Month: January 2017

by

Ration Change!

I banged on a while ago about the pig ration we’ve developed over the last several years.  We changed that up recently, and the results have been excellent!

The drivers for this were twofold:

1.       We had a few pigs look a bit patchy and get itchy. My first thought was that they’d picked up mites. We were on the new place, and it’s possible that it came with its own mite load (that’s not uncommon).  As it turns out, it was related to diet.  We had the vet out as part of our Herd Health Management Program, and they did some blood tests for us. What they found was a lack of a couple of things, but mostly zinc.

We’ve had advice before about giving the piglets iron etc.  This was always based on experience from intensive farms where the pigs never get to be outside and forage and eat the copious amounts of dirt that must make its way into them.  We’ve found that letting the pigs live naturally removed the need for many of the supplements they’d receive otherwise.  This zinc thing is our first exception to that.

On a related note, it never occurred to me that what we were seeing in just a few of them could be related to their diet. For one, it was only a small percentage and they all get the same feed. For another, I’d never have thought that itchy patches were diet related. Live and learn…

2.       We had a few pigs that weren’t growing the way we’d like. They were healthy and happy, but weren’t in the condition we wanted. We do grow our pigs relatively slowly, but these were beyond slow grown and on their way to glacial. 🙂

In the past, we could just wait until the pigs were the size/condition we wanted.  Some do take longer than others, the same way that people grow at different rates.  We were used to just leaving them a bit longer. However, that becomes problematic when you have a market demand to meet. We ended up taking a couple of pigs that I wasn’t entirely happy with, and the resulting product wasn’t to our normal standard.  We have a lot of customer who like lean pork, so that wasn’t a huge issue. The bacon wasn’t the greatest though, and it was probably that more than anything that really made me tackle the problem.

We had long talks to the vet about this, who in turn spoke to a nutritionist he knows. We’d had our own problems with nutritionists (I’ve also banged on about that 😀 ) who simply could not fathom the fact that we didn’t want to grow our pigs as fast as possible, or that we didn’t want to feed them GMO/imported products/fish meal etc.  The vet that the nutritionist spoke to was pretty much of the same ilk, and apparently became quite indignant when the vet explained how we do things. Seriously, they act like we’re neglectful parents forcing our children to eat nothing but dust bunnies!

At the same time, we were lucky enough to speak to yet another nutritionist who actually proved helpful.  She had no experience with free-ranged pigs, heritage breed pigs, or the feeding of brewers mash to pigs.  What she did have was a willingness to hear us out and do some research.  It took a little while and lots of conversations and emails, but she was so, so, so helpful.

That nutritionist gave us a heap of feed options based on what we have available and what we could get locally.  While I didn’t actually follow any of those rations exactly ( 😀 ), it gave me a basis to work up rations that worked well for us.  We’ve since been able to experiment with those rations and are super happy with where we ended up.

A few things we learned along the way are:

·         Canola meal is currently used in most commercial pig feeds as a protein supplement.  Canola sourced outside of South Australia almost certainly contains GMO. The S.A. stuff comes with a GMO-free certificate, but not the stuff from the other states.

·         We could actually get meat/bone meal locally.  My concerns with this were the fact that it’s highly processed, potentially taints the taste of the meat, and has to be imported. The local source removed one of those three concerns at least.

I actually really like the idea of using waste meat/bone/offal as a source of protein for pigs and the like. It just seems an effective use of a by-product that would be wasted otherwise.  My concerns over the carbon footprint and potential taste change still stand though.

·         Fish meal is almost entirely imported, potentially from overseas.  The nutritionist found an Aussie source, but couldn’t guarantee how long it would last.  I’d not even experiment with fish meal though, as my research and advice from UK customers is that it almost certainly taints the taste of the meat.

The one big bit of advice we kept getting was to mill the feed.  Our research, including speaking to multiple other breeders, was that soaking the grain was as good as milling. We were also told that you don’t need to soak or mill the peas, as it’s the one grain that pigs can process without intervention.

We had bought an ancient mill a year or so earlier, but it needed work and we had a thousand other jobs that needed doing.  We didn’t think we needed the mill, so we prioritised it down our long to-do list.  However, based on the advice (nagging) of our vet, we got the old beast of a mill working.

