The award-winning Brodoclea Woodland Farm has proven pigs and trees can get along. So it was about time Forestry Journal checked out the site for itself.
YOU come across plenty of creatures when you venture out in the woods. Deer, squirrels, and birds aplenty, wildcats and pine martens, too. But walk through the 174 hectares of Brodoclea Woodland Farm and you might find yourself snout to snout with something quite different entirely – more than 160 pigs.
With thick, curly coats to keep out the chill of a wind that whips across the Ayrshire hillside, it’s easy, on first glance, to mistake the rare breed for sheep. Move a little closer and their distinctively flat, broad snouts become apparent, perfect for the task at hand.
Allowed to freely roam pockets of the Dalry farm’s woodland – featuring a mix of deciduous and broadleaved trees – the Mangalitsas root and forage in the undergrowth, doing their bit to help grow the forest, boost biodiversity, support an array of wildlife and pave a new path towards a different style of agroforestry.
“There are some things I would do differently”
The funny thing about Brodoclea is that it could be argued the whole thing has been done ‘back to front’, with its trees coming before the pigs.
Planted around a decade ago in the heart of an area traditionally associated with uphill sheep farming, the site had long suffered due to over-farming and sheep grazing. But on the sunny September morning that Forestry Journal ventured down, it couldn’t have been a more different place now, with oak, birch, alder, aspen and hazel a sea of early autumn vibrancy, as dozens of Mangalitsa scamper about underneath the canopy.
“The pigs have been here for four or five years, but the trees had been in for five years or so before that,” says farmer David Carruth as he shows FJ the first of four stops at the site. “I think that’s perfect. With this system, we are seeing a little bit of natural regeneration, but if it was blanket saplings throughout the site, all pretty much the same age, that might not work.
“Pigs don’t really tree graze, but they are quite boisterous and could just walk through and damage the saplings.
“If it was planted with the pigs in mind, there are some things I would do differently.”
The agroforestry journey really begins when its current owners, the Future Forest Company, purchased the farm around five years ago. Realising it was ripe for restoration – with planting having been undertaken by Scottish Woodlands – the challenge was to show how it could embrace multi-faceted land use, tree planting included. The solution emerged in the form of the resilient yet friendly pigs, their calm temperament, thick woolly coat and quality pork that is considered a national treasure in their Hungarian home ensuring the Mangalitsa were chosen over wild boar.
The pigs are said to happily live outside all year, grazing and rooting for food; 97 per cent of their summer diet comes from what they find. To maximise their effectiveness, David uses a system of adaptive “mob” grazing, keeping them in large groups and grazing them through 20 separate 25-acre forest paddocks. As well as the broadleaved pockets, the site boasts several small productive plantations, timber from which has been used for fencing and other projects around the site.
While David and Ken Porter – a Dumfries-shire beef and sheep farmer and now agroforesty lead at the FFC – have carried out very little planting themselves since taking over the running of Brodoclea, hindsight has shown that more horse chestnut would have been beneficial, given one mature tree provides the equivalent of three or four bags of feed for the hungry pigs.
“One of the main objectives when FFC started was to show how the land can still produce food even when it is planted,” Ken explains. “We want to still produce very similar amounts of livestock. The pigs fit in really well to that.”
“There’s so much woodland creation going on, and that has raised questions and criticism that the trees move in, and people and farming moves out,” David reflects. “There’s almost a feeling of loss in a rural community. This answers a few of those criticisms.”
“This is one method of bracken control”
Hopping into Ken’s trusty pick-up, we drive along a narrow, winding, single-track road, before being deposited at our next stop. Clambering over a barbed-wire fence, several Mangalitsa rush up to David, who duly obliges with an affectionate rub of the chin. “Where is the big boy?” he asks the gathered swine, referring to Whacky, one of the farm’s boars. “He’s usually with his girlfriends, but he’s off on a solo mission.” But we haven’t stopped here to see the father of, well, many, many pigs, no matter how impressive he is when he finally surfaces.
Instead, it’s one of the key strengths of the pigs that David and Ken are keen to highlight – just how neatly they can clear bracken. Emerging from under tree cover out into an open space, the Mangalitsas’ powers are clear to see, with very little obvious damage found across a site which, in all likelihood, more modern methods would struggle to even reach.
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“Imagine if you had a rotovator or a digger that came in here,” David says. “Now this is five pigs that came all the way along here and cleared it in a week and a half. This was a thick layer of monocultural bracken.
“They will dig the bracken through the winter at different stages. We don’t really know what their shift is or what they are aiming for.
“But they ignore the plant – it is dangerous to pigs and shouldn’t be eaten by them. They have the natural ability to ignore that and go after the rhizomes. They will chew up and down the rhizome until they find the bit they want, digging out that nitrogen-rich top of the plant underneath the soil. They’ll leave their own number twos on top of the soil.
