Pigs and Chicks

Horseofadifferentcolor

Horseofadifferentcolor

Jedi Council Member
I wanted to start a thread about raising your own food. We have been working very hard to be off the grid in a healthy organic lifestyle, but this has been easier said than done.

Chickens- A few months ago we got our first chickens and it is a wonderful feeling to walk outside and get breakfast :P The only organic feed around here (H&H)is $30 dollars a bag, and that makes my eggs cost a few dollars a peice. So I wondered if anyone on this forum has found a way to grow your own food for your ladies?

Pigs- This is our next adventure and I'm a little nervous. I have never had any experience with pigs and have just been doing alot of reading up about them. Seems simple but it is the realm of scary unknown to me.

Fish- I will be picking up some local baby talapia for our ponds in a few days. Looking foward to this. We have had a really hard time finding safe fish to eat. I need to be able to feed them organic food that I can make or grow worms?

Any advice is welcome. Thanks ;)
 
go for it
it all depends how much land you have available ,but chickens can do well on free ranging and birds do eat seeds in the wild so I feel chickens can eat grain without complications
have a look into aquaponics for fish http://milkwood.net/2011/10/15/vertical-garden-meets-aquaponics/ for example and look what Joel Salatin from Polyface farm does http://milkwoodpermaculture.com.au/courses/details/107-joel-salatin-pastured-beef-and-pork-masterclass
pigs are great fun and lovely animals to have ....and you get bacon :D
instead of just canning meat I recon we should all become pigfarmers :) :) :)
 
Horseofadifferentcolor said:
I wanted to start a thread about raising your own food. We have been working very hard to be off the grid in a healthy organic lifestyle, but this has been easier said than done.

Chickens- A few months ago we got our first chickens and it is a wonderful feeling to walk outside and get breakfast :P The only organic feed around here (H&H)is $30 dollars a bag, and that makes my eggs cost a few dollars a peice. So I wondered if anyone on this forum has found a way to grow your own food for your ladies?

Pigs- This is our next adventure and I'm a little nervous. I have never had any experience with pigs and have just been doing alot of reading up about them. Seems simple but it is the realm of scary unknown to me.

Fish- I will be picking up some local baby talapia for our ponds in a few days. Looking foward to this. We have had a really hard time finding safe fish to eat. I need to be able to feed them organic food that I can make or grow worms?

Any advice is welcome. Thanks ;)
Click to expand...

If you're not in a position to allow much by way of free ranging (suburban back yard for example):

Chickens find lots of goodies to eat when they scratch. Something as simple keeping lawn clippings in a pile so that all sorts of bugs and grubs move into it to live, then letting the chickens out to scratch there for food. I used to either put the lawn clippings in a pile in the chook pen, or spread mulch in there. Then when I raked out the pen, both the mulch and the chicken manure was spread on gardens and plants. I also used to throw weeds pulled from gardens and prunings from plants in there. However at the time the chickens were being fed commercial chook feed as well so I'm not sure if these practices would have been enough for their sole source of food? They did have the freedom to roam 6 acres when they were let out - but we couldn't let them out everyday because of stray dogs in the area.

If you decide to grow worms for your fish, it might be an idea to get your pigs first. Depending on the type of worm you need to grow for the fish, the pig manure may serve as worm food. A popular composting worm, Tiger worm or Red Wriggler worm http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eisenia_fetida does well on manure so long as the pH doesn't get too acid - something that can be adjusted with garden lime. This is also a popular worm used as bait in fresh water fishing. You can also put a lamp over your ponds for a few hours of an evening to attract insects and moths for the fish.

Your chickens will eat these worms too.
 
Thanks for the replies. I found a few organic sites selling seeds to grow your own horse, chicken and pig feed.
I bought some last night from here...

http://www.groworganic.com/catalogsearch/result/?order=relevance&dir=desc&q=chicken+forage

After a few hours of reading articals like this...
http://www.motherearthnews.com/Sustainable-Farming/Grow-Poultry-Feed-What-Chickens-Eat.aspx?page=5

I learned that some natural weeds we have here like chickweed is free and abundant feed out here in the winter. We have 18 acres but have every predetor you can have out here so free ranging is not a safe option. I get scraps from a local organic store and the ladies love it and finish entire trash bags full in just a day. Thats a lot of food to grow myself, so I also feed grain.

