The Woolly Pig Company is renowned for the ethical meat sourced from its herd of high-welfare Mangalitsa pigs. They live outdoors, grazing woodland paddocks in the Scottish uplands. The pigs also have a surprising use – managing bracken at Brodoclea Woodland Farm. We catch up with David Carruth, Sustainable Farming Manager at The Future Forest Company, which owns the farm, to find out how the pigs contribute to a sustainable whole-farm system.
We started using the pigs for bracken management about five years ago. They were being moved around, so they had lots of forage to choose from. We noticed that when they were in bracken, at certain times of year, they’d fire into the rhizomes! Toxins are released into the plant above ground while the plant’s growing, to stop anything damaging it. Then it dies back later into the year, in August/September, and the nutrients return to the roots. The pigs instinctively know that at certain times, around September-January, there’s something nutritious for them underground. They go for the rhizomes but not the leaves.
They dig pits to get to the rhizome networks and root under the ground or go into the side of the hill the bracken is on, as a quicker way of getting to them. The pigs dig out the roots and chew along them. They only eat certain parts of the rhizomes, that I presume are soft enough to eat, and chew up and spit out the rest. They instinctively know how to eat it. For the rest of the year, they still graze the paddocks with the bracken in, but they don’t touch it.
There’s not really a lot of bracken left in the pig pasture now. We used to have several big patches of bracken on our 430-acre site, with some plants around 6 foot tall. Areas of the site have been transformed by the pigs, with a diverse forage growing back in place of the bracken monoculture that was there before.
The pigs have also helped our agroforestry work. We’d previously tried to plant a line of aspen trees on one section of our site, but the bracken grew and crushed the saplings, making it difficult to establish trees in those areas. Now the pigs have been on it eating the rhizomes, less bracken has grown back, creating a bit of space for trees.
It depends on what your goal is. For us, the goal isn’t to eliminate the bracken, it’s to break it up. We’re looking for diversity in the pasture.
Only graze pigs in areas with bracken at certain times of year, when the plants have died back. The pigs will let you know when it’s time to go onto the bracken, follow their lead. My feeling is the pigs would eat the bracken if there’s nothing else to graze in the paddock, and that’s when it becomes dangerous. I’m moving them all the time and we have a diverse forage, so it’s not getting to that stage. The pigs have plenty of options and they seem to instinctively know not to go for plants that could be toxic. I wean quite late as well, at three months, giving piglets a good amount of time with their mums to pick up learned behaviour. Get good at fencing too, fencing is key! We moved onto a high tensile rylock fence with an additional ground wire running underground. I use rails and stones to fill in any gaps. It’s a pain to install but it lasts.
I went to a local feed merchants and we got together a supplementary feed that complements the grazing. I don’t need to give the pigs much in summer, sometimes only 3-5% of their total diet, then in the winter it’s more like 20-30%, but that’s fine for rearing. Mangalitsa are a slow reared pig, so there’s no point keeping them at a big weight for too long. It’s bad for the pigs and expensive. I haven’t settled on a feed for finishing yet, I’m still trying things out to get them above at 60kg hanging weight.
Mangalitsas are a Hungarian breed, a mix of European pigs and wild boar, borne out of a harsher climate. Not many people keep pigs in upland Scotland, but they seem to thrive outdoors here. They farrow outdoors too. I took the boars to the sows in January, so we get piglets this time of year. The aim is to condense farrowing into four to six weeks. We haven’t quite got there yet but we’re moving that way. I’m creating mobs for rotational grazing, so I want 35-40 boars and the same number of sows, about the same size and age. Otherwise, the bigger ones can push the smaller ones off the feed for the first few months and the smaller ones fall behind. This system means they all do a bit better.
A friend who’s trying to manage bracken mentioned the Learning Network to me and it sounded interesting. I’ve also been invited to the Scottish Government Bracken Control Working Group, and I’m working with Scottish Woodlands and the Integrating Trees Network for a tour of our farm later this year. With all these groups, I’m trying to share anything significant we learn. If we can help others be successful with their non-chemical bracken management, that’s a big win for biodiversity and potentially pigs as well. Everything I’ve shared is observational, so I’m also hoping the groups can help me get proper data to back up my observations.
My observation in that is in some areas of our site pigs have helped expand and restore wetlands. The reed beds form a monoculture. In a way, the reeds are like the bracken of the wetlands, that don’t allow for much diversity. It’s something that needs to be studied more and that we’re interested in exploring.
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Please email brackenmanagement@soilassociation.org if you have any questions.