Can you work full time and keep sheep / cattle or pigs off site?

My husband & I have 1.7 rough acres on a northfacing, poorly draining hill. We both work & we have two young kids under the age of 5. We currently have geese, but before we had our second child we had 5 pigs, 2 goats and chickens.

The pigs were really easy to keep (they are very tidy animals, don't let anyone say otherwise!), but they are insanely smart. They will pull up and/or push over fences in their burrowing. We used old pallet boards which we put up on their side & nailed together to make a small paddock, then we used electric fencing to make runs. These runs we moved every couple of weeks (always off the main paddock area). The pigs didn't challenge the fencing after they got buzzed a couple of times so it was easy enough to keep them contained. Problem was the uprooted grasses kept grounding the fencing, and they figured this out too so we had to stay one step ahead of them.

All in all, we got our pigs in March-April & had them butchered in Oct-Nov, and they only used a max of 1/3 of our entire site throughout their time with us. OP - if your brother is planning on keeping the pigs for the longterm he will require a shed, but if he's willing to convert his 1acre to a farm he can keep a couple pigs on his land (assuming no planning permission difficulties). Otherwise, if he wants to rent land nearby he can keep the pigs there - they require a morning & evening look & feed, but otherwise are very self sufficient. They require a lot of water, good shade & shelter & are quite happy with dirt to dig in. Be sure that whatever land is used is well contained (very strong fencing!) and the owner is happy to have the land overturned by burrowing pigs!

We are currently working on improving our land and once this is done we will have pigs every year - they surprised us with a lot of joy!