So my wife and I bought 90 acres of land in New Brunswick, Canada in the fall of 2006. The following is some of the lessons that we have learned during the process of carving a homestead out of that 90 acres of swampy scrub brush.
In the spring of 2007 we decided that we needed some animals if this was going to be a real homestead and since we were just starting out and didn't really have any land cleared for pasture we figured stick to the small stuff.
Chickens, pigs and goats, oh my!
To start we ordered 20 layer chicks and 20 meat king chicks from our local feed store, but they were going to take a couple of weeks to arrive, so we started working on the pen for the pigs. Off to the back of the property I went and cut myself a truck full of trees for post to build the pen now if you are going to do this the first lesson, dealing with green freshly cut trees is sticky business and soap doesn't really work very good at washing off tree sap. Next lesson I learned when you sharpen the end of a post you sharpen the small end, what would be the top of the tree. There is two reasons for this first is that they will go in the ground easier and the second is that they don't have the tendency to suck water up the post from the ground which causes them to rot faster. The next thing you might want to know is that green post like this don't last that long if you get 5 years out of them your doing well. You may also like to know that driving a post like this into the ground with a sledge hammer is a "hit and miss" situation, watch your feet. All it take is a few rocks to make your experience a big chore. But with a little determination and some sweat we got the 25'X50' pig pen staked out and fence. The next thing we needed was something for the pigs to sleep in, so after a little (not nearly enough) research I built a small (to small) pig arc for the pigs.
You can see the pig arc in this picture it was simple and quite nice for the piglets when we first got them however...
40 pound piglets don't stay 40 pounds very long and very quickly out grew the small space, so the next lesson I learned is do all the research not just a little. You you also need to know that pigs are like children when the get bored they get destructive. They dig at , chew on, rub against, push and pull, on everything. Their house, the fence, the the fence post, their feeders the water tub... everything. The worst most annoying thing to a pig is the gate. The gate I'm sure received the most attention from the pigs , I guess they figured that if I was able to come and go through it, that they should be able to as well, and much to my dismay on more than one occasion they did. So I guess the next lesson I learned was to over build everything that pigs are in contact with. FYI a 2x4 is nothing to a 200 pound pig at 8 feet long they can snap it in half no problem and if its shorter and can't be snapped with brute force it will be chewed through. Another thing you might want to know about pigs is that they will go under a fence if they can so after a few escapes I put an electric fence wire around the inside of the pen a couple inches off the ground to keep them from digging under it, this worked... sort of. The problem with it was the pigs would start digging in the middle of the pen and push all the dirt to the fence line and eventually bury the wire which would ground it out and then they were free to tunnel out again so it became part of the feeding chore to check the wire and make sure it was not buried. By the end of my first year with pigs I became a master (at least in my own mind) of catching pigs.
Well that is all the time I have for now, I'll talk about the chickens and goats next time.
