Winter Farrowing

As usual we are no where near ready for winter. Even though we are 2 weeks later than our normal for the arrival of the white stuff, we are scrambling as normal.

There is one big difference this year in our preparations however. The need to have adequate winter farrowing areas for the girls due to have babies in the next 3-4 months.

We are fortunate enough to live in a logging area, where some of the logging contractors are willing to put "scrap" wood aside that would otherwise end up in the burn piles. We had one contractor up in our area who was pulling a lot of cedar out and saved us all the tops for rails and fence posts.

Over the summer we got a couple loads with the 3 ton and a couple loads with the flat deck. That gave us a fair amount of fencing materials, at a really good price, a few packs of pork chops.

We have given up on the "modern" fencing, using wire and posts, electric, etc. We have found that with our terrain and our animals it doesn't work overly effectively, and we spend more time doing fence repairs than anything else.

On various road trips we have seen different styles of rail fences and we love the look of the wood and the "old" style, so we decided to give it a try. We started with a boar pen, out of neccessity, we had picked up Tank and couldn't turn him loose with Mojo. What better way to test a new fencing method than with a 1200lb boar.

The rails we got were approximately 20 feet long, and fresh cut, each rail weighs about 100lbs or so. We have had much smaller boars clear a 4 foot high fence to get at the girls, so decided we better go at least 5 feet tall. Held together with spikes in each joint, the final ended up being about 7 rails high. The nice thing, which we are hoping will work to our advantage is that it is not fixed to the ground, it simply sits on the ground and if he decides to push it, the whole thing should move before it "breaks".

After a couple weeks of having the big guy in his 6 sided pen, and not having any issues with escaping, we were hitting the crunch to get winter farrowing quarters setup. We decided to use the same ideas as we did for the boar pen. We decided on a 4 sided pen, working out to roughly 350 square feet with a large lean to shelter.

All things considered the pens and shelters went together fairly easily. A few hours of moving rails and putting spikes in the corner joints, cutting some 2 x 6 and cutting the opening for the gate. Then covering the insides of the rails with plywood to reduce the chance of escaped piglets. Covering the insides of the shelter to hopefully help them retain heat so that the newborn little piglets won't freeze.

Total time per pen, approximately 6 hours. Total cost per pen, approximately $50 but remember we are lucky and live in a logging area where we got the rails for "free", the planking and lumber for cheap and the biggest cost was the spikes used to hold everything together.