The Long Goodbye - pigs off for haircuts

Its a sad time when it comes to saying goodbye to our porcine friends. This last week has been about preparing them for their departure and this can be a gloomy set of tasks.

On Tuesday evening I began their trailer-entry training programme. It is quite basic. Position the trailer in its departure point and stabilise it with bricks and both ends. Then for a few days feed them from the trailer. This was learnt from experience. The first couple of batches of pigs weren't so well drilled. I had to practically carry one of them up the ramp and into the trailer. By the second batch I had worked out that a week long feeding routine was probably the answer. However, 6 days in and they still wouldn't go up the ramp. It took me a while to work out that while the trailer felt stable to me, the considerable weight of 4 pigs made it behave like a seesaw. I learnt this by finding myself at the wrong end of the seesaw one morning before work. It was much like the closing scene from the Italian Job with me at one end and pigs at the other.

Then there is the tattooing. Another melancholic task but one I'm getting closing to mastering or at least competency. Back in 2007, the first few pigs I tattooed were a massive inky mess. I had tried to apply large amounts of the ink to each pig and then slap with the spiked slap-marker. Keeping track of which pig had been labelled was a joke as they jostled each other for position at the feeding trough.

I have advanced my skills in two ways. Firstly, don't apply ink to the pig, only to the slap marker. Fingers crossed that works well enough for the meat inspector to read. Looking at my hands now, it appears that even small quantities of ink go a long way and last well.

Secondly, identify the pigs before hand with two clothes pegs clipped to the wiry hair on the back of their necks. (kiwi's refers to this hair style as a mudflap) Then as each pig it slap-marked, remove the clothes pegs, one for the right shoulder and one for the left. Bingo. The job was complete in less than 20 minutes. A great improvement on the first tattooing experience which was an all morning affair with more than a hint of farce.

With only days left, rations have gone up to 12kg per feed. They seem blissfully happy rooting among the leaf litter and under the turf and they are certainly enjoying this exceptional spring weather. Two more days sunshine and then we'll pack-up our snouts and go. They'll be missed.

Gold Rush and the Petaluma Colony System

The Petaluma colony system is an outdoor production system for egg layers named after an attractive Californian City in Sonoma County. A fertile and wholesome place, the town really began to prosper at the beginning of the gold rush in 1849. The area soon became the centre of a rapidly growing poultry industry serving the growing metropolitain districts. A temperate climate, lush farmland and proximity to the urban population of San Francisco made it perfectly suited to poultry production. It was at one time known at the "Egg Capital of the World" and the home to the inventor of the first modern egg incubator in 1879. (The Egyptians had beaten him by a few thousand years).

The egg laying industry of Petaluma was based around family run farms each with several thousand hens. The Californian poultry farmers hit upon the following system of production which is regaining popularity today. The hens live in colonies of around 200 birds. Each colony is served by a common feeding area, a communal egg laying house and a drinking station. The colony is sleeps in movable roosting houses containing around 50 hens each. The key aim of the Petaluma system is to maximise the peace and harmony within the flock while minimising the labour inputs. I have tried to implement this labour saving system on our small-holding; it suits the dawn and dusk raids by the guerrilla farmer. With a single feed point, the hoppers can be filled once a week from the back of a tractor (or horse drawn cart). In an age before pressurised running water, having a single drinking point was also a labour saving ruse. In our case we have a mains pressured trough linked to gravity fed waterers

In the roosting house, roost bars are 24 inches above bare ground where the manure accumulates for a few weeks until the house is towed to fresh ground. The manure is removed to the compost heap and ultimately finds its way to the vegetable garden. The roosting houses were traditionally very open structures, often a simple roof with walls sheltering three sides and almost completely open on the fourth. This leaves the sleeping birds quite exposed to predators but the large flow of fresh air keeps them healthy. Birds suffer more than most creatures from respiratory illness so a closed structure with damp air is to be avoided. Our roosting house is very similar with an over-sized roof and wide ventilation gaps on three sides.

