Pig Shelter Design Fail: Time for an Upgrade
Sasquatch comes up with a lot of crazy ideas for raising pigs in the forests of Oregon. Inevitably, nature comes along and screws everything up. After a recent rain and wind storm we had the opportunity to try out a new pig shelter design after the previous design failed.
Failure has become a big part of my life lately. That’s not a bad thing. I’m a lawyer trying to figure out how to be a pig farmer. That means a lot of trial and error experiments. I’m simply trying to remember to fail forward and learn from my mistakes.
One thing we haven’t quite figured out yet are shelters. Building a pig shelter in Oregon’s Coast Range is a bit different than your normal pastured pig operation. We can’t just move pig arks around the forests with a tractor.
We need highly portable light-weight shelters that we can deconstruct and reconstruct in different spots throughout the forest. These spots are inevitably going to be on uneven ground. That means a design flexible enough to accommodate the rough terrain.
We can, and have, built the shelters on flat ground. However, the only flat ground we have on the farm are on our internal roads. When you build a pig shelter there, they root around making a comfortable bed for themselves and completely jack up the road.
The current iteration of our pig shelter design is made up of 4 T-Posts, 2 PVC cross bars, an 8×10 tarp, and 6 fiberglass roof panels. All the pieces are held together with zip ties (I love zip ties, I think I need to right a love poem to them).
Since building this version of the shelter I’ve already figured out a couple design tweaks I’ll be making the next time around.
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