This post is the long-promised summary of the costs and yield of raising two pigs for meat. I collected as much data as possible throughout the whole process with the hope of compiling a more complete picture than is often found online. Additionally, I have attempted to presents costs from both a financial and an efficiency standpoint.
Final Meat Yield
Before we talk about costs, let’s answer the most common question: What do you get? When butchering or buying whole pigs, much of your cost will be based on “hanging weight”. This is the weight after the carcass has been skinned and gutted. As has been previously noted, it’s not the final weight of the meat. It is generally suggested that a hanging weight of 200 lbs maximizes the meat produced, so we aimed for that. Even with similar hanging weights, the feed types, husbandry, weather, genetics, and so forth can affect the final yield. The smaller of our two pigs was butchered with a focus on roasts, ham, bacon, and sausage. The final breakdown was as follows:
Interestingly, we bought half a pig last year from a local farmer and gave the same cut & wrap instructions to the butcher. The breakdown for that pig can be found here. Note that last year’s pig was 65% meat and 16% roasts, while the pig in the chart above is 83% meat and 24% roasts. The pigs we raised were leaner and produced much more meat at the same weight. I believe genetics may have played the largest role in this.
The large pig was butchered with a focus on roasts, ham, bacon, and pork chops. The final breakdown was as follows:
I think it’s interesting how similar these two charts are. Choosing to cut pork chops reduces the ribs and sausage, but all other categories remained about the same. The charts highlight something else important. When you buy or raise whole pork you really do end up with the whole pork: ham hocks, tenderloin, liver, and heart. Nobody has yet to create an 80% bacon pig–if they did, I’d be afraid to eat it!
Financial Costs
The final cost of the meat we produced was $2.34 per pound. The cost is affected both by the costs of raising the livestock and paying for them to be butchered. The following chart shows the relative costs that went into producing each pound of meat:
I must admit I am proud of our cost savings by raising our own pork. Last year’s half pig cost us $4.32/lb, so by raising it ourselves we saved almost $2 per pound. I would attribute the savings to greater meat yield, lower feed costs in 2010, and sweat equity.
An obvious message from this chart is that butchering costs were the single largest factor in the final meat price. It can be a little difficult to accept this. You spend 4 months buying feed, filling feeders and water tanks, fixing the pig shelter and monitoring their health and on the last day someone stops by for 30 minutes and doubles your costs. Ouch!
So, given that breakdown, I can think of a few ways we might reduce our costs in the future:
- Home butchering/curing – Butchering is a huge hurdle for the novice, but gives you more control over the process and could reduce the final costs by almost 40%.
- Reduce pig stress – Our pigs were off their feed for about two weeks when we changed feeders. If pigs aren’t growing they are still burning weight maintenance calories.
- Better shelter – A warmer shelter would mean less calories burned staying warm. A calf shelter would be ideal.
- Cheaper source of hay – Buying per ton in late spring would be cheaper than per bale from the farm store.
- Cheaper source of feed – Buying supersacks from a local feed mill might save you money, but we couldn’t find an economic source nearby.
On the other hand, there are several factors which could easily raise our costs in the future. Pork production is heavily dependent on grain prices. If feed prices doubled, our overall cost of $2.34/lb would go up by 38%. This would negate any savings by home-butchering. Choosing a better source of feed for our pigs would also increase our costs. We used standard farm-store swine feed, which likely contained GMO ingredients. The closest mill that sold preservative-free non-GMO feed (not organic) required a minimum 2000 lb purchase at $15 a bag. This would have raised our costs by 34% and left us with 600 lbs of past-date feed. Finally, raising heritage breeds, which grow more slowly but can be better at grazing, would also raise our costs.
In addition to the immediate production costs, there are certain equipment costs which cannot be avoided by the first time pig raiser. For us, these included:
I feel like we did very well at minimizing these costs, as someone could easily spend many times more on basic equipment. Also, nothing was damaged during the first season, so the cost (an additional $0.33/lb) should technically be amortized across several seasons of pigs.
