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Why pigs have snouts

-- "Pigs are ideal ploughs, rooting up weeds and turning over the ground, while they manure it at the same time. They need to have a house and temporary fence (eg, electric netting) to confine them to the area. As soon as it has been cleared, move the house and fence ready for the next section." -- Katie Thear, Country Smallholding Magazine

Free-range pigs (Christine Thery)



-- "Use your own pigs, or borrow a neighbour's, to dig beds for you and to manure your land. Keep them in a moveable pen. Put them where you want your beds to be made. Leave them there until they have dug and manured enough. This is called a 'pig tractor'." -- People's Farming Workbook

-- "Pigs would make an excellent addition to a farm for pasture renovation. Pigs can be extremely rough on pasture. Why not use unrung pigs on poor pasture instead of a plow? Then just level and reseed. Fertility would be taken care of by rotational grazed pigs." -- Greg Gunthorp, pasture pork producer.

See: Fertility Farming by Newman Turner, Chapter 17. Pigs and Poultry on the Fertility Farm. "In the building up of fertility, especially on the poor light-land farm, there is no animal more effective than the pig."

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I've heard many organic farmers saying: "I'm doing organic farming without hoping to make a profit." Some complain: "The biggest dissatisfaction is that consumers always demand cheap products. They don't think of the farmers who grow their food." But I finally found one young farmer who stated clearly: "I decided on organic farming because I want to make money." He was a 27-year-old pig farmer.

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There’s an interesting piece in today’s NYT Magazine noting that, by attempting to make organic foods–now derided by many as an elitist luxury–cheap enough for the masses to afford, Wal-Mart may be undermining the very things that make organics desirable in the first place. ...
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The perfect should not be allowed to become the enemy of the good. In an ideal world, local farmers would produce delicious foods grown without any harm to the environment at prices we could all afford while simultaneously making an excellent living. The livestock would all live happy lives, singing their little animal songs, dying a natural death and yet remaining tender and tasty. We would then get together and cook them over our campfires which produce no smoke, sing our little camp songs, and eat our meals in perfect harmony.

That world, unfortunately, does not exist.

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But I finally found one young farmer who stated clearly: "I decided on organic farming because I want to make money." He was a 27-year-old pig farmer.

"You have to raise healthy pigs to make money," he said. "You can't raise healthy pigs on the artificial feeds on the market, and vets just inject lots of medicine when the pigs get sick. I don't want to eat such a pig -- and pigs don't become healthy with the medicines either. There are thousands of anti-fungicides and antibiotics in artificial pig feed. I can't let my pigs eat such stuff! The best food for healthy pigs is healthy soil."

The Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry in Japan says 65% of pigs sent to abattoirs are sick. The Department of Agriculture in the US reported that only half the piglets survive. Vets and scientists have concentrated on eradicating disease with new treatments, vaccinations, new antibiotics, but still, half the piglets die. So medicine couldn't solve the basic problem, and half the piglets die in protest.

A farmer in England reported: "If you confine pigs inside, many piglets will get diarrhoea [white scour]. I feed these sick piglets plenty of fresh soil full of humus, which contains no chemical fertilizers. I've proved that piglets stay healthy when they eat soil. You should start feeding piglets healthy soil when they're one week old, and continue until they're six weeks old. You'll be surprised how much soil piglets eat! The interesting thing is that it's no use at all feeding them chemically fertilised soil." [From "The Living Soil" by Lady Eve B. Balfour, Faber & Faber, London, 1943 -- see below.]

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"Profitable Pork: Alternative Strategies for Hog Producers", 16-page bulletin from USDA's Sustainable Agriculture Network (SAN) -- Farmers producing pork on a small scale can preserve their independence in the face of the consolidating hog industry. The bulletin showcases alternative ways to raise pork profitably -- in deep-straw bedding, in hoop structures and on pasture -- producers have been able to save on fixed costs, find greater flexibility, identify unique marketing channels and enjoy a better quality of life. Profiles successful hog producers as well as the latest research on everything from greater profits to better-tasting pork raised in alternative hog systems. Full text online:
http://www.sare.org/publications/hogs.htm

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BERRY: That's right - building commercial linkages between the city and its local countryside. And there are good reasons to do that. You've got the prospect, to begin with, of better, fresher food. You've got the possibility that consumers could influence production.

