Raising Iberico Pigs on Pasture and in the Woods

From a distance, raising pigs on pasture and in the woods can look like the simplest kind of farming: grass underfoot, shade overhead, fresh air, and animals given room to wander. Anyone who has done the work for a while knows that the beauty of it comes not from the absence of work, but from learning how to put the work in the right place at the right time.

At Stillwater Farm, we believe pasture and woods are part of a regenerative system in which the animals, most of them Iberico pigs, are not merely occupants but partners. The place to begin, therefore, is not with a stocking number or a collection of ear notches and tags, but with the daily disciplines of observation, feeding, moving, repairing, recording, and caring for what has been entrusted to us.

Start With the Farm

Before the first pig arrives, walk the property as if you were going to have to solve every problem on it in the dark. Find the water, shade, feed access, gates, handling areas, wet ground, drainage patterns, and the route a livestock trailer will take when it must load or unload, because the farm you know on a pleasant morning is not necessarily the farm you will meet after three inches of rain.

Then imagine the inconvenient days before they come, because they will come eventually. A water line will break, a loading day will turn muddy, a group of pigs will need to be separated in a hurry, or a paddock will need to be rested before the calendar says it should be, and a good farm is one that has already made room for such troubles.

At Stillwater Farm, I use FarmKeep to help keep the farm itself in view, not simply the individual animals. It allows us to profile animals and breeding records while also marking, mapping, and naming pasture paddocks, which makes the property easier to understand as a working system rather than a collection of fences and fields.

The arrangement of that system depends upon the ground beneath it, the rain that falls upon it, the shape of the land, and the animals that inhabit it. Our livestock live in relationship with one another as well, including sheep, cattle, and donkeys, and each species contributes something different through grazing, rooting, weeding, manure, and the particular way each animal works the land.

A farm becomes more interesting when we stop asking what each animal produces by itself and begin asking what the animals produce together. The answer is often fertility, movement, disturbance, manure, grazing pressure, and a landscape that is being worked by more than one kind of mouth and foot.

Water and Feed

A pig can find many things for itself, but clean water should never be one of them. Pastured pigs need reliable access to fresh water every day, and that access ought to be judged when demand is greatest rather than when the trough happens to look full during a morning inspection.

Watch the pigs around their water and feed points, because a system can contain enough water and feed on paper while still failing the animals that are lower in the order of competition. Husbandry is not merely putting resources somewhere on the farm; it is making sure the animals can reach and use those resources well.

At Stillwater Farm, we like to give the pigs choices, with water supplied in troughs and in wallows created from water pumped from approximately 275 feet below the surface. That water is distributed through the fields into wallows and ponds, where it is replenished regularly and gives the pigs another place to cool themselves and carry out one of the ancient occupations of being a pig: getting muddy.

Pasture is food, but pasture is not a complete nutritional accounting. Growing pigs, breeding animals, lactating sows, young litters, boars, and animals being finished for processing all have different needs, so the ration, body condition, weights, and stage of production belong together in the record.

Our winter pastures are planted as a mixture of grasses and legumes, including clovers, vetch, winter peas, ryegrass, oats, wheat, radishes, and turnips. In the summer, the pasture begins with common bermuda and bahia grass and is supplemented with millet, buckwheat, cowpeas, okra, Sudan grass, and sorghum, giving the pigs a changing table of forage rather than asking one plant to carry the whole burden.

Supplemental feed also depends upon the animal standing in front of us. Lactating sows, pregnant sows, boars, young breeders being prepared for the herd, and feeders being finished for processing do not have identical requirements, and our finishing animals generally leave the farm at approximately 250 to 275 pounds.

For animals being finished, the quality of fat and the oleic acid content are particularly important considerations, while protein remains another necessary part of the ration, generally falling in the range of 13 to 16 percent depending upon the animal and stage of production. Pigs will also gladly accept a variety of fruits and vegetables when they are available, and there is something fitting about an animal that can turn what might otherwise be waste into nourishment.

That is the old farm idea of waste-not, want-not, though the modern farm has to make the same idea work with records, nutrition, and deliberate choices. Nothing is wasted merely because we have failed to imagine another use for it.

Design for Keeping-An-Eye-On

One of the easiest mistakes in raising livestock outdoors is to choose a place that is beautiful to look at but difficult to keep an eye on the animals and infrastructure. A remote paddock may look like paradise until a pig needs to be caught, a sow needs treatment, a group needs sorting, or an animal simply begins behaving differently from the day before.

