If this wasn’t enough, once he did get up and back to feeding the pigs, they all surrounded him at the trough. He fell right on the fence, continually getting zapped, trying to get up while piggies were climbing on his legs. Once at feeding time CJ was walking back and forth, stepping over the fence, trying to be quick grabbing his feeding buckets when he fell. CJ agrees with me on this as he has had his own issues. I am no match for 4,100lbs of excited and ready to fight for feed, beasts. I am a tiny individual and while I would like to think I am small but mighty, each pig has me by about 200lbs and all 14 of them together have me by about 4,100lbs. However, I no longer feel safe going in with them. I used to have no issues going into the paddock as the pigs never presented any problems for me. They also fight each other to get to the trough. Now every time CJ goes in, they think it is feed time and get excited rushing at him. With the previous feeding system, the pigs knew they could get feed anytime they wanted and didn’t really worry about us coming into their paddock. Imagine fourteen 300lb animals all rushing at you at once and you can imagine how this presents a problem for the person with the feed buckets. They have been waiting to eat and they are hungry, hungry, piggies. The pigs now know when feeding time is and they are very excited for it. However, this has produced yet another problem for us. They also seem to eat all the feed with little wasted. This works well since we can monitor exactly how much they are eating. More work for him but this would help us cut down on our losses and motivate the pigs to eat all the feed knowing that they no longer had the choice to free feed. This just couldn’t continue.ĬJ decided that he would feed the pigs in two troughs, twice a day. We were spending much more than we anticipated on feed costs and gas to pick up the feed from the mill. Once this happened, the feed was lost as the pigs might eat some of it, but most of it would be left to rot. It did work as it should, however, the pigs were still able to knock a good portion of the feed out onto the ground. We expected this feeding system to work well for us. He also built the base small enough to where they could get their heads in, but they could not lay in it and push feed out onto the ground. He built it with two PVC pipes at the bottom that the pigs could nudge, and feed would fall down from the container. It was definitely big enough to accommodate all 14 pigs and he thought he had built it in such a way that they couldn’t waste feed. So earlier this year CJ built a larger feeder using a food grade IBC tote. With the additional pigs this year, we knew it just wasn’t big enough. Last year CJ built a barrel feeder and while it worked for the 6 pigs, we were not overly pleased with it. They have been wasting a large portion of their feed. We have experienced some feeding issues this year with the pigs.
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