The “ Hoggit house” An underground pig shelter
I had what my friend Rob calls a “wacadoodle idea” I wanted to build an undergound shelter for the pigs, to keep them warm and snuggly in winter.
Are we nuts? Probably!
Pigs don’t need much for winter but they do need a good windproof shelter and straw to bury in. We have a calf shelter that they like to go in for winter. It has a low roof and the pigs generate enough body heat to keep warm. For winter we have it covered with a heavy duty tarp and also put large straw bales at the front of the shelter. They make their own bed by taking some of this straw in the shelter to sleep under and the bales also help stop the wind. Pigs are very clean and their bed is a bed they dont use it as a bathroom, they go outside for that!
With the pigs making their own bed we can’t put all the straw out at the beginning of winter, they demolish a bale really quickly. We always have to rely on neighbours to help us move the large bales in the dead of winter because we don’t have a tractor. Small square bales would be ideal but are hard to find, and trudging through snow drifts with 50lb bales is no fun…. I’m getting old you know! It’s all about an easier life where work is concerned in winter.
After trawling the web to see what’s out there for underground shelters in extremely cold climates and not finding much we tried to just try a semi buried shelter.
We recently hired someone with an excavator to help us put in a new hydrant and automatic water bowl. A perfect opportunity to get a large hole dug for the pigs shelter. Yes, he thought I was nuts lol.
The quickest solution was to sink our existing calf shelter into the hole. It is a steel frame and we put more tin on the open side to keep the soil out. We have chosen not to cover it all yet though that would look so cool, just like a hobbit house, but ventilation is a concern if we bury it all. We banked soil around the sides and 3/4 of the front where we normally would have straw bales. There is a little more work to do on the front and we need a snow fence and some coral boards around it but we will just have to see how things go.
Just because no one is doing it doesn’t mean it won’t work. You don’t know till you try!