Due to technical difficulties, it’s taken me a bit to get these pictures up, but here are the wooly mangalitsa pigs. They arrived courtesy of a capable young entrepreneur, Jimmy Lambert, who’s young enough not to mind a lot of hours behind the wheel travelling to Iowa and back and is very good at backing a long trailer into small spaces. The little pigs actually slept a good deal of the way and so enjoyed a fairly stress free ride. They sure were happy to see food and water, though! For the first two days they stayed in the barn, but once Mark forced them outside and made them enjoy the sunshine and fresh air for a while, they loved it. They’ve got a lot of work ahead of them as the goats left large piles of unwanted hay (goats are rather picky hay eaters) that the pigs get to turn and work into compost. For these little diggers it’s a pleasant task.
The little diggers excavating potatoes left from last fall. What a reward for doing what you love!
Hungry pigs waiting for dinner. Mark’s been concocting some of their feed by making chicken stew and then soaking grain in the broth.
Mark constructing the fence for the wooly pigs’ pasture. It will be planted with grazing and root crops, subdivided, and rotationally grazed.