A pig tractor is a movable pig pen. When my three sons who all eat meat were living at home we raised pigs a few times to feed those boys plus to provide good quality meat to other family members and a few friends. I recently decided to get a couple of pigs again to raise for the Hoys, friends, family and to use the hogs as rototillers in garden cleanup. In order to do that I need to be able to easily move the pen around to areas of the garden that need cleanup. And the pen needs to be strong enough that 250 pound hogs can't get out. Yikes, what they could do to my garden if they got out. So I came up with a design in my head. . .
Fortunately I have a bunch of scrap metal from having worked in the construction trades for so long. I went through several of the piles looking for pieces to use.
Here I show the tools I would end up using. A chop saw, welder and helmet, a portable drill, two hand held grinders and a magnet to find and pickup small pieces of metal made from cutting and chopping so the lawn mower is not what finds the pieces. Tape measures, framing square, etc. not shown but they were important.
Using the chop saw, I first cut all the pieces of pipe and angle iron to size and laid out the pieces for assembly. My garden beds are 3 feet wide and 35 feet long with 3 feet pathways in between. The pig tractor will be 11 feet wide and 18 feet long. That way it will cover 1/2 the length of 2 garden beds. I'll add wheels on the corners when I want to move it over the the other half of the 2 beds. Or wheels on adjacent corners to move it across to 2 new beds. (More on the wheels and moving the pig tractor in a later post.)
Everything in place it was time to weld the pieces together. I'm lucky enough to have a friend who is a good welder and who has a winch truck we could use and who was willing to come to work for pork. Pork in the future that is. Now there's a deal. I'll make it worth his while. He's always good help and I let them fish in my creek all the time. I'm a believer in mutual benefit.
We made good progress that day. The next morning I clamped the cross pieces into place so that it would be ready for us to finish welding. I still had a few more pieces to find and cut for completing the gateway and the gate.
To make the gate swing I would need hinges. Not only do I have piles of scrap metal pipes, angle iron, etc. I also have many containers of all kinds of miscellaneous metal things. I found these two pieces in this container. Since I am building the tractor with pipe these will work perfect. I'll weld a 1/2" pipe in the gateway corner to the horizontal rails for these hinges to rotate on.
I cut the pieces down with the chop saw. The four new scraps will go back into the container they came out of and back onto a shelf in the shed. Almost everything I build here at home is made from recycled materials. That's why I've got piles of scrap metal lying around.
The gate is recycled, too. Probably got it at an auction somewhere. I added the 3/4" angle iron pieces in the middle making a star in the gate to add to the gate's strength. I don't want those hogs getting out. Then I bolted the hinge pieces to the gate so that it would swing in. The pen is low enough that I can step over it if I need to get into the pen. But I will put the pigs in and let them out only through the gate. Don't want to teach them that they can go over the top of the pen.
After welding all the pieces together I added hog panels to the inside of the pipe. The hog panels I had to buy new. When the boys were at home and I raised pigs years ago we used T posts and hog panels to make not movable pens. However, the old hog panels were used up to build the two movable high tunnels I have now. (I'll tell you how I built the high tunnels in a post later this Fall.) They were also made out of almost all recycled materials except the plastic and shade cloth, of course.
I added steel wool to fill the ends of all open pipes. I'll epoxy over the steel wool to cap the pipes so that critters and water can't get in. Total cost so far was mostly time spent with purchase of 4 hog panels, 4 pounds welding rod, a bag of steel wool, a handful of bolts, washers and nuts for the gate and three feet of chain with two hooks to be the latch for the gates. Adding up to less than $100 so far not including time. I like using salvage materials to save dollars but the time to haul home, store, sort through and move around materials can add up. Then add the time to assemble. It is easy to underestimate how long it takes to do a project. Thank Goodness I'm having fun.
Ta Daa!
A pig tractor. I'll still need to add a waterer and a feeder and add sides and a roof in one corner for shade. Right now it is sitting on short pieces of pipe. I can roll it on those. That's how I roll the high tunnels you can see below. But I'm going to make the pen so that I can add wheels to make it easier to move. With the pipe rollers I have to keep moving the short roller pieces of pipe from the back to the front as it rolls off of them. With the wheels I'll be able to put them on to start moving the pen and take them off when it is where I want it to end up. Quicker and easier than pipe rollers.
Josh is trying to find piglets to bring here so that I can make them happy, healthy and bigger while they help me clean my garden area. Mutual benefit. I'll post pictures of the wheels and the other add-ons after those piggies arrive. Maybe I will be lucky and they will arrive soon. Meantime, better put away the tools and put the left over pipe scraps back in one of the piles. I'll need them later on another project, I'm sure.