I like the rotating gardens idea for the pigs and chickens. I just need to find the healthiest weeds that will grow fast in our hot Texas summers.

This guy had some really good ideas for pig keeping with a tictactoe grid garden

http://sugarmtnfarm.com/2005/08/31/keeping-a-pig-for-meat/

A solar light over the pond at night is a great idea for attracting bugs....whoo hoo free flying food :D
 
Horseofadifferentcolor said:
I wanted to start a thread about raising your own food. We have been working very hard to be off the grid in a healthy organic lifestyle, but this has been easier said than done.

Chickens- A few months ago we got our first chickens and it is a wonderful feeling to walk outside and get breakfast :P The only organic feed around here (H&H)is $30 dollars a bag, and that makes my eggs cost a few dollars a peice. So I wondered if anyone on this forum has found a way to grow your own food for your ladies?

Pigs- This is our next adventure and I'm a little nervous. I have never had any experience with pigs and have just been doing alot of reading up about them. Seems simple but it is the realm of scary unknown to me.

Fish- I will be picking up some local baby talapia for our ponds in a few days. Looking foward to this. We have had a really hard time finding safe fish to eat. I need to be able to feed them organic food that I can make or grow worms?

Any advice is welcome. Thanks ;)
Click to expand...

Make sure you have a big land as away as possible from big cities. This will help reduce perhaps stress for the animals (sounds, lights), give them better air to breath (less atmospheric pollution) and hopefully natural spring/well water which will be free of contaminants. Same for the soil, it shall be chemical free (pesticides etc).

My uncle have already raised pigs and chickens for consumption in the past. All naturally. It's a heck of a hard/physical job but very rewarding and even fun. Plus you have the best food possible.

Nice buddy! I hope it'll work well for you.
 
JayMark said:
Horseofadifferentcolor said:
I wanted to start a thread about raising your own food. We have been working very hard to be off the grid in a healthy organic lifestyle, but this has been easier said than done.

Chickens- A few months ago we got our first chickens and it is a wonderful feeling to walk outside and get breakfast :P The only organic feed around here (H&H)is $30 dollars a bag, and that makes my eggs cost a few dollars a peice. So I wondered if anyone on this forum has found a way to grow your own food for your ladies?

Pigs- This is our next adventure and I'm a little nervous. I have never had any experience with pigs and have just been doing alot of reading up about them. Seems simple but it is the realm of scary unknown to me.

Fish- I will be picking up some local baby talapia for our ponds in a few days. Looking foward to this. We have had a really hard time finding safe fish to eat. I need to be able to feed them organic food that I can make or grow worms?

Any advice is welcome. Thanks ;)
Click to expand...

Make sure you have a big land as away as possible from big cities. This will help reduce perhaps stress for the animals (sounds, lights), give them better air to breath (less atmospheric pollution) and hopefully natural spring/well water which will be free of contaminants. Same for the soil, it shall be chemical free (pesticides etc).

My uncle have already raised pigs and chickens for consumption in the past. All naturally. It's a heck of a hard/physical job but very rewarding and even fun. Plus you have the best food possible.

Nice buddy! I hope it'll work well for you.
Click to expand...


Thanks JayMark, we are very lucky to have found a beautiful 18 acre lot for cheap but it was wild and never tamed on a hill. No electricity, water, septic, nothing just a bunch of invasive trees. With a year and a half of very hard work we are doing very well. Building our own fencing, canning, clearing, road building, a house, everything has gone better than we could have dreamed.

So the hard work does not stop here. I want to make everything we need here. From start to finish. I have not figured out toilet paper though! :P
The cannining thing stress's me out a bit. Seems like its never enough, or too much?

I would like to learn tricks that the old timers know or new owners have learned about being a good steward to the land and have it give back what we need to survive.
We do not get much water so I have to be pretty savy to be able to grow all of these animals needs. And much like the human diet there is alot of misinfo on what our animals need to eat and what is already around that is healthy and can be grown in this climate.
 
