Are Beech & Oak Fruit Used as Animal Feed?
Pigs are by nature foraging animals, rather than grazing animals. In their natural habitats of forest and heavy cover they eat an omnivorous diet. This made them a useful domestic animal for people who could enjoy the luxury of a domestic or semi-domestic animal that could be left to forage free-range in woods and thickets.
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The First Domestic Pigs
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Recent studies by the University of Oxford's Henry Wellcome Ancient Biomolecules Centre and the University of Durham indicate that the pig was domesticated several times over history, going back as far as 9,000 years and occurring in several different locations throughout Eurasia.
Wild pigs are omnivorous, opportunistic foragers. They eat nearly anything but high-cellulose fodders. Their natural intake would have included oak and beech mast (acorns and beech nuts) left lying on the forest floor. Communities with partially domesticated pigs would have been able to allow the animals to take advantage of labor-free foods as one of several sources of intake.
This pattern of free-range management has been a constant in swine care throughout history.
Two Basic Managment Methods.
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By the middle ages two basic patterns of pig management were in effect in European communities. Pigs were kept in the community as sedentary home-farmed animals. Other pigs were allowed to run completely free in the forest, much as cattle were in the American West, being brought in only for identification, marking and slaughter. Forage was free, care was minimal, and the free-range pigs provided a steady reserve of meat and breeding stock. An intermediate third group were home-bred animals allowed to run free in the towns as semi-domesticated stock, serving as a compromise between the penned pig and the free range. This system of two established pig raising methods--with a compromise method bridging the two--allowed farmers to take full advantage of all available resources.
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The Necessity of Forest Rights.
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For this system to work, farmers and townsmen had to be able to depend on access to the forest. For much of European history the average European citizen could expect such access: forests and other common lands were held communally, or when owned by an overlord were still open for specific uses, from foraging for fallen wood to use as fuel, to the right to run livestock within the forests--a right called "pannage." While rights were whittled away over centuries, remnants of the old rights have lingered, along with the agricultural knowledge of the use and value of pannage as a way of maintaining swine.
In the American colonies much of the central East Coast was used as a source of pannage for swine, many of which became fully feral over time. The "wild boar" hunted sometimes in the south are reminders of this early practice of pannage, maintained for generations.
Right to Mast.
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Of all the pannage rights the right to mast was among the more critical. Nut harvests, particularly oak and beech, were superb food sources for swine, but challenging food sources for human harvest. The period when the nuts ripened and fell was perfectly timed to fatten swine for late fall butchering. A farmer with access to oak or beech mast could thus convert calories present in nuts into calories in pork with little or no additional effort and at no additional cost in fodder. Indeed, by using mast rights a farmer was able to make use of a resource that would otherwise be unharvested or very inefficiently harvested.
Culinary Benefits.
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It is commonly accepted that the foods used to feed and to finish meat livestock affect the final flavor of the product. Even today such distinctions as "corn finished" alert the most uninterested buyer that a meat is of high quality. In much of Europe and North America pork fed on oak mast, chestnut mast or beech mast has a reputation for producing exceptional finished meat. Virginia acorn-fed cured hams were and are famous.
As a result, with the new interest in artisanal and high quality foods as well as humane stock handling, there is a resurgence of mast-fed pork.
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- Photo Credit JimChampion, Wikimedia Commons