You have the possibility that urban consumers, by fulfilling their responsibility to local producers, can make secure their local food supply in the face of various threats. The paramount one, now on everybody's mind, is terrorism, but there are also the threats of epidemic and disease. In other words, the influence of local consumers could work, not only to maintain farming in the local landscape, but also to diversify it. And American agriculture is badly in need of diversity. Another threat to the present food system of course is the likelihood that petroleum is not going to get any cheaper.

BERGER: That happened in Venezuela a few years ago. They had an oil producer's strike and people lost their gasoline supply. As a result they couldn't truck food anywhere. Whole communities were starving because they couldn't get access to food in stores, and they didn't have any capacity to feed themselves.

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BERRY: The first ethical requirement is a decent suspicion of the claims of people who have something to sell. I'm not reading anything that suggests that genetic engineering is increasing production. Some recent things I've read suggest that productivity of Round-up ready soybeans is less than that of other varieties.

I think that the real reason for genetic engineering is to put absolute control of the food system into corporate hands. They don't want anybody - farmer or urban consumer or anybody else - to have anything whatsoever that they don't buy from a corporation at the corporation's price. In other words, economic totalitarianism is the goal. And I don't think the difference between political totalitarianism and economic totalitarianism is worth lingering over. If you're not economically free, if you don't have economic choices, you're not free.

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BERRY: Rural poverty happens because people aren't being paid to take adequate care of their places. There's lots of work to do here. And you can't afford to pay anybody to do it! If you depress the price of the products of the place below a certain level, people can't afford to maintain it. And that's the rural dilemma we're in now. But you've got to see the connection between the poverty of the people and the impoverishment of the place. If you buy the products, and you don't give an adequate payment in money, then that means that the producer doesn't give adequate care.

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BERGER: This organic mechanism of resistance is trying to establish a community/regional area and beginning to develop alternative models of connection between the producer and the consumer, and begin to create some trading zones that are micro-trading zones.

BERRY: Yes. You can hope only to take it back a little at a time. There is no master plan. And I would be very suspicious of a master plan if I knew of one. It's got to happen a little at a time. You've got to confront the very difficult economic problem of making a local supply and a local demand come into existence simultaneously. I don't know that that's ever been done before in the way we will have to do it. And nobody knows how well it's going to succeed. But there are hopeful signs. It would be no trouble to take you and show you things that are working, but there are not enough of them yet.

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So medicine couldn't solve the basic problem, and half the piglets die in protest.

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If organic farming was more efficient on large farms would it still have the same desireability to consumers?

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Your bashing of organic food consumers is uninformed and rediculously short-sighted in it's stereotyping.

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The perfect should not be allowed to become the enemy of the good. In an ideal world, local farmers would produce delicious foods grown without any harm to the environment at prices we could all afford while simultaneously making an excellent living. The livestock would all live happy lives, singing their little animal songs, dying a natural death and yet remaining tender and tasty. We would then get together and cook them over our campfires which produce no smoke, sing our little camp songs, and eat our meals in perfect harmony.

That world, unfortunately, does not exist.

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This goes doubly for organic products. I will even protest for the farm in Los Angeles if they grow some good organic weed!

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Well, that pretty much explains what your priorities are--It also might go a ways to explaining why you seem so out of touch too.

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That was the bashing I referred to. Those people that the author you qouted do not exist, but that doesn't stop him or her from characterizing organic food consumers as such--and that's bashing.

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Remember, now, at the moment most people simply can not afford “organic” food. They’re consuming food that’s been sprayed with pesticides and prepared with preservatives to give it a long shelf life. And whatever cost to the environment that comes from these practices is already being borne. So, we’re comparing an ideal–growing foods that yield some health gains to the consumer in addition to various environmental benefits–that does not presently exist at anything but a niche level because of cost against a proposed reality where the health gains are made possible for the masses but without the ancillary environmental gain.

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But isn’t that how affordable milk is produced now? Why don’t we compare Wal-Martized organic milk to the status quo?
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No, they’re not. They’re merely transported. But don’t we transport goods globally now in consuming non-organic foods?
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Okay. But how would mass-produced organic meat compare to mass-produced non-organic meat? And, would the niche organic products now available still be available for those willing and able to invest in ensuring that the animals grown to be killed and eaten have enjoyable lives? If so, what’s the harm?

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My point was that small scale is more productive and thus already in a desirable form as it is--no need for consumers wanting a silly fantasy to be possible inorder to support organic foods.