It is wise to be nervous about this--pigs are highly intelligent, large, powerful animals. There is a lot of possibility of harm for both you and the pigs if
you do not know what you are doing, and the is a lot to know. Keeping livestock is not like keeping pets or even chickens. The smartest and safest
way to proceed would be to find a moderate to small, non-factory farm (organic?) where pigs are raised and ask for permission to volunteer and and help with the work and to observe. You must get some live experience with pigs (hogs) before you try to handle and care for them yourself. books are useful, but life usually doesn't "go by
the book."
Good Luck,
shellycheval
 
shellycheval said:
It is wise to be nervous about this--pigs are highly intelligent, large, powerful animals. There is a lot of possibility of harm for both you and the pigs if
you do not know what you are doing, and the is a lot to know. Keeping livestock is not like keeping pets or even chickens. The smartest and safest
way to proceed would be to find a moderate to small, non-factory farm (organic?) where pigs are raised and ask for permission to volunteer and and help with the work and to observe. You must get some live experience with pigs (hogs) before you try to handle and care for them yourself. books are useful, but life usually doesn't "go by
the book."
Good Luck,
shellycheval
Click to expand...

Thankyou ShellyChevel, I agree with the volunteer idea.Great idea really.Also I should post in original thread but I am sorry for the loss of your loved one of 30< or more years. I feel that I was wrong to say what I did without knowing full story? Also, so true, life is NEVER by the book in my life anywho :cool2:

I ordered some worms today for fish and chickens today. The tilapia 2''-6'' $2 dollars a fish I am picking up tomorrow. The cool thing about this story is that this women bought 20 of them last year and has 500 offspring this year on a small auqapontics system! Lots of growth and food in short amount of time.
 
shellycheval said:
It is wise to be nervous about this--pigs are highly intelligent, large, powerful animals. There is a lot of possibility of harm for both you and the pigs if
you do not know what you are doing, and the is a lot to know. Keeping livestock is not like keeping pets or even chickens. The smartest and safest
way to proceed would be to find a moderate to small, non-factory farm (organic?) where pigs are raised and ask for permission to volunteer and and help with the work and to observe. You must get some live experience with pigs (hogs) before you try to handle and care for them yourself. books are useful, but life usually doesn't "go by
the book."
Good Luck,
shellycheval
Click to expand...

Agreed that it's a lot of hard work. I remember my uncle's farm and have talked with him about it many times. Yep. Very hard but it's feasible. You need the right information (knowledge) and need to apply it. As far as my uncle was concerned, the knowledge itself is not all 'THAT' hard to get, understand and apply. You don't need a Ph.D. to actually 'get' it, just the right (emphasis) information. The hardest thing was, for him, to be constant with his work and never give up a single day. I mean, you can't decide to take a full week-end off and leave the farm as is with no monitoring or care.

But I still encourage you to do what you want buddy. As I've said, I have seen that it is totoally doable if you put your mind and good efforts into it. Don't give up. Just be aware!

Peace.
 
We used to have goats and chickens.

The chickens were kept for the eggs and were very little work - you just had to go and collect eggs each day and make sure they had feed and water. If you wanted more chicks then you just allow some of the hens to brood. The droppings made great fertilizer for the vegetable garden.

The goats (just females) were easy to keep too. They are quite smart and friendly animals. We had to milk them daily to keep the milk coming, but we worked out a method of feeding them some grain while the milking was being done, and they would jump up on the milking stand and eat while we milked them - no real problems except that one of them got mastitis once and had to be treated.

Goat milk when fresh does not taste "goaty" at all, and makes great yogurt and cheese as it has high butterfat content.
 
We have chickens and we had pigs since I know for myself, but last 4-5 years we don't have them.

Chickens are awesome. In the morning we give them corn (non-GMO) and green leaves (vegetables) from the garden, around midday again vegetables and in the afternoon we let them out to eat grass, find worms or insects.

We usually had two pigs and we were cleaning their place every day. They were eating corn, vegetables, rotten apples or any other rotten fruit. Every morning and evening we gave them grass. They were also eating our food leftovers. Pigs are intelligent and as a kid I tried to talk to them every day in their language... :) They are also very funny! I remember one pig... it was summer and it was very hot and that pig was sooo happy when my mom splashed him with cold water, he was running all over the place. Then, he got back, opened his mouth and waited for more splashes :D
 
since trying to find pastured eggs without corn feed a few years ago... I researched for my dream farm one day.

