Pig Housing
We bought a purpose built pig ark from Pig Paradise. It looks OK, it's robust and the pigs seem to like it. I tried it and it was certainly warm and dry inside. It came flat packed and took us about an hour to put up. It has a wooden floor and is raised off the ground so it keeps dry.
Pigs like to nest, so a nice straw bed is the order of the day. Pigs don't dung or urinate in their sleeping area, so cleaning out the ark is never unpleasant. In fact, it is quite fun because the pigs like to help! The whole bed is removed and replaced about every four weeks, when the straw has broken down. It is simply swept out of the ark, which conveniently has a door at each end, on to the ground in front of the ark. This helps to keep the new straw clean by giving the pigs somewhere to wipe their trotters before going to bed. The straw is trampled into the soil pretty quickly, perhaps even improving the structure.
The pigs sleep in the ark all night, and sometimes during the day, although if it's sunny outside the Tamworths will happily sunbathe all day. White pigs can get badly sunburned, so must have shade from the sun. During the day, In bad weather, they will also use the ark for shelter. We've noticed that boars seem to spend more time sleeping than gilts.
As well as a house you will need some kind of fence to keep your pigs within their allotted area. Many people use electric fencing for pigs with great success - the pigs soon learn the consequences of trying to pass the wire and, so long as the power is maintained, will respect the boundary. The main benefit of electric fencing is the ease with which it can be moved making strip grazing possible.
We plumped for post and rail fencing, together with sheep netting. We originally had a single pen for our 2 gilts, measuring about 40x30 feet. We subsequently added another 2 pens of the same size, intending to practice a 3-year rotation of pigs, vegetables and pig fodder. As it turned out we used the original pen to permanently extend the vegetable garden, and now have two adjacent pig pens separated by post and rail fencing, with the ark bisecting the fence line. Since the ark has a door at each end we'll never need to move it again (thankfully, 'cos it weighs a ton!).