The Pink Tractors at Greene Family Farm

The pigs learning to plow in March.

The new tractors at Greene Family Farm are pigs, and they are remarkable. Using pigs as tractors was not my idea. I am not a man who has ideas; I am a man who borrows ideas. This idea began, as most of mine do, with someone else's book.

One of the most useful books I have ever read is Chicken Tractor. I built my first serviceable mobile chicken pen (a chicken tractor) from a plan in that book. I wouldn't say that the rest is history, but it was an important step for us as we learned to raise good food well. That chicken tractor has seen many hundreds of chickens and been through our yard and garden many dozens of times. It has also been rebuilt and repaired several times. The chickens do an amazing job fertilizing the soil (see the picture of the piglets above and look at how rich that dirt is). However, they don't really till; at least, mine never have.

The refurbished, red hot chicken tractor.

We wanted to expand the area that we have under cultivation and we needed something that could work a little harder and dig a little deeper than chickens can.  The natural next step, also spelled out in someone else's book - Norman Blake's The Pioneering Pig (a hard book to find and a story that would take too long to tell) - was pigs. So we bought four pigs in March.

The pigs in May. Growing up and getting really good at what they do.

Everything the chickens do, the pigs do better (I'll spare you Norman Blake's comparative analysis of manure - though it is interesting). It is true that the pigs don't lay eggs, but then the chickens don't make ham and bacon and sausage. Chickens also don't smile. Alexander, Francis Bacon, Pettitoes, and Applewood grunt and grin all the time, even when they sleep.

The left is after the pigs; the right is before the pigs. They are thorough.

They eat a lot and they work a lot. To us, that is worth a lot. Like the chickens, the COF, and the straw and leaf mulch, they are helping us to build the fertility of Greene Family Farm. As much as I sometimes long for a John Deere (I come from a long line of Greene green tractor drivers and I have "built my own" on the John Deere website many times), the pink tractors are doing a fine job for us right now.

Breaking new ground.
Their favorite appears to be lamb's quarters.
We have lots of lamb's quarters.