The SOTT of raising chickens (my title)
http://www.richsoil.com/raising-chickens.jsp[/b]
excerpt below but reading it on site is better (lots of pics, predators etc)
six approaches to raising chickens

These are all of the methods I'm aware of for raising chickens. All of these can be done in the city or on a farm. And lots of folks come up with combinations of these, like using a coop and run, but letting your chickens free range once in a while.

factory
coop and run
chicken tractor
truly free range
pastured poultry pens
pastured poultry paddocks

I'm a strong advocate of the last one: paddocks. Later I'll go into a lot of detail of why I like paddocks so much more than the others. But, first, I want to make up some metrics to better help me describe why I like the paddocks approach so much.

on website a chart with comparisons
vegetation factor bug factor poop cleaning factor poop hygiene factor work factor natural habitat factor confinement factor food cost factor

I've tried to come up with a way to represent these ideas numerically. For comparison. So rather than just "yes" or "no" I'm trying to find a way to express how much better one way is over another way. I've tried to use a scale such that the value 10 is best. These numbers are entirely made up by me and are a numerical representation of my opinion.
vegetation factor

How much quality vegetation is available to the chicken.

0 = none
10 = so much that the chicken doesn't eat any of the provided chicken feed.
negative values represent feeding toxic plants to chickens.

This is the strongest driving force to me. If I can get my feed bill near zero, then I have increased my profit margin by a factor of 8 or so. Plus, I am powerfully driven by the idea of my animals eating from a polyculture.
bug factor

Nearly half of a chicken's natural diet is bugs. The more bugs a chicken can eat, the less feed I have to buy.

0 = no bugs are available
10 = the chickens get their fill with plenty of bugs to spare

poop cleaning factor

How much effort is exerted in cleaning up chicken poop

0 = fixed coop
10 = no effort

poop hygiene factor

0 = every moment of every day the chicken is standing on poopy bits and breathing in amonia
10 = the chicken is never standing on poop and the air is as fresh as it can get

work factor

0 = about 4 hours per week for 25 birds
10 = about 2 minutes per week for 25 birds

natural habitat factor

0 = factory farms
10 = completely loose in a jungle

confinement factor

0 = factory farms
10 = truly free range

food cost factor

0 = factory farms
10 = the chickens do not eat purchased food
Click to expand...

mod: fixed quote and text size
 
Pigs & chickens, oooooooooh, my favorite subject :P

My husband was keeping pigs some 10 years ago so I know it's not that easy.. but now it's time for me to learn also everything about it, we're planing to get 2 pigs and let them into one part of forest we own, fenced ofcorse... there they can enjoy mud baths, digging and all kinds of pigs fun stuff... they'll eat grass, vegetables, pumpkins, acorns and hemp seeds which we'll grow on our own...

And for chickens, ducks & co. also hemp instead of corn, and worms (raised on fish remains in warm part of the year - outside, and in winter in special containers indoor) any other food they should catch for themself around the house/ in the garden compost boxes etc....

Hard work indeed, you can't go anywhere longer then half a day...but when you put some bacon and eggs on the table..... my God :P
 
I would definately suggest a cow or two before pigs. They are SMART, unlike cows. I'm a born n bred okie. Always lived on or near a farm. Main thing about any animal you choose to keep is that you have to imprint them very young for them to be "yours". That's why I'd never take in a stray or wild animal. Its always good to have at least one rooster when you have chickens. It helps them with their natural order and the rooster protects them. Pigs are cake til you gotta wrestle em! Haha We had 2 waddles a few years back and one had pneumonia so I had to give it a penicillin shot. No Bueno! Funny thing about them waddles was that they learned how to bark from the dogs.
 
bobsaget said:
Pigs are cake til you gotta wrestle em! Haha We had 2 waddles a few years back and one had pneumonia so I had to give it a penicillin shot. No Bueno! Funny thing about them waddles was that they learned how to bark from the dogs.
Click to expand...

I agree, boars are very dangerous... 3 months ago when my husband tried to pull out one hog outside the fence, other attacked him, they know what's going on when they see a few men with sloughters knife so they protect each other...
yup, barking and biting like dogs..
at the end it took 5 men to get the hog outside and kill him.... :shock:

Grass fed cattle is much better choice for a start if you don't have someone close who knows 'the job'...
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Trending content

Back
Top Bottom