When we still lived in Melbourne, and I was a puffy, pale chap sitting at a desk, I used to go for a run at lunchtime. The idea was to try and keep some sort of fitness, keep my weight down, offload some stress, get some fresh air….

The fresh air worked, and I had an ok level or aerobic fitness, but I felt lousy, and remained pale and puffy.

When we moved up here I sweated it all off, got some sun, dropped a few clothes sizes, and gave up running.

Until yesterday.

Yesterday the blackberry removal team moved in. That is, we introduced four beautiful black pigs to the top paddock. The top paddock is the one that, 10 years ago, was 5 metres deep in blackberries, with every olive tree covered. The mega-blackberries are gone, but the one million seedlings remain.

We regularly mow to make sure they don't get away or ever seed, and have run a few trials to try and reduce them. The common wisdom is you poison them repeatedly, or you manually dig them out. We're not going to spray poison in an olive orchard, and the digging is heartbreaking. Mowing theoretically works over a seven year period, but it requires constant mowing, and we are removing cow feed at the same time.

So the pigs are tasked with ripping the paddock segment by segment. They have a beautiful mobile house and we'll move their yard as they obliterate everything within the segment. The expectation is they will dig out the blackberry nodules. We'll move the pigs onto a fresh patch, and resow the paddock behind them as they go.

To keep them in place we invested in a snazzy portable electrified mesh grid fence. Carefully we unloaded them out of the car, opened up the gate and ushered them in.

Gobsmacked, I watched in horror as they walked through the gate, and then walked across their yard, and straight through the mesh fence. And they were off….

They didn't know us, they had no sense of a home site, they had been fed and were not hungry, and they simply headed out. It took us maybe 15 seconds to react, and by then they had ducked through the fence into the next paddock. I bolted wide and round them to head them off, and also positioning myself between them and the vast hop farm next door. If they got in there we'd never get them back.

We managed to steer them back to our house yard, which has a dog-proof perimeter. In they raced, heading to the fruit tree orchard and discovering all sorts of treasure.

Just as it was getting dark. What a relief.

We worked out the next strategy….I would cobble together a fence at the end of the orchard, and keep them penned in for a few days until we sorted out the issue with the electric fencing. They would be ok overnight, I figured.

But the next morning they were gone. I walked around a bit, went to the highest point on the farm…nothing.

The thing that bothered me the most was that sooner or later I would need to speak to George, who supplied them to us. He clearly loved his pigs, and would be pretty annoyed with our ineptness.

I did the rounds, fed everyone else, and went inside to have breakfast…after one more search of the yard. How did they get out? No holes, gates correctly chained, it was a mystery.

We decided to have another look after breakfast, and noticed two things. Off in the distance, the sheep had formed a tight group, and were all looking in the same direction. And nearby, the alpaca was staring at something and making a rarely-heard warning gurgle.

Off we went again, on foot and in a farm buggy. There they were, in a gully! We rounded them up, with me again sprinting ahead of them to turn them back from the corner they were aiming at. Back into the house yard. I quickly started cobbling together the temporary hard mesh fence, and while I did that….they got out again.

And that was how it went for three hours. Working as fast as I could on the fence, the moment one of us wasn't watching them they were gone. We chased them back, each time they were more determined to get somewhere else. It started raining, and I found myself sprinting in the rain, in soaked jeans and heavy boots. The last time I just got to the fenceline ahead of them. Thankfully we had the new fence sorted out, and they have been safely contained since.

They'll be there for a few days yet. I want them to recognize me, come for food when called, and then we'll start thinking about moving them back into the olive paddock.

It was a lot to learn in a very short timeframe!