We visited our friends Erick and Collette at their farm a couple of weeks ago to pick up a couple of piglets.

While we were there, we checked out how they were keeping pigs so we could get some ideas of our own.

Their pigs are kept behind a low fence of hot wire in the woods. Some of them are moved from place to place, basically making them into bushhogs, where they clear the forest layer and munch on acorns and smilax roots.

Others were kept in a large enclosure, like these piglets.

When the land was cleared for a house, Erick told me they used heavy equipment to take out some giant tree stumps, which they stacked at the edge of the woods.

Later, he realized that this would be a good area to fence in some pigs.

The tree stumps are huge and piled up in a mass, giving the pigs lots of places to hide from the sun and tunnel and play.

It reminds me of a zoo. My little ones really enjoyed watching the piggies run around the stumps and hunt for the corn we threw them.

Later that afternoon, Erick drove two piglets over to us and we are now the proud owners of multiple pounds of future bacon.

These are a mix of Red Wattle with (probably) Guinea. For the last week we’ve been enjoying giving them all our food scraps and spoiled milk. They eat like… pigs.

In recent years I have become much more aware of how very bad the industrial food supply is, so we’re doing everything we can to divorce ourselves from it.

I’m using the pigs to clear some land in the new food forest as they grow. We’ll probably be butchering sometime this coming fall.