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Originally posted by douglaslee:

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Seahawkfan: The successful ones will continue to be the ones you despise.

Where's that coming from? Factory farms [from another thread] I think are what Ren's talking about.

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Originally posted by /.ren Posted 04 May 2006 11:55:
douglas (and now Jason I see, while I was composing),

I overlooked that really irrelevant to me charge of "despising" you picked out. But maybe it's worth some thought now that I've looked at the linked thread you offered. Here's the last post on it, from the last day in April:

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It is undeniable that our American way of life is not sustainable. Farming, is the most blatant example. Petroleum fertilizers are a way of life for farmers. They can rape the ground of its precious nutrients and then replenish them with fertilizers. However, this will burn out the soils. It is time to go to more organic ways of farming. Local production on a small scale is the right choice. Here in Vermont, we have started using our cow manure to make electricity. Yeah, that's right. Not oil, coal, Natrual Gas or Nuclear, but Manure. Cow Power, what a great thing. Sustainable farming practices are possible. You just have to invest in the products that are locally grown. Once the world was so big, now it is so small. I look forward to the day that it is big again.

There's a manure spreader load of good solid scientific based ideas imbedded in that post. I'd personally be more than happy to spread them around and examine them for anyone here that seems to love dwelling in the basement of emotional opinion. Maybe it will fertilize something. Above it in that thread, until I come to your lead post, there's a whole lot of thread unraveling distractions with very little substance. It doesn't appear anyone really wants to take the issue seriously. Early up we find Gnarly dismissing the topic with "family farms are inefficient". That concept devolves right straight back to the cheap energy issue that created the entire enterprises of "factory" farming in the first place, the development of which can be traced directly in parallel with the upcurving extraction and consumption of that resource as well as the parallel curve of human population expansion. Note too that "we" funded through research in many of our top state universities, which were specifically picked out to focus on agriculture and were provided public tax-based grants for that purpose, most of the "science" that made it possible. All this no one thinks much about, but it all goes into the emotionally based paradigm of faith in the free enterprise system and that remark Seahawkfan made imbedded with his undoubted "objective" opinion of my perspective.

As a side note, I once mapped out getting a degree in agricultural engineering, so besides having the personal experience of trying to make a real family farm work, I seriously considered taking it to the next logical level, since I could see at the time which way the wind was blowing, so to speak, for farming. Vietnam sort of distracted me and when I got back I'd already begun looking at the world with a different perspective, and with an entirely new paradigm of questions. But as part of my B(ull) S(h_t) degree, I did end up getting a minor in one of the first programs of environmentalism at the university I attended in Michigan, actually a university famous for its involvement in the Green Revolution, the results of which keep getting wiped out periodically, and we are headed for yet another phase of trying to figure out how to feed the planet as the undeveloped gaps in the world are being rapidly filled in, and populations continue to expand exponentially. I really think we could learn some lessons from lemmings.

But back on topic,

In my brief lifetime I've watched:

Family farms disappear, and, sadly, suicides occur in the process as many lost a way of life they the land that they treasured, not necessarily because it was the loss of property but because they lived with it -- it was their life. Some stayed physically alive but died in other ways;

I've watched the soil be transformed from a living organic self sustaining producer of goods to a medium of chemical infusions for maximizing plant growth, without which the soil soon becomes inert, meanwhile multinationals like Dow, Phizer, Cargill (they've made trillions selling to anyone and everyone in most of the Twentieth Century's wars, now they are tied to Dow, very innovative folks) etc, have tried to buy up every single seed on the planet so they can patent them and thereby control their distribution, not to mention to transform them through genetic research to make them more compatible with industrial agricultural applications;

I've watched this "innovative" process displace small time farmers all over the world, some of whom immigrate here to the mythical "land of opportunity" since their own cities soon fill up and offer little opportunity for survival, so now we have an "immigration" issue;

I've watched much more, but worth a note, I've watched a fledgeling environmental movement grow, develop its own emotional weeds that make it difficult to grasp fundamentally sometimes, and I've watched as it's fundamentals are cast aside by a society that works less and less on a rational basis so important for a democracy to one of isolated specialists who think within the cacoons of their own specialties, and don't even hear the idea of going to grandma's farm to see the livestock or play in the orchard.

In the process of all this, I have stayed cognizant of science, cognizant of the evolution of agriculture and cognizant of the actual complicated and difficult to summarize science in this now emotionally charged word: environmentalism.