Our six pastured pigs are getting awfully big, and they have minds of their own. Every few days, Karen has to move their electric fence to give them access to a new swath of pasture, since grass-fed pork is the name of the game here. Once the fence is off, they can escape if they want to. They’ve done it before. How can you deal with this problem?
I was out mowing and I watched Karen work her magic. She had a trick all worked out: the pigs were hungry. They look to her for food. So their first impulse is to follow her around, not to leave and go foraging on their own. As she worked, she’d pause once in a while to fetch a few hard-boiled eggs from the pickup, and give these to the pigs. This kept them close at hand and totally under her control until she was done. Then she gave them the last of the eggs, stepped over the fence, turned on the juice, and was gone. A job well done!
A feed bucket can do more than any amount of yelling or pleading.
By the way, we take all our cracked or otherwise unsalable eggs and hard-boil them for the pigs. During the off-season, when we have no pigs, we fill up a chest freezer with hard-boiled eggs. Pigs will gladly eat frozen eggs, shell and all. If the eggs are stuck to the carton, which they usually are after having been frozen, we feed them carton and all. The pigs have nothing but time, and will happily separate the eggs from the carton on their own.
Grass-fed, egg-fed, pastured pork is like nothing you can find in the store. Feel free to envy us.
I Publish Books! Norton Creek Press
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That last comment revealed you to be rather a cruel man. That surprises me. I would have thought you to pity those of us not in your enviable position! Heh, heh….
We don’t have pigs this year, but last year we fed them extra, raw eggs. They loved those, too.