Efficiency
If you are a homesteader or an environmentalist, it’s important to look at the overall system costs as well. Even if something is financially viable, does it fit into my overall homestead? Does it consume resources I can produce locally and produce wastes I can deal with effectively? Can I create similar resources through more efficient means? Pigs have historically been recyclers, consuming human food waste, agricultural byproducts, wild nuts, and tubers. They grew slowly, and were valued for their lard production as much as for meat.
Unfortunately, the modern practice of feeding pigs grain is much less efficient. I have attempted to measure efficiency by two methods. First, by the standard livestock producer’s metric of feed conversion. This is a ratio of the pounds of feed to the pounds of meat produced. Commercial pork producers expect a 3.5:1 feed conversion efficiency. Of course, a pound of feed and a pound of meat do not contain the same number of human-usable calories, so I have also attempted to calculate the “calorie conversion” efficiency between the feed and meat.
Compared to a commercial operation, we did pretty well on feed conversion. Our pigs ate 3.8 lbs of feed for every 1 pound of meat they eventually produced. They were thus 9% less efficient than their industrially raised counterparts. Apparently, you can take a commercial breed of pig (Yorkshire), omit the low-dose antibiotics, the crowded living conditions, and the tail docking, and still achieve commercial levels of feed conversion. Many of the cost-saving measures listed in the previous section would act to improve feed conversion even further.
While feed conversion is useful as a general rule, I find the idea of “calorie conversion” efficiency much more compelling. Since our pig’s grain-based feed could technically have fed humans directly, how many calories are being lost in the conversion to meat? If you think humans wouldn’t want to eat ‘wheat middlings’ or ‘brewery grain’, you obviously haven’t looked at many food labels for processed foods. Efficiency aside, it’s useful to know the total input calories so that you can more realistically estimate the advantage of feeding your pigs garden produce or past-date food.
Unfortunately, swine feed bags are not labeled for human calorie content (surprise!) or even for TDN. I ultimately estimated the calorie content of our swine feed using two methods. First, I calculated the calorie content for an equivalent mix of corn, wheat, and soy flours using the nutritional content information from Oregon-based Bob’s Red Mill flours. Second, I sanity checked this estimate against swine feeds analyzed by the 1965 research paper, Energy Value of Various Feeds for the Young Pig. The estimate I arrived at was 1800 kcal/lb for most swine feeds. (‘kcal’ is simply a unit of energy. It is identical to ‘Calorie’ as seen on nutrition labels.) In addition to eating 1350 lbs of swine feed, our pigs also consumed 50 lbs of squash and 380 eggs, foods for which calorie contents are easily found. Similarly, we had already weighed and sorted all the meat for the yield charts, and calorie contents by meat type are easy to find. My final estimates for calories in and calories out are as follows:
And when you divide feed calories by meat calories the result is 6:1. The pigs consume 6 calories of feed for each 1 calorie of meat they produce. One has to admit that producing pork from grain is pretty inefficient. Another useful number is that two pigs consume 2.5 million kcal of feed to reach market weight.
Robin and I were happy that we could feed our pigs a lot of surplus garden produce: tomatoes, lettuce, collard greens, cucumbers, etc. Of the many supplemental feeds, only the squash/pumpkin and eggs contained significant calories. We had hoped these would reduce our feed bill. The numbers tell a different story:
One really gains a sense for how calorie dense grain is when you realize that 380 eggs and 50 lbs of squash represent the calorie contents of just 18 lbs of grain. All our boiling and peeling of eggs and watering of winter squash saved just $4 in feed costs. In fact, if you expect to raise your own pigs and supply a significant portion of their calories from home-grown supplies, think again! Here’s a list of common homestead foods and the quantities required to produce the 2.5 million kcal needed to raise two pigs:
I was shocked by this equivalence table. A successful homesteader really has to look at the numbers behind things instead of just trusting intuition. Intuitively, we should be able to raise a pig on home-grown potatoes and sweet corn. Practically, there is no substitute for purchased grain-based feeds.
