The new piglets are spending a significant amount of time arranging and rearranging their straw bedding into piles and nests. They are having a great time rooting and exploring their new home. Pictures will be up soon. It’s not easy to get good pictures with the piglets so curious of the camera resulting in lots of pig nostril pictures.
We have been slowly gaining their trust by offering them chopped apples, strawberries and bananas. When they are a bit bigger, they will be outside and their first task will be to use those natural rooting instincts and skills to rototill part of our garden for us. It gives them a chance to express a behaviour they have a strong instinct to perform, we benefit by having the garden prepared for us and our need for using gasoline powered garden equipment is minimized.
An example of one of our poultry mobiles shows how the birds have access to the outside while being protected from predators and still have shelter. The white electric fencing is solar powered by the energizer on the plant stand on the right hand side of the picture. On colder nights, I have placed boards on a couple of sides of the poultry mobile to stop the wind and placed hot water jugs inside for the birds to snuggle against. There has only been a couple nights where I was worried it was too cold and went out at 3am to refill the hot water jugs.
I was doing chores one morning to find a bunch of wild turkeys in close proximity to our farm turkeys. They were enjoying the barley buffet breakfast: