One of the problems that all pastured hog farmers face is the need for a constant water source for your herds. Hogs need water; a mature hog needs about a fifth of its body weight each day. Supplying that can be a real problem when they are out on pasture and far from the nearest water spigot.

There are solutions available to solve this problem and you choice will depend on how you set up your grazing paddocks and available water sources. I’ll explain a few of these so that you may find some ideas for your farm.

Here on Homegrown Acres farm we are lucky to have several ponds spread around the place. Using these constant water sources only requires that we create our paddocks so that they always contain one of the ponds. We use sort of a pinwheel pattern; rotating the paddocks around a pond as the hogs graze.  The hogs help keep the ponds from being choked with plants and also keep the pond’s bottom firm so it retains the runoff that comes from rainfall. It’s an ideal setup for pastured hogs.

There are occasions, however, when one pond may dry up during a drought and then we have to bring water to the hogs. There are several ways we have done that.

1. If the hog paddock is close enough to a water spigot then we move water troughs to the paddock and use water hoses to fill the troughs every few days. The troughs we have are especially made for hogs.

They have openings in the side that allow the hogs to drink and a float valve that keeps their water source a few inches deep. In the warm season we just leave the hoses in place; when it gets cold we roll them up to prevent them from freezing and use water heaters to keep the water in the trough from freezing.

2. If the hogs are too far to use hoses we use our tractor bucket to bring water to the troughs. This is not ideal as we lose about half the water driving to the troughs (bumpy ground…) but it does work. In the winter we sometimes have to break up the ice in the troughs since they are too far to use heaters.

3. We have considered using water containers, such as the four by four foot juice containers that are always available on Craigslist. These are plastic boxes that have metal wire frames. When placed on a pallet they are easily moved around using your tractor forks. With a set of hog nipples or a valve controlled bowl these may become our water source of choice in the warm season but I don’t think they will be that useful when it’s freezing due to the lack of a heater.

4. At one time we considered running PVC pipes or plastic hose to the far paddocks but the expense of such a setup was not justified. They would need to be above ground since our soil is just too rocky to dig trenches (I once broke a large rented trencher…) and would freeze during the winter.

5. The best plan is to just create more farm ponds over time. They are not the easiest to build, by far, but ponds have been the best water source we’ve had even during the winter. Ten minutes breaking the ice on our ponds sure beats an hour moving water with the tractor… Of course creating the ponds can become an expensive and difficult process but, once the retaining wall is built where a slope allows runoff to fill the pond, the hogs help seal and maintain it for you.

We are always looking for creative solutions to the problem of supplying water to pastured hogs so please let us know if you have another idea.

By the way, if you have an old pond that has become overgrown with weeds and algae, there are easy solutions. Put a pig in it and your problem will be solved very quickly.  Also, ducks love to eat algae. We have a pond in our front yard (where we don’t run hogs) that was completely choked with string algae. Eight ducks took care of that for us in a month and now have a wonderful pond they call home!