Our Experience with Pigs for Fire Prevention

In 2022 a fire started straight upwind of us on the levee west of Rancho Marina. It raged and blew toward us in a 30mph wind. It burned 40+ units in Rancho Marina, the homes of 86 people. The fire leapt forward burning willow and blackberry thickets, flinging showers of dry burning branches into the air like a burning blizzard in hell.

The blizzard of embers blew through Lighthouse Resort's gravel and chain-link storage yard, igniting a dozen or so boats and campers while they frantically removed as many as they could.

The fallow field upwind of us was a total eruption of fire, burning tinder- waist high dry weeds.

We had just moved our grazing fence west into that field and starting mowing to deal with the obvious fire hazard. Unfortunately, the fire happened a week or so too soon for us. But we were not alone.

Delta residents are fantastic. Friends, neighbors, and strangers called each other and rushed to the farm to open gates for the animals and make sure they were ok. A disaster with good people is amazing. Who else knows that a bunch of people will literally run through fire to help them?

Pretty much everything within 50 feet of our property line burned (the fire was so hot it singed my eyebrows), but it went no further than that. Everywhere our pigs had been grazing was incapable of sustaining a fire.

The fire that no one could stop and that built to a raging inferno got stopped by a pig pasture and didn't get to the woods downwind of us. Not only didn’t the woods burn, neither did the buildings and resorts downwind of that. 200+ people didn't lose everything in this fire thanks to the pigs. Pig pasture is more fireproof than a well maintained rv park, a gravel storage yard, harvested cornfield, riprap levee even. All those other things burned.