pig food -- what they eat in the winter

Feeding your animals from the farm gets easier the longer you do it. That's because every year you have a clearer picture of the way nutrients can cycle in your farm community.

Pigs, being eager omnivores, can eat almost anything the farm produces, in some pretty impressive quantities. Right now -- early December -- the four porkers in the barn are eating mangel-wurzels, storage squashes, hay, cow bedding, and house and dairy surpluses (we don't like to call them 'wastes' because they're not).

Why is there cow bedding (waste hay and manure) when our cows are on pasture all day, all night, all year? Good question. Right now two of the lactating cows are grazing the home pasture where the sheep spent the summer, and the grass is just lovely -- dense, green, and lush. It's full of nutrients and the cows just love it. But grass like that goes through a cow's gut too fast -- she'll get scours (really runny poops) and fail to get the good from her forage.

So at night we put them in the barn with a bale of hay. The brown forage takes more digesting than the green and keeps the gut in balance. Waste hay and poops (not too runny now) end up on the barn floor, conveniently near the pig pen, where the pigs are happy to recycle it.