“When we come back next year, this will be some of the best grazing we have on site. You awaken the feedback and create layers of different grazing.”
Dropping to his haunches, David excitedly points to the different levels of soil the pigs will affect, offering the perfect opportunity for regeneration.
“We will keep the pigs on here for quite a while, letting them have a go at the bracken, then move them across the road [to another bracken-filled plot]. We will rest this for a bit longer, meaning that, when we come back to it, it will be really good grazing.
“The objective isn’t to eliminate the bracken. There is biodiversity that is tied to bracken as a plant. But we want to keep it under control and to manage it. That’s what the pigs do so well.”
Admitting that the Mangalitsa method might not be the best if your end goal is for a flat, beautifully manicured site, David explains that we still don’t know what the pigs are trying to achieve while grazing the bracken, or even how they know when to go for the plant or not.
This also raises another pertinent question. Do David and Ken measure the soil in terms of the benefit the swine are providing?
“We want to do more soil monitoring,” David replies. “Observationally, the impact is very good. When we do our own soil tests and dig into the ground, we are seeing the soil health is quite good. But we do need to do a lot more monitoring.
“The problem is we didn’t baseline, so don’t know how good it was to start with. Our feeling is that it has gotten better. We are seeing a lot of the regrowth coming back a lot quicker once the pigs have come through.”
So far, pigs as bracken control all seems very foolproof, but there are one or two caveats. As David mentioned, the plant itself is dangerous for the animals, that’s why it is important to ensure they aren’t simply wandering within a bracken-only spot, instead presented with a choice of what to do and eat.
“Because of the choice, we haven’t had any problems,” Ken says, before David adds: “They can take the bracken or leave it.”
When Whacky does eventually appear, David, a beaming smile on his face, estimates the boar is a father of 200, but is “quite relaxed about it all”.
“Change has never been a healthy process”
The next stop perhaps shows the full extent of an unintended (but pleasant) consequence of introducing the pigs to Brodoclea; their effectiveness in spooking away deer from its trees.
Looking across the site from its highest point, it’s obvious just how much its pockets of woodland are thriving. An unseasonably cold wind whips through the leaves of hardwood species. In the distance its productive pockets of woodland stand tall against the gusts, while Scots pine is pleasingly scattered throughout the site. Recently cut timber – milled by Keith Threadgall and his trusty Wood-Mizer – lies waiting for its ultimate destination.
As we head into Ken’s pick-up again, we discover the pigs’ pork, rich in Omega-3 fatty acids and antioxidants due to their diet, is sold online via the Woolly Pig Company, which in turn provides income to maintain and staff the wood and farm.
It all sounds good to FJ, but how have other farmers reacted to what David and Ken are trying to achieve?
“Change has never been a healthy process in agriculture,” David says. “When we are talking about change, it can be a difficult and sensitive subject. It’s not because farmers are grumpy or politically inclined one way or another; that’s all nonsense. But it’s because there are 11,000 years of history in farming.
“If you look through that history, can you point to one just transition where rural communities have been at the heart of that transition?”
“A general rule of thumb is that farmers are generally wary of trees and argroforestry,” Ken adds.
“I have never been on a farm where they wouldn’t benefit from a proportion of trees – big time. But that doesn’t seem to happen. Everyone has been pushed down that road in the past, but we need to make it easier for people to change a little bit at a time.”
“It means a lot to be accepted”
Success and attention have duly followed. The innovative example of agroforestry saw former dairy farmer David win the 2023 Scottish Woodlands Farm Woodland trophy for Young People at Scotland’s Finest Woods Awards, while a play was created to tell its story (“The actress who played me was a better me than me,” says David), before Brodoclea picked up the Best Agroforestry Award at this year’s Scottish Agriculture Awards (chosen by Forestry Journal).
“It’s amazing, we only really started with agroforestry a couple of years ago,” David said just moments after editor John McNee handed over the trophy. “It means a lot to be accepted by the wider agriculture society considering we are doing something new, something weird.”
It might be a little bit weird, but it’s no less important. Back to FJ’s Brodoclea visit, and David outlines that the determination to get Woolly Pig’s name out there is twofold. “Part of the reason for entering the awards is being able to show how this is resonating agriculturally and creating a bit of attention. That makes it more difficult to ignore.”
But equally they are determined to see pigs access the same basic payment funding for grazing that currently applies to cows and sheep, with Brodoclea’s local MSPs taking the case to Mairi Gougeon, the rural affairs secretary. Impending changes to the Agriculture and Rural Communities (Scotland) Bill – approved earlier this year – might have “put people’s minds at ease”, but “played it safe”.
David says: “Engaging in projects like this and seeing all of these young people doing very creative and innovative things and bringing that into the policy-making could have led to some interesting things happening; it could have opened doors that weren’t previously there.
“If projects like this can make a difference, then they are worthwhile.”
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