Philippines Books

We Discuss The Ground Level Of the Pig Business

My piggery at Calape, part of the vast family estates, is a five bay (sty) piggery that has flyscreens to keep out the birds and a concrete floor.  The floor slopes downhill allowing the waste to runoff and into a large 12 cubic metre septic tank while the roof slopes the other way allowing rain water to fill the large rain tank at the uphill end of the building.  The stys are seperated by steel bars between each sty and also from the front where there is a walk space between the flyscreen and the front of each sty.

It is a neat set up that is easy to keep clean with hosing and scrubbing but it has its liitations.  When we choose a gilt to go with the boar and become a sow (and have piglets) we have to keep her tied
to a tree outside on rough ground for a month beforehand.  This is to ensure she can keep her footing when taken to the boar, who spends his time outdoors on rough ground.  I’m taking Mama Alice’s word for it here that this is necessary, but I wouldn’t want our girl to fall over when the boar is in the middle of the business.

Personally I would prefer to let the vet inseminate her for less than P500, no charge if it doesn’t take.  However, Mama Alice and Papa Jusing prefer the old ways and they have a lot of history with the
owner of the boar, apparently.  So the gilt gets to spend a month under the jackfruit tree, which is not necessarily a bad thing for a pig. Pigs love to root around and they have the snout to do it.  Concrete is pretty hard on their rooting instincts and so they get the urge to do something without getting the pleasure stimulae in return they need.

I am a big fan of doing things as naturally as possible.  My original plan for the piggery called for a courtyard to each sty that came out from the building and offered the pigs some rooting dirt. This idea was canned on the grounds that they had never seen it before and who wants to take a risk etc.  The other traditional Filipino way of building a pig farm is to buy a piece of rope and cut it into shorter lengths, one for each pig they owned.  Then you make sure you also have one tree for each pig and you tie each animal to its own tree and leave them there. It has its health concerns but the method is low cost, low tech and does work.  Losses due to weather and disease can be high though, but for some this isn’t a problem provided they can sell the dying pig before it actually croaks. Then it would be known as “double dead” when it appeared on the chopping blocks at the local market.

When I build my next piggery, I plan to make it ten times the 30 pig capacity farm we now have.  I also plan to have it as “free range”  as I can.  What I plan to do is to have several large, open stys, roofed
over but not fenced into small enclosures.  Have them big enough for groups of 30 or so fatteners.  The floor will be three feet deep of rice hulls, coconut dust and dirt, with lactobacilli generating good
bacteria and aerating the soil.  The pigs can void into the floor and it will be soaked up and do away with the need for an expensive septic tank.  Of the P100,000 or so the current building cost, P14,000 of it was spent on the septic tank alone, mostly due to having to dig by hand into rock and hard soil.

I will also have some pigs in a concrete floored sty and compare which pigs grow better, stay healthier and so on.  My bet is happy pigs will always outshine unhappy pigs and pigs with lots of compost and mulch to roll around in and root through will have to be happier than their cousins on concrete!  I invite anyone with an interest or any knowledge or opinion on this topic to email me at the Philippine dreams Forum and open the topic for discussion.  No times wasted talking piggies, I say!