Good outdoor husbandry depends upon seeing the animals often enough to notice small changes before they become large problems. Practical access is therefore not an afterthought or an inconvenience imposed upon the landscape; it is part of the landscape we have designed for the animals and ourselves.

The farmer must learn the faces and habits of the herd. A pig that stays behind, eats differently, walks differently, stands apart, or fails to come forward with the others may be telling us something before any thermometer or laboratory test does, provided we have been present enough to notice.

Think Fences as A Biosecurity Partner

At Stillwater Farm, our perimeter fencing includes hog wire and barbed wire, with lanes that allow us to move animals from one pasture to another. Inside those larger boundaries, we use electrified polywire to establish and secure paddocks, and the arrangement is a little like pants held up by a belt and suspenders: one system backs up another.

The purpose is simple enough, even if the work of maintaining it is not. We want to keep our animals where they belong and unwanted animals out, because a fence is not merely a line on a map but one of the first pieces of livestock health infrastructure on the farm.

Pasture and woods also bring animals into greater contact with wildlife, visitors, vehicles, equipment, and newly introduced livestock. For that reason, farm-specific biosecurity matters, and USDA resources can be useful when reviewing risks such as feral pig exposure, deliveries, visitor routes, and the introduction of new animals with a veterinarian.

Iberico genetics and outdoor hardiness are valuable qualities, but neither makes a pig disease-proof. Health records should stay connected to animals, groups, and paddocks so that when something goes wrong we can investigate what happened instead of trying to reconstruct the past from memory.

Move the Pigs Before the Ground Forces You

Pigs will usually tell you where the valuable places are. They gather around feed, water, shade, shelter, and the rooting places they have decided are worth returning to, and because of this a large paddock can develop a small, heavily used area long before the rest of the field appears tired.

The ground speaks if we are willing to look at it. Vegetation, bare soil, mud, manure concentration, rooting, and traffic patterns all tell us something about what the pigs are doing and what the land is receiving in return.

We establish conditions that tell us when a paddock should be moved or rested, but we try not to become slaves to a calendar. The animals and the soil do not know what day it is, and wet weather in particular demands that decisions be made from the condition of the ground rather than from the date written on a schedule.

Rain is easier to manage when we have planned for it before the clouds arrive. A farmer who waits for the pasture to fail before moving the animals is not really managing the pasture; he is merely responding to its failure.

The goal is not to prevent pigs from disturbing the ground, because rooting is part of what a pig does. The goal is to give that disturbance a place, a purpose, and enough time for the soil and vegetation to recover.

Review the Season and Keep Good Records

At the end of the winter and spring seasons, and again at the end of summer and fall, it is worth looking back over the whole system rather than judging the farm by a single successful litter or a good stand of grass. Look at feed use, weights, health events, labor, ground cover, repairs, mortality, breeding results, and all the jobs that took considerably longer than you thought they would.

Good records are one of the quiet forms of farm wisdom because they allow memory to become useful instead of merely sentimental. At Stillwater Farm, we use Ambrook for accounting and FarmKeep for animal, breeding, weight, medical, and pasture or paddock records, and those records give us something more reliable than recollection when we are deciding what to change.

Photographs can help in much the same way. Pictures of the same pasture, woods, and animals taken from the same locations over time can reveal changes that the eye misses when it visits the farm every day, and the camera sometimes becomes another kind of farm notebook.

In the end, raising Iberico pigs on pasture and in the woods is not a matter of turning animals loose and asking the land to take care of the rest. It is a partnership that asks something from everyone involved: the pig roots, grazes, eats, cools itself, and leaves fertility behind; the pasture feeds and shelters; the soil receives and recovers; and the farmer watches, moves, repairs, feeds, records, and learns.

A regenerative farm is not a place where nothing is disturbed. It is a place where disturbance, recovery, fertility, animal life, and human work are brought into a relationship that can continue.

That is the work at Stillwater Farm. The land is not merely the stage on which the livestock are raised, and the livestock are not merely another crop; together they are part of the living farm, and the farmer's job is to pay attention long enough to understand what that partnership requires.

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Sources & Further Reading

• Center for Environmental Farming Systems, NC State University (2015). Designing Pasture Subdivisions for Practical Management of Hogs.

• USDA APHIS. Protect Our Pigs and African Swine Fever producer biosecurity resources.

• Center for Environmental Farming Systems, NC State University. Nutrient Management in Pastured Swine Operations.