I can be a pretty stubborn person — lets call it determined actually. I like to problem-solve and make things work. But when you’re running your business, you have to ask yourself whether it makes sense to keep pushing after a certain point.

And that’s where we finally landed with our pigs this year. We love pigs! They are probably our favorite animal to watch. And they were one of the first ways we got our girls involved with the farm, picking apples and acorns to feed to the pigs. But after trying several different ways of raising them, we had to be honest. They were not improving the land.

That’s the thing about pigs — they can be super destructive! It’s their nature to root and dig. They’re curious and if they get bored, mischievous. Over the last several years, Joe and I have brainstormed one idea after another on what type of set-up or system would work for our pigs AND land to thrive.

The first year we raised pigs, they were exclusively on pasture. We moved them into different paddocks, reseeding the old ones as we went with fast-growing forage to hopefully bounce back sooner. It seemed like we could never move them fast enough. By the end of the season, the ground was bare and they had made huge body-sized craters in the ground, which Joe had to smooth out once the pigs were gone.

So the next year, we decided to try a different breed and a different set-up. That year, our pigs were completely forest-raised. We had a couple of large paddocks in the woods that were thick with brush and stumps. It took the pigs most of the year to root through this and help clear it up. This was the best year we’d had, but we saw how quickly the pigs rooted through this space and knew we wouldn’t be able to put pigs on the same area again the next year, without them starting to tear it up again.

Year three we expanded into the woods, more paddocks in different, thicker spaces and a new breed again. While the pigs again cleared the space up, this breed were definitely more destructive than the ones from the year before, and by the end of the season, the paddocks were pretty destroyed.

We spent that winter researching different systems and brainstorming ideas. We decided to try a deep-bedding and rotational pasture system again, as well as a new breed. But the results ended quite the same as the first year.

Pigs are masters of what we call “moonscaping”, which means they can desolate a space to make it look like the surface of the moon — bare, with lots of craters.

As a regenerative farm, our number one commitment is to improve the land. We’ve reached a place where it is clear that raising pigs on our farm is not improving the land. After many conversations and more brainstorming, we’ve decided to take a step back from raising pigs.

This is a hard decision, and some part of me (probably that determined part) wants to keep trying until we figure it out. But the land needs a rest. It needs to restore. And we have more homework to do.

There are other farms doing it and doing it well. But having the right land set-up is critical. It’s clear to us that finding the right breed of pig that is less destructive is also important. Finding a consistent supplier of the right breed is a big hurdle right now.

Will we ever raise pigs again? Probably. But this is a season to regroup and research. It’s making the hard decisions to do what’s right instead of what’s easy. That’s why we set a mission and values to hold ourselves to, so that when those times of pressing come, we can turn to those things again and make sure we stay true to who we are and what we’re about.

And that’s a lesson that goes far beyond raising pigs.