The mill is probably 60 or 70 years old. It’s a relatively simple machine that runs off of our tractor’s power take off (PTO). It has a friction clutch behind a universal joint, uses four belts on a big drive for power, just uses a heap of scary-looking metal teeth for the actual crushing, and then an attached cyclone to blow out the dusty stuff.  That might sound like a lot of words, but the mechanics of the mill are really not at all complex.  The fact that it’s mechanically simple makes maintenance a heap easier, and means we could get it up and running without a huge amount of fuss or expense.

mill-1

This is the view I have as I’m feeding grain into the beast. That’s the hopper at the top, with the chute at the back for feeding in straw to make chafe.

mill-2

Sheldon runs the beast from the PTO, and does a great job. 🙂

mill-3

The tall galvanised part is the cyclone. It throws the light dusty flour out the top and lets the heavier milled grain drop down into a drum. I used to stand on the back of the Ranger to feed the grain in, but now stand on the back of an old paddock-basher, mostly to save my lovely farm truck from being covered in flour. 🙂

So, the changes we ended up making were:

·         Mill the feed. This is a hammer mill rather than a true mixer mill, but I’m able to feed in both the peas and cereal grain, and they’re nicely combined when they come out.

·         Tried meat meal. We bought some as an experiment. We didn’t see a lot of difference in pigs who had it and those that didn’t though, so we’ve discontinued its use. I really am worried about the carbon footprint of the meat/fish meals, and it changes the pig poop so they start to smell like their poor intensively farmed brethren.

·         Experiment with the ration. We landed on 70 to 75% cereal and 25 to 30% peas/lupins/beans.  This is a bit of a moving target, as our milling method is still me manually adding these things into the hopper.  However, over an entire batch that lasts a couple of weeks, those ratios would be about right.

·         Tried a mill pack. Mill packs are basically a multi-vitamin for pigs. They’re designed to be added to a tonne of feed at the rate of 1.7%, and therefore come in 17kg bags.  This was to combat the zinc deficiency, and it worked well.  The problem is the lack of mixer mill I mentioned earlier.  Without the ability to mix it into their feed at the correct rate, we have to do it on a feed-by-feed basis. That’s not huge problem, but it means we use a bit more than absolutely required.

A rule-of-thumb is that a pig should eat about 3% of its live weight a day.  We split our pigs based on age/size, having breeder paddocks with the adults pigs, farrowing paddocks with the mums and little tackers, weaner paddocks for the weaners, and grower paddocks for the porkers and baconers.  That means that, using my well-honed excel skills, I’m able to maintain a spreadsheet of what pigs are where, an estimate of what they weigh, and the resultant feed they should be getting. We use that as a guide and the minimum we should be feeding out, and then adjust based on the condition of the pigs. 

The brewers mash is still a big part of what we feed.  It would be MUCH easier for us to not use it.  Getting it is slightly painful, and involves a lot of more-than-slightly painful shovelling of heavy, wet material. However, it is the ONLY way to sustainably grow pigs.  Feeding them grain grown for human consumption is absolutely NOT sustainable.

The mash has the other advantage of letting us fine-tune the condition of the heritage breeds.  We have a few saddleback sows that struggled with their litters due to being too fat.  We’re able to feed them mostly mash, with just enough milled grain to make it really palatable. At the same time, the few white sows we still have need a much more nutritious feed, and so get at least 50% milled feed, and more if we think they’re losing condition.

The grain we mill is mostly screenings (seconds), including some amazing lupin screenings that we were able to get from our friendly share farmer.  The rest is what we’ve grown on our property, and we’re in the process of trying to trade as much as that as possible for screenings from elsewhere.

The results have been outstanding.  We can feed the pigs the same volume/weight we’ve always fed them, but they process this new ration so much more effectively. They’re not any more full than they were before, and they’re still grown slowly, but they put on condition beautifully.