The benefit of splitting the sleeping quarters from the egg laying nest boxes are two-fold. The manure is kept a good distance from the eggs and the egg gathering by the farmer is all from one place. During the day, the hens lay their eggs in a spotless laying house stacked high with nest boxes each brimming with clean wood-shavings and sawdust. The wood-shavings dry out muddy feet keeping the eggs picture perfect. The nest boxes have been fashioned from wooden wine cases. The names of the finest vineyards known to humanity furnish the insides of our laying house; a generous gift from my oenophilic neighbour. It is kept dark inside the laying house. The smell of the dry wood-shavings and all those wine cases makes it a special place to go hunting for hen-fruit on a sunny afternoon.

Modern practitioners of the colony system advocate a line of electric fencing to keep predators from the roosting house. Since our small-holding is on the edge of town we see rather a lot of foxes, so I decided to build a 9 strand electric fence as the perimeter of a one acre grassy plot. After several weeks' success things started to go wrong in December. The fox enjoyed hopping through the wires and was helping himself to a feathery breakfast of chicken sushi. After one attack on 'the colony', the hens also decided to start darting through the wires if only to escape from Charlie. I have since gone back to electric netting which has done the job of keeping the birds in and fox out. To further defend against night-time raids from badgers, mink, owls etc I have fitted light-activated electronic door openers. With some weeks of training, the hens now put themselves to bed at dusk and wait patiently for the doors to open in time for breakfast. I'm considering investing in a child sized version for the house.

For further reading on Alternative Poultry Production Systems and Outdoor Access http://attra.ncat.org/attra-pub/poultryoverview.html#layers

La Copper Marans

The egg laying flock currently numbers around 60 birds. The dominant breed is the Marans at about 45 birds all at 6 months old and just coming into their first lay. These birds arrived as day old chickens last September. They hatched in Belgium in the morning, travelled by truck, ferry and white van to arrive with us by tea time.
They are not a particularly rare breed but are certainly uncommon in the UK and North America. The breed originates from the town of Marans in the west of France and remains a popular breed throughout France to this day. The unique feature of the Marans is its ability to lay chocolate-brown coloured eggs. Its a bit of a gimmick but important in the constraints it places on the grower. In order to produce such a rich mahogany shell the hen has to produce these pigments internally and so far no one has been able to genetically speed up this process. Therefore the breed has an upper limit to the number of eggs a hen might produce in a year; around 250. A commercial flock of genetic super hens can expect a laying rate of 325 per year.
With these French birds on the equivalent of a 35 hour week, you can at least be sure that they're enjoying life and not worrying unduly about their laying responsibilities.

They share their roosting shed with 8 Ixworth hens and a large Ixworth cockerel. These are large white utility birds, know for their fine table qualities and their wonderful cream shelled eggs. Being dual purpose these should be laying something like 220 eggs per year. They are currently laying quite a good number of smallish Farrow & Ball New White eggs.The balance of the flock have a different roosting house and are the remains of last summer's flock after several fox attacks through the winter. Charlie, the fox, left us with three Light Sussex, two large Ixworth hens and an elegant Dorking cock. If you find an enormous double yolker in your egg box then there is every chance that it came from one of these more mature ladies.

Pigs Start to Explore Their New World

These new pigs have been with us two weeks now and it was only Wednesday that the snow had finally all melted. Last weekend I repaired the damage done by the cold weather to the copper watter pipes. Three splits. That's on top of the 14 odd that Dad and I fixed about a month ago. I've resolved to replace all the copper with alkathene sometime over the summer.

With the water lines back on and the ice gone I have stopped filling buckets from the kitchen each morning. The pigs now have their water trough in service I just had to show them where to find it and how to use it. I wonder if the electric fence is might be a bit too fierce because they've been rather shy about leaving the straw bedding in the stables. Throughout the last week I have fed them each morning (in the dark) a few meters further from the stables each day. This morning I found them in the depths of the woods, knee deep in mud, probably rooting around for frogs or something else delicious that you find in mud. Anyway, here are some pics I took with Sabine this afternoon.

Classic pig snouts, just like a child would draw. Nice muddy faces too.


Sabine did well taking that photo, she was having her wellies nibbled at the time.