I will preface this entire post by saying this....

I am a city boy, I know how to take care of my dog, and I know how to shoot, clean, butcher, and eat a deer. That's about it when it comes to animals.



I have a cabin and about 40 acres of land, all of which is wooded, hilly, and (it had been timbered 10-15 years ago) fairly overgrown with brush in some areas.

I would like to put in a food plot or two for deer, but the only means of access is by foot or atv. I'd rather not buy a tow behind brush hog and then also, I'm assuming, a tow behind tiller of some sort. The area is way too difficult to get my tractor in, and trying to get a walk behind in there would probably land me in the hospital.

So, while stumbling through the internet, I saw that some in similar situations use pigs. They set up an electric fence, maybe give the pigs some shelter, and let the pigs go to town on the brush and roots, and the pigs trample the earth fairly well so that it is almost ready for planting.

Sounds like a great plan, but before I go out and plant a couple packs of bacon in the middle of the woods and wait for the piglets to sprout, I figured I better educate myself a bit more on the subject.

There has to be a lot more to this than buy pigs, fence pigs in, then shoot and eat when they're done right?

If I were to ever go through with this scheme, I'd figure on 2 pigs (female I'd guess), on about 1/4 acre at a time.

I would rarely if ever be there to check on them. I would not groom them, pet them, take them to the vets, water them, read them bedtime stories, or anything else.

Is this feasible, or should I get to work building my road so I can get the tractor up there?

Also, how likely are pigs to break out? There's not much around me (from an agricultural point of view), but I still don't want to be that guy from the city whose pig excavating experiment caused damage  to someone else's property.

This. Way to many things to go wrong with your plan.

I did this on a smaller scale. I used four 16' long 48" high cattle panels and would leave them in an area for a few weeks then move it until I had the size garden I wanted. I only had two sows in the pen at a time. I did water them everyday and I did supplement with corn and scraps. The other poster is right, once they run out of food ain't much can keep them from getting out of anything.

generally speaking you should check on a pig at least once a day just to see what kind of trouble they are figuring out


would take some serious fence to keep a hungry pig in

I've helped raise pigs but we fed them commercially so I don't know much about ranging them. We had horse fencing with electricity strung low so never had issues with escaping.

One thing I've seen that helps with them tilling the land is to take rebar and make holes a couple feet deep all over and drop corn into them. This supposedly works great to have them do most the work digging up stumps for you.