Although Megan didn't explain it this way, I divide her livestock up into two categories --- the colonizers and the maintainers.  Today, I'll discuss the colonizers, which are animals she and her husband turn into areas that have become overgrown with troublesome weeds or turn into woodland that's destined to be pasture.

Joel Salatin uses pigs extensively as colonizers, and Megan's four pigs certainly had a huge impact on their pasture in very little time.  Unless you put a ring in a pig's nose (did you know that's why pigs sometimes wear rings?), the pig's favorite method of feeding is to snuffle through the dirt and find tasty tubers and roots to eat.  You can think of pigs as plows, with all of the pros and cons that comparison entails.  Both plows and pigs will reduce weed pressure immensely and let you start at ground zero --- whether you want to start there is up to you.

Of course, you don't have to let your pigs graze all the way down to bare earth, and I don't think Megan and Erek actually intended that to happen.  At this time of year, there are so many parts of a farm where you just have to throw up your hands and say "The animals have food and water.  Everything else can wait until next year!"  I suspect moving the pigs to a new pasture was a bit like our vastly overgrown blueberry patch --- just too much to handle at this instant.  I'll talk more about rotating animals later, but I should mention here that Joel Salatin uses 30 to 50 pigs in eight paddocks per acre to kill off the perennial weeds while maintaining a ground cover of pasture plants.  Each pig paddock is only grazed three times per year, and the pigs are never allowed on pasture in the winter since they'll churn the ground up to mud.

Goats are a less destructive (but slower) colonizer species.  They function more like repeated bushhogging, eating the aboveground portions of tall weeds, vines, and small trees constantly until the unwanted plants give up the ghost.  Salatin doesn't use goats in his system because he didn't have a market for their meat and milk, but to my halfway educated eye, goats seem friendlier to the earth.  On the other hand, goats need better fences than pigs and are more appropriate to smaller operations where you can put more time into each animal.

In either case, goats or pigs are used in a paddock for only a short time, then are moved on to the next trouble spot.  Megan walked me through last year's pig paddock, which now looks like a nice grassy pasture with just a few small patches of poison ivy.  The whole thing had been chock full of the troublesome vine before her pigs went to work, so Megan gives her pigs high marks for dealing with poison ivy.

Once the colonizers have done their work, the pasture is ready to be used by the maintainers --- the subject of tomorrow's post.