I also think that the pigs prefer the milled feed to the soaked grain.  We used to move them around by waving a bit of bread in front of their face. Seriously, they’d normally follow me anywhere for a few slices of bread. Now, if they get a bit stubborn and baulk at the bread, I’ll get a half-bucket of milled feed out.  You sometimes have to run to keep ahead of them if you’re moving them with the milled feed. J

Don’t take my word for it though. This video shows you just how enthusiastic they are about their new ration. 😀

That was another wall of words about how we feed our pigs.  I’d like to apologise to anybody who got this far and is now cursing me and my verbosity.  🙂  However, I think it’s important that we properly and accurately document things like this. Everybody should know what is eaten by the animals they in-turn eat. Even if a consumer doesn’t care at all how stock animals are treated, they should care about what those stock animals eat as that then indirectly becomes part of their diet.  I’m also keen to record this stuff so it might benefit other people like us.  We’re working most of this stuff out through trial-and-error, often heavy on the error.  I’d like to help avoid that for those coming after us.

 

 

by

Fire Readiness!

I wrote about our fire preparedness, or slightly frustrating lack of it, back in November when I marked the first anniversary of the Pinery fires .  We were partly prepared, but nothing close to what I’d planned.  That changed soon after that blog post, with the purchase of a fire pump and the installation of roof sprinklers.  Today, in the first week of January, it finally feels like summer is here, and we tested everything to make sure it all worked and that the family knew how it worked.  I’m now feeling pretty confident in our ability to not just survive the next fire, but to actively fight it.

Two things struck us on November 25th, 2015 when the Pinery fires ripped through here.  Firstly, the power goes out hours before the fire is even close to us.  Secondly, the water pressure drops to next-to-nothing shortly afterwards.  If you’re dependent on mains water or electric pumps for stored water, then you’re pretty much screwed.

The other thing we learned is that most houses are lost due to ember attacks, rather than radiant heat.  This is especially true of houses like ours that have a tiled roof – the embers can sneak in under the tiles or they hit the gutters and burn litter and/or burn through the fascia.  

We’ve combatted all of this in several ways:

Stored Water:

Every downpipe on our house and sheds goes into a tank.  We currently have something over 80,000 litres of water storage, with the ability to collect around 200,000 litres per year from our roof areas.  That’s broken down into a few different areas.

Area 1:

We have two galvanised tanks that collectively hold around 26,000 litres, and these are to the west of the house behind one of our sheds.  They are right where we’d expect a fire to come through, and so our first line of defence.

Area 2:

We have two tanks next to the house on the western side.  One is a 5,000 litre poly-tank and one is a 2,000 litre fibreglass tank.  The 5,000 litre tank is dedicated to our roof sprinklers, and the 2,000 litre tank is there for the CFS to use.

Area 3:

We have two poly-tanks that collectively hold near 50,000 litres on the western side of our big shed.

Our plan is to keep the tanks in Areas 1 and 2 full all Summer, even if we need to fill them from the mains.  Area 3 has more water, but is a long way from where we’d expect a fire front, though we’ll make sure there’s still water in them and the ability to use them should it be required.  We’ll not bother filling them to the top though.

fire-sign-1

This sign tells the CFS that we have water specifically for their use.

fire-sign-2

This 2,000 litre tank is the capacity of a lot of CFS trucks and has the kind of fitting they need.

 Roof Sprinklers:

We installed two runs of purpose-built sprinklers on our roof and they are amazing!  The brand is Ember Defender, and they’re an Australian invention.  They’re super easy to set up, and just them on their own would give me a lot of peace of mind in the event of another fire.

The guide with the sprinklers suggests a run of 3 for a house our size (250 square metres).  They also suggest a closed loop – hoses from each end of the run that run to the tap.  This increases the pressure, and it really made a difference when we tested it.

We ended up installing 5 sprinklers, so way more than suggested, and did it on two separate runs.  We did a run of three from a fire-fighting pump we already had, and a run of two from a slightly weaker electric pump.  We can run these off of mains at first, should the pressure be good enough, and then switch to the pump later, or just run it from the pump.  Either way, it takes no time at all for the roof to wet down and for the gutters to fill. 

