was there, the line was not even charged.
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Post by aussiedarren on Feb 3, 2020 5:10:42 GMT
Australian Defense force helps out with ours, Helicopter, sniper for the adults and a belt fed 12G for cleaning up the younguns
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Post by Deleted on Feb 3, 2020 12:49:31 GMT
Australian Defense force helps out with ours, Helicopter, sniper for the adults and a belt fed 12G for cleaning up the younguns Up here in the Ozarks, running a helicopter would be a trick. Lots of wooded, hilly areas.
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Post by daw on Feb 3, 2020 15:12:32 GMT
Raised pigs many years. One experience we never forgot or related. The weeds in the garden got ahead of us one year. After harvest we turned the pigs in for the fall.
Ever hear that if a pond goes dry you can turn pig or ducks in and it will cause the the bottom to seal and hold water? It took several years of hard work to get that once highly productive garden back into to production.
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Post by DEKE on Feb 3, 2020 15:55:43 GMT
Daw, I don't get it. I put my pigs in a pen. I put in lots of bedding in the form of wood chips, sticks, paper, cardboard, etc, until it had built up about a foot deep. A year later that pen and the pigs were gone and I put my garden there. It has been productive ever since.
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Post by Tim Horton on Feb 3, 2020 17:13:57 GMT
Australian Defense force helps out with ours, Helicopter, sniper for the adults and a belt fed 12G for cleaning up the younguns
Cry-key..... I have some a little experience with belt feds..... But I have never seen a belt fed 12 ga.. THAT would be interesting..
Make, model, details mate... Details...
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Post by Ozarks Tom on Feb 3, 2020 18:50:46 GMT
Tim Horton , I'd love to see that too. I've put a few rounds through M-60s, and with every 5th round being a tracer it's almost like watering a garden with a hose. From a helicopter an M-60 makes short work of most anything on the ground, even running.
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Post by daw on Feb 3, 2020 18:55:31 GMT
DEKE, our garden was just weeds no where like your hog beds. They worked all that in to compost. But you put pigs on wet ground and those sharp little feet with all the weight above , packs the the soil to the consistency of concrete. We had a certain amount of clay, certainly not loam or good black soil.
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Post by DEKE on Feb 3, 2020 19:36:06 GMT
Understood. I forget about clay because it is practically nonexistent here. We are all sand except for places like the pig pen /garden where we make our own black soil. Hard ground is never an issue for us, getting the ground to harden up is our big goal. Anywhere the animals walk frequently gets torn up pretty fast.
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Post by aussiedarren on Feb 3, 2020 23:16:10 GMT
Australian Defense force helps out with ours, Helicopter, sniper for the adults and a belt fed 12G for cleaning up the younguns Cry-key..... I have some a little experience with belt feds..... But I have never seen a belt fed 12 ga.. THAT would be interesting.. Make, model, details mate... Details... Sorry mate got the info off a friend who worked for the ADF ammunition supply company many years back. Fairly sure it was something they made up specially for the purpose, belt fired semi not auto. Shot shells would never take the heat and mechanical torques that is required to rock and rock with, you'd be looking at full brass casings on something like that. Details are slim sorry, was a conversation i had about 30 years back when semi interested in Pig hunting, with a fellow member of the Country Fire Authority at a BBQ.
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Post by cccindy on Feb 4, 2020 16:35:10 GMT
DEKE , our garden was just weeds no where like your hog beds. They worked all that in to compost. But you put pigs on wet ground and those sharp little feet with all the weight above , packs the the soil to the consistency of concrete. We had a certain amount of clay, certainly not loam or good black soil. It's not the clay that solidifies the soil. Pig manure feeds bacteria that form a waterproof film of slime. IIRC it can work even in sandy soil. See "gley":
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Post by daw on Feb 4, 2020 16:51:26 GMT
Farmers do their own sealing of ponds by using ducks or pigs on dry ponds. One neighbor put his hay ring on a long dry pond. There came a big rain the pond filled up and his hay ring was left in the water. More often it is new ponds that don't hold water ducks are cheaper but if you have pigs they are used. On this area at least.
Permaculture is a somewhat new term, but many of their ways were commonplace for centuries.
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Post by DEKE on Feb 4, 2020 17:44:50 GMT
It's not the clay that solidifies the soil. Pig manure feeds bacteria that form a waterproof film of slime. IIRC it can work even in sandy soil. See "gley":
Maybe I don't have enough pig poo, but that hasn't happened here. The pig pen holds water far better than the sandy soil, but even with 6 inches of rain, or the few times I've forgotten to turn off the water and made a 20 ft circle muddy pond within the pen, by the next day there will be no standing water.
I've known pig farmers who had their beasts standing in 6 inches of poo slime. That's not going to happen here. That might be what is needed to seal the soil? I keep the pigs near the house for easy feeding. Even at the pig pen, there are no pig smells. Lots and lots of wood and paper go into the pen every week. She breaks everything down by walking on it and the carbon absorbs all the smells. That keeps all of us happy.
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Post by cccindy on Feb 4, 2020 19:18:32 GMT
Sorry, I should have said clay probably isn't the only thing. I learned about gley in an article I read as an ag student at Penn State in the 1970s. It described a technique for sealing farm ponds (in Russia?) that used natural bacterial slime to seal the soil. The pig manure feeds bacteria which form a dense, natural 'plastic' layer under the pond. "Sharp little feet" would probably defeat the waterproofing effect.
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