paddock 4

one of the most amazing things about my apprenticeship has been its serendipitous timing. my interest in moving to georgia and learning to farm occurred within days of full moon farms physically relocating, and as far as infrastructure is concerned, restarting from scratch. seeing a farm develop from the ground up will be an invaluable experience when i start my own farm down the road. 

each time we want to move the pigs to fresh pasture we have to build a new fence. when we move the cows to a new section of the pasture—new fence. if this was ten years from now all of this sort of infrastructure would be well established, and the happenings on the farm would be more like clockwork, as opposed to the “develop as we go” approach that seems to work best for us today. that knowledge, as important as it is, will come in due time. today, however, my path as a farmer is dramatically represented by the growing farm around me. new cows, new fence lines, new watering systems, new fields. as i learn these many things, i see them appear before me.

and now a lesson on fencing. over at pork chop hill we have been building a new paddock for the pigs to rotate into. pork chop hill is a round topped semi circle, with a centralized feeding and watering system in the middle, and pie shaped paddocks radiating out from the center. the hogs were moved here to pch this winter, just before i moved to georgia. at the time there was only one paddock, and since then we have built three more, completing paddock four just yesterday.

for the sake of this lesson, make believe the unevenly cut slice of pie we call our paddocks was a perfectly straight line. on one end the line would have a wooden post—dig a hole, place post, pour concrete, cover with dirt. the same thing goes for the far end. running from both of these posts we pull flexible metal wire to the center point of the paddock (shown above). where both of these lines meet, one from each end post, we use a clever little device (shown below) known as a gripple which is used to connect both half lines and tighten them to form one continuous and taught fence line. in between the two end posts pound smaller metal rods into the ground to add structure to the line. and now you have a fence.

back in the centralized feeding area one gate closes, locking the herd out of paddock three, and another gate opens, releasing them into paddock four. no more than five waddles into paddock four the herd was greeted by about three hundred tiny wild plums that fell off the tree and onto the forest floor. basically a las vegas style neon sign screaming welcome to paddock four!!! the vegetation beneath this magical tree lasted about five minutes.

it doesn’t take long before they’re acting at home. after a plum pig out, and a little stretch of the midsection, the whole herd was down for a pig nap in the afternoon sun (these are the first two pictures of this post). six hours later i returned to find some happy explorers and the first makings of some pig lanes, streets, and boulevards. pigtown, paddock four, has been born.