Last, but not least, a word about manure. Manure is another useful bi-product of raising pigs (after meat and lard). In a world where fertilizer inputs are increasingly more expensive, pig manure definitely has economic value. I plan to build a huge compost pile with the generated manure intermixed with straw from their shelter. When it has broken down sufficiently, we’ll use the resulting fertilizer on fruit trees, raspberry vines, hops, etc. Pig digestion is too similar to humans for me to risk using their manure on a vegetable garden without much more rigorous composting.
Final Thoughts
I have mixed feelings about the conclusions to be drawn from this post. On the one hand, it is evident that pork can be produced on a small scale at a price competitive with the store. If you were to spend a little more for all-natural feed and handle the butchering and curing at home, I think the price comparison would work out even better. Furthermore, I assign value to knowing how my meat was raised and exactly what it was fed. Our pigs could run, root in the earth, eat garden snacks, and stand in grass. They were not the tortured victims of a factory farm.
On the other hand, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that pork produced in this manner is a product of cheap grain. Cheap grain is a product of cheap oil. Since the 70s, the American farmer has burned 1 kcal of fossil fuel to produce 1 kcal of grain. To produce the 1368 lbs of grain consumed by our pigs, 70 gallons of crude oil were consumed. As the price of oil rises, so will the price of pork. From this standpoint, pork is a luxury. The era of cheap oil is over. Few homesteads can produce an edible waste stream sufficient to feed a pig to market weight, and if you can’t use a pig for food recycling there are much more efficient livestock you could consider. If you have pastures, sheep and cattle can convert grass into useful human food with few outside inputs. If you have a large garden, you can reasonably grow sufficient field corn for meat chickens. Both of these homestead meat sources would be independent of the global markets for grain and oil.
This is not to say we will never again raise pigs if feed prices remain low. We will. Next time, however, we will keep them longer to maximize the yield of bacon and lard, and we will not delude ourselves into thinking that any amount of garden produce will affect their final cost.
End Notes
- This post presents data gathered from the two pigs we raised. Your results may differ.
- My discussion of pig feed considers calories but ignores proteins, fats, vitamins, and minerals. A complete pig feed program would need to meet all their nutritional requirements.
- I’d be glad to provide additional data or debate my calculations in the comments.
- My calorie conversion efficiency numbers omit the feed calories that went into the weaner pig. I have no way to calculate this number, but it would have a significant impact. My guess is that the true ratio is more like 8:1.
- Thanks to Ebey Farm blog for his regular ‘Costs to Raise a Pig’ posts. Also, thanks for his suggestions on how to calculate human calorie counts for pig feed.
- Pork feed conversion rates are from 2009 U.S. commercial meat production data.
- Harpers magazine has published one of the many articles available online which discuss the relationship between oil and our food supply.
WOW! Great job on collecting that much data. Hope you dont mind I shared the link to this post on our Facebook page.
Thanks. Link sharing is fine by me.
Very, very nice. Great jon on the break down and trying to account for as much as possible. I know how tedious it can be! But again, very nice job.
Yeah, I have to admit this post was a pretty big roadblock for me. Our blog silence lately has been a combination of me working on these charts in my spare time and being sick twice in the last four weeks.
Will you come live at our house?
No, wait a minute. Maybe not. Although we haven’t tackled pigs (yet), I’d be afraid to do this kind of analysis for the turkeys we raised last year. We lost count of the amount of feed our turkeys consumed, but it was at least 75 pounds each. That’s about 130,000 kcal input per bird. Gulp.
You’ve put numbers on the idea that meat is a luxury. It’s a potent reminder, and profoundly interesting to anyone who raises animals. Thanks.
I’ve