vituperation

Reader Mandi said in a comment overnight:

I don’t know how you do it. I lived w/ my in-laws for a couple of years and they got chickens and a pig and oh. my. god. The SMELL!! They both stink so bad!! Pigs definitely worse than chickens. I knew then I could never, ever, ever, ever, ever, EVER be a farmer!! I had to hold my breath when walking past the pens of either animal. It honestly shocks me that so many people don’t mind the stench.

I thought I’d discuss that briefly (not to pick on Mandi, because I’m not). Many farm animals have an undeserved reputation for being stinky, especially pigs and chickens. The problem isn’t so much the animals themselves, but the way they’re kept. Many people keep chickens in runs, tiny little caged areas where they scratch the ground down to bare earth. Their coops are small, too. Pigs are often kept in small pens, where 20×20 (for one or two) is considered luxury-sized.

If there is a single great truth in life it is this: animals (including humans) are shit machines.

Any animal (again, I include humans here) will start to stink if kept in a small area for an extended period. It’s axiomatic. That much poop in that little space is going to have some stank going on. Our last chicken coop, at about 35 total square feet of floor space for thirteen chickens, could get a little ripe in the summer after a few weeks of unchanged litter. I only smelled the coop from outside the coop a couple of times; but inside the coop it could be somewhat…breathtaking. Change the litter, the smell goes away.

The only time I ever actually had a stinky chicken was when Frick took a dust bath in a hole Mister Boogers peed in, and she smelled like cat pee. Otherwise, chickens smell remarkably like a mix of outside and whole roasting chickens you get at the grocery store.

The new coop is 120 square feet of space for (ultimately) 27 or 28 chickens, and has better ventilation. It also has much deeper litter, roughly 10 inches instead of 6. It sits in shade, so it shouldn’t get TOO hot in the summer, and I don’t expect there to be a smell problem. More importantly, the new coop has about 30 feet of roost space, instead of the 10 of the old coop. Since most of the time a chicken spends in a coop is roosting, the shit gets really deep directly underneath. More shit = more stink.

Now, as far as pigs go, I pretty much know nothing other than what I’ve read. However, what I’ve read over and over again is that pigs are not smelly by nature. They’re smelly because they’re kept in small areas and like the chickens, their poop builds up. Commercial pig raisers — those agribusinesses Farmer Rich hates so much — recommend less than 10 square feet of floor space per pig. Humane farming (like the Animal Welfare Institute) recommend no less than 225 square feet (15×15) per pig.

It’s pretty easy to imagine how fast smell could build up in conditions like that. Pig manure is rumored to be mind-bogglingly stinky. In all the times I’ve been around them at petting zoos and on farms, I can’t say that I remember them smelling better or worse than anything else. All I remember is the generic “barnyard” smell which wasn’t rosy, but wasn’t all that bad, either.

But back to the space thing. Our pigs will have four thousand eight hundred square feet of ground space.

Each.

Pigs, unlike chickens, don’t shit where they sleep, so there shouldn’t be an issue in their shelter unless they roll around in shit then go roll in their straw. Speaking of shelters, our pigs will have ten times the recommended space in their shelter.

Interesting factoids you may not know: pigs nest, and will bury themselves in straw to sleep. They also don’t habitually stay in mud. The only reason they wallow is because they lack sweat glands, and the muck helps them to cool off. We’ll probably be getting some sort of kiddie pool for our pigs once it starts warming up.

I won’t know until we actually have pigs in the summertime whether or not they really smell bad. If they do, their living quarters are downwind.

To answer your other question, Mandi — sometimes it does feel like I never stop. One thing I’ve learned since we moved out here is that there’s always something to do. Yesterday it rained all morning and was too muddy to work on the pig yard, so I spent the afternoon moving things out to the garden shed I built a few months ago and getting them arranged. Once that was done, I took all the nest box covers off the new coop and re-did them. The way I originally built them, they didn’t open all the way and that quickly became an ass-pain. Now they’ll lift all the way up.

I had planned to take a couple of easy weeks once I got the new coop and chicken yard done, because I thought that piglets wouldn’t be ready until early April. That’s what I get for assuming. I figured pigs farrowed in late winter and I was wrong. They farrow in early winter so their offspring will be ready for life as winter gives way to spring.

I was wrong, and now I’m busting my ass to get ready for them. Once they’re situated, I should be able to take some time off for for resting.

The funny thing is, I say that very thing every time I near the end of a project.

Saturday morning, once the wood for the pig shelter was delivered, I went up to the co-op and bought supplies for their fence. It took me two trips to bring everything home and unload it, because I was concerned about the weight load in the back of the truck. My truck is called a “half-ton” pickup, but I’m not sure what that means. My assumption is that it means I can put 1000 pounds in the bed (and I had 960 pounds in concrete alone), but something in the back of my head tells me that that “half-ton” actually has something to do with weight over the axle. I dunno. If you know more about trucks than I do, please feel free to explain in the comments.

I spent the rest of the day boring holes with the post-hole digger on the tractor and setting posts in concrete. I dug out twenty-one holes, carted around sixteen 8-foot posts that were 6 inches in diameter and 6 4×4 treated posts, and lifted 80-pound bags of concrete about a hundred times. Usually when I spend the day working outside, I come in complaining that I felt like I hadn’t accomplished anything.

Not Saturday. Saturday night, I felt like a train had hit me. I wasn’t too sore yesterday, just a little up and down the whole back side of my body. Today I hope to finish the shelter, but I don’t know if I will because I have to go to the sawmill for the wood and that’s about 45 minutes each way.

Anyway, here are a few pictures.

This is mostly an overview, though you can’t see the gate or left front corner.
The treated posts by the truck are for the shelter.

The shelter posts were squared using a very scientific method.
Also, note the distance the shelter is from the house.

Another view

Part of the living area, now with set posts.