Animals

Let The Animals Help 

Ahhh, There's just something about working so hard to get things done at the farm and then rinsing the sweat off by jumping into the lake right down the road! Although, one day we'd love to have a swimming pond right in the yard, the lake does a pretty great job rewarding us for all of our hard work on these insanely hot days.

We moved all the pigs today. It has been a long time coming but we finally got it done! Two hours, a gazillion ticks and sweat dripping in all the wrong places later, they are now down in the woods in a beautiful little shady area! As I walked the fence line to ensure there were no gaps, I stopped and took in all the beauty our property had to offer! Their new area is like a hidden natural getaway, with massive vines and towering pine trees with just the right amount of sunlight to make the area glow.

Our sweet pigs are currently in heaven, running around enjoying their new paddock. It will be only a week before the six of them have it completely rooted up, the canopies on the trees raised and the ground left as a bare pile of Arkansas rocks. Moving them into the woods before we go in to remove dead trees and make room for the larger ones, is the perfect plan. They take care of all of the brush, poison ivy (that I am super allergic to), and any other small bits off the forest floor so we can see what work we have ahead of us.

Eventually we plan for the top two acres of our property to be pasture land with as few trees as possible so the sun can get through and allow grass to grow. It has been, and will continue to be, a long process but lucky for us the animals will help do the work too. The goats love to forage so, I can not wait until we are finished with the fencing so they can really let loose and get all those canopies raised even further as well as the weeds under control but for now we will let the pigs get to work.

Siren enjoying some ice cold water straight from our well

We got pigs for an unconventional reason to be honest. Most get pigs as pets or pigs for meat and although these will be great for both and we will probably end upusing them for those reasons as well, we made our decision to get pigs to have them terrace our land for us. Our property is one giant hill. There isn't one flat spot, other than where our house sits, which is kinda hard to deal with when you don't have bukoos of money to throw down on filling an entire holler up. (You didn't wanna donate to filling it perhaps, did you? HaHa) After tons of research of how to fix our issue without a major cost, we landed on pigs. I know I know, you're thinking "these people are crazy." Maybe we are, or maybe, just maybe, we are geniuses! 

Pigs root, which means they dig up the top layer of soil and keep digging until they get about six to eight inches deep. They take from the higher land and push to the lower land.  Every two weeks we move the pigs (or as close to two weeks as we can get) and they begin the process all over again in a new area. Once they have made it all the way around the property we will start in area one again. (Keep in mind they already dug that area down) When they get rotated back and fourth through these areas they will over time dig down on the high end and build up the low end leaving us with no digging work left to do. 

We may be weird, but weird is the new cool and we say "embrace your weirdness!" Buy all the animals and let them do the work! 

The video of when we got our pigs is below.

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