Pigging out in a food forest
Sepp Holzer raises cattle,
bison, yaks, water buffalo, ducks, and chickens on his farm, but his centerpiece
animal is clearly
the pig. His swine are nearly self-sufficent, and also help out
by eating spoiled fruit in the orchard, increasing plant diversity by
creating small patches of bare ground, and regulating the snail
population. Holzer scatters feed on the ground when he wants the
soil loosened, and his pigs till that specific patch of earth.
And, of course, they provide meat.
Holzer's pigs (and other
livestock) live in rotational paddocks that encompass his entire
farm. So the pigs move through the vegetable garden when it's
fallow, through the orchard to clean up windfalls, and
through the green
manure areas busy
improving the soil.
The pigs are stocked at
a density of about one to five pigs per acre, and are allowed to do a
moderate amount of damage before moving to the next paddock.
Holzer ensures that perennial tubers like Jerusalem artichokes aren't
entirely dug up by swine snouts, and finds that pig action spreads
smaller tubers around so that the plants actually expand before the 
livestock come through
again. In the vegetable garden, he makes sure to leave lots of
crops unharvested at the end of the year, including beets, carrots,
turnips, cabbage, and potatoes, so that the pigs have something to eat
during the winter. And after the pigs leave a paddock, Holzer
seeds bare ground with green manure crops, tree seeds, or vegetables.
For those of you who
want to follow along at home, the trick to making sure that pigs
don't create a moonscape is variety choice and plenty
of space. Holzer's favorite breeds are Mangalitza, Swabian-Hall,
Duroc, and Turopolje, heritage breeds that may or may not be available
in the United States.
| This post is part of our Sepp Holzer's Permaculture lunchtime series.
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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.
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Lisa --- I know what you mean about bringing it down to the backyard scale.
I don't entirely have answers about the fruit, but here are my guesses. First, many storage pears will stay on the tree for a long time if you let them. Maybe some of the storage apples do too? He didn't talk about persimmons, but I've seen persimmons still ready to eat on the tree around New Years. So, if some apples and pears act similarly, they could hang up there out of reach of the marauders, then drop a few at a time to feed the livestock.