In theory, you block the downpipes and fill the gutters.  The fact that all of our water runs back into the tanks means that I just leave them unblocked.  We have a dedicated 5,000 litres for the sprinklers, and that will run them for hours and hours.  I’d expect a decent warning before a fire got to us, we had a few hours warning before Pinery, and the first thing we’d do is start the sprinklers.

pump-1

This is from our old mobile fire-fighting unit, which ironically almost burned in the Pinery fires.

sprinklers-1

This panoramic shot shows all of the sprinklers on the roof.

 

Fire-Fighting Pump:

We bought a nice fire-fighting pump and use the 26,000 litres described above in Area 1.  Most of our weather comes from the north and west, with Pinery coming directly out of the West.  We expect something similar with any subsequent fires, and this pump and the water are situated accordingly.

The pump will run two hoses, and we have a 20m and 50m hose connected currently.  We tested them, both separately and together, and the range of the water stream is impressive.  The 50m hose reaches north to the front of the property, and will reach most of the way down our western boundary towards the south.  It’ll also reach every corner of our house.

 

fire-hose-1

This towards the back of the place, and where the Pinery fire first hit us. The tree closest to Peyton is the one I hid behind when the fire storm came through.

 

Miscellanea:

We’ve done other bits-and-pieces as well.  We’ve run the overflow hose from the Envirocyle (recycled septic system) down the western boundary with its low-pressure sprinklers.  They’ll keep some of that area constantly damp. 

We’ve also trimmed back the trees along our northern and western boundaries, of which we have around 20.  The gum trees are actually excellent at absorbing blow embers, as we found out when John’s house burned last year.  We want them there doing that job, but these trees tend to grow long limbs that break under their own weight.  We’ve removed those limbs, as they’re just fuel for a fire, and pre-emptively pruned some limbs back to keep it all under control.

At the same time, we have a handful of giant pine trees along the western boundary, right where the Pinery fire hit us.  Those trees are awful in a fire, and I considered taking them down. However, I actually like them, and we should be able to control any fire near them with the fire hose.  In fact, two of them did start to burn last time, and there are still scorch marks a good 10 or 12 feet up their trunks.  It was the wind and dust that snuffed those fires out, but next time we’ll be able to do that ourselves.  We still cleaned them up a bit, and removed any dead wood from the area.

Strategy:

Most importantly is how we bring all of these things together.  Our strategy is something like this:

·         Keep the tanks in Area 1 and Area 2 full ahead of summer.

·         Have generators available for the electric pumps in Area 1 (used for the second run of roof sprinklers) and Area 3.  We have two generators, both of which are situated where we need them.

o   Have petrol available for the generators and the petrol pumps.  This is in the form of larger jerry cans tucked into a shed, with smaller cans next to the devices.

·         Test the entire system at least monthly, including generators and petrol plans etc.  We did that today.

·         In case of a fire alert:

o   Turn on the roof sprinklers.

o   Use the fire pump to wet down the boundary where the fire is expected to hit.  The boundary and a few metres inside our property will be wetted.  There are some trees there that almost burned last time, and we’ll wet them too.

o   Given time, we’ll also wet internal fence lines, especially anything that houses an animal.

o   Fight any flames that make it onto the property.

The pump and stored water in Area 3 will only be used if needed.  This will be if something gets passed us, or we need some extra water.  If nothing else, I can run the pump and transfer water from those bigger tanks to the smaller fire-fighting tanks.

The priority in these fire events is to protect yourself, your house, your sheds, everything else, in that order.  I’m pretty confident that we can protect everything with our current set-up; however, should something more ferocious than Pinery hit us then I am super confident that we can protect at least the house and ourselves.    

Last time we were helpless. Nothing we did altered the course of that fire, though we were able to save most of our animals and our house (the CFS were confident that our house would’ve gone without our intervention. They were actually surprised that it didn’t go up even with our intervention).  Even with saving the animals and the house, we felt completely helpless, just reacting to whatever disaster the fire decided to throw at us.  Next time, however, we’ll be able to proactively protect ourselves and what’s ours.  Hell, we’d be able to reach next door and help at John’s house if needed.  That makes me feel much less helpless, and much, much happier. 🙂

My one biggest wish is that we never have to use any of it.