Rooting as Tillage, and the Swill Law

#A vegetarian restaurant offers you its prep waste, free, every day

No meat has ever been near it. Peelings, trimmings, stalks, bruised tomatoes, a bucket of it at the back door at six every evening. You have twelve pigs. The arithmetic writes itself, and so does the story you would put on the label.

You may not feed it. Not raw, not "just the vegetables", not "only on Tuesdays". It is unlawful in South Africa unless it has been boiled for at least sixty minutes or sterilised in some other efficient manner — and the reason has nothing to do with whether meat touched it.

This is where the imported pastured-pig model breaks in this country. It does not break on biology first. It breaks on a 1986 regulation that most farmers have never read and most overseas courses have never heard of.

#The trap is in the word "infectious"

Farmers who know about the swill rule almost always know it in the wrong shape. They carry the test "does it contain meat?" in their heads, and that test is not the law.

"Infectious thing" is a defined term. Section 1(1) of the Act defines it, and Annexure 1 A of the regulations then deems a long list of ordinary farm materials to be infectious things whether or not anything about them looks infectious. Three items on that list decide the whole question for a pastured-pig enterprise:

• Item 3 — meat and any meat product. The one everybody expects.
• Item 2 — milk and any dairy product. This catches whey. The cheese-maker down the road offering you free whey by the drum is offering you a deemed infectious thing, and plenty of South African smallholders feed it raw every day.
• Item 12 — any kitchen refuse of animal or vegetable origin originating from any dwelling, hotel, motel, restaurant, eating-house, airport, harbour, or any place where food is prepared for human use.

Read item 12 slowly. The deeming attaches to where the material came from, not to what is in it. A vegetarian restaurant's prep waste is kitchen refuse of vegetable origin from an eating-house. It is inside the definition. So is the canteen bin at the plant, the airport catering trolley, and the scrapings from your own kitchen sink.

There is a second sleeper in the same regulation. Annexure 1 B item 3 makes used animal bedding, and grass, hay or straw that has been used for feeding animals, contaminated things. That converts a load of cheap second-hand bedding from a neighbouring farm from a bedding decision into a biosecurity decision. And Reg 24(1)(e) bars feeding any protein of ruminant origin (except milk and milk products) to any animal other than predators and carnivores without the Director's written approval.

DALRRD's own position, in its ASF strategy, is the same sentence in plainer words: "The best way to protect pigs is by confining them in biosecure accommodation and feeding safe feed (no swill consisting of leftover catering waste)."

#Now the good news: the pig is a tillage implement

Strip out the feed fantasy and what remains is genuinely valuable. A pig roots. Used deliberately, that is a tillage and seedbed operation: turning maize stubble, breaking a compacted crust, burying residue, cleaning up spilled grain, terminating a cover crop. On the Highveld this is the single most defensible pastured-pig integration there is, because it puts disturbance exactly where you already wanted tillage, in the season when a genuinely surplus feed exists.

Used carelessly, it is the opposite. A pulverised, bare paddock going into the thunderstorm season violates two of the course's principles at once — keep the soil covered, and minimise disturbance — and it does so at the worst possible moment.

The certification standards make the same demand from the welfare side. A Greener World's South African pig standards require ranging and foraging areas to show evidence of grown vegetative cover, require manipulable material where cover cannot be held year-round, and require denuded areas to be rested and allowed to regenerate.

#The ring in the nose

A septum ring works by making rooting painful. That is not a side effect; it is the mechanism.

There is no South African statute or regulation that specifically prohibits or permits nose ringing. The governing law is the general cruelty offence in the Animals Protection Act 71 of 1962, whose definition of "animal" expressly includes "pig". In practice, in South Africa, ringing is a certification and market question rather than a criminal one — but a badly done ring that turns septic is prosecutable cruelty, and that is not a close call.

#Three things nobody can tell you, and you should stop pretending otherwise

#What to do on Monday

Walk your feed shed and your feed relationships first, not your fences. Write down where every input actually originates, and cancel anything that traces back to a kitchen, a canteen or a dairy — today, in writing, with the reason. Then take one paddock, set a cover threshold on paper before the pigs go in, and plan the planting that follows them out. If you cannot name the crop that goes in behind the pigs, you have not planned a tillage operation. You have planned a bare paddock.