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Pasture Pigs in North America: A Beginner's Guide to Sustainable Outdoor Hog Management: Woodlots, Fields, Rotational Grazing, Fencing, Forage, Water
Paperback
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Publisher: Independently Published
Published: Nov 26 2025
Pages: 194
Weight: 0.59
Height: 0.41 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
Raise pasture pigs with better planning, stronger fencing, healthier land, and more realistic numbers.
Originally published November 26, 2025. Revised and updated May 2026. Pasture Pigs in North America is a practical guide for serious beginners who want to raise pigs outdoors in fields, woodlots, orchards, and rotational systems without destroying land, underfeeding animals, or guessing their way through the first season.
Pasture pigs can produce excellent pork and fit beautifully into a small farm, homestead, market garden, or direct-market meat business. But pasture is not a shortcut to cheap pork. Pigs still need balanced feed, reliable water, strong fencing, shade, shelter, bedding, parasite awareness, veterinary planning, legal processing, and honest pricing.
This book gives new producers the practical details that many beginner guides skip: what happens when fencing fails, when pigs root too long in one paddock, when water does not reach the next rotation, when a processor is booked too late, or when customers do not understand hanging weight, freezer yield, and processing costs.
Inside, you'll learn how to:
- Decide whether pasture pigs fit your land, climate, budget, and goals
- Choose breeds and crosses for growth rate, flavour, temperament, climate, and market demand
- Assess pasture, soil, drainage, slopes, shade, toxic plants, and water access before pigs arrive
- Build fencing systems that work, including electric-fence training, wire heights, grounding, and voltage checks
- Plan portable water, shelters, feeders, shade, wallows, and seasonal infrastructure
- Design rotational systems with paddocks, stocking rates, rest periods, and move triggers
- Use fields, woodlots, mast trees, orchards, and silvopasture without damaging soil or tree roots
- Understand what pasture provides nutritionally-and why pigs still need a balanced supplemental ration
- Manage health, biosecurity, internal parasites, quarantine, and vet relationships on pasture
- Raise feeder pigs to finish weight with realistic growth timelines and feed budgets
- Plan breeding, gestation, farrowing, and sow management if you expand beyond feeder pigs
- Protect soil health, manage manure pressure, restore paddocks, and avoid overstocking
- Prepare for spring, summer heat, fall finishing, and northern winter conditions
- Build a small pasture pork enterprise with infrastructure, records, pricing, processing, and customer communication
- Troubleshoot escapes, poor growth, muddy paddocks, fence failures, parasite pressure, heat stress, and processing delays
This revised edition focuses on North American conditions, including the United States and Canada. It recognizes that pigs in southern Ontario, Georgia, Manitoba, Vermont, Kansas, Oregon, Arizona, or Nova Scotia face very different weather, soils, feed costs, predator pressure, processing access, and meat-sale rules.
The book includes practical tables, breed references, fencing specifications, paddock planning tools, feed formulation references, parasite guidance, farrowing records, grow-finish production records, and cost-tracking templates.
Pasture Pigs in North America is not a romantic promise about effortless pork. It is a clear planning guide for producers who want healthier pigs, recovering land, fewer preventable failures, and a more honest path into pasture-raised pork.
If you want to raise pigs outdoors with more confidence, this book will help you build the system before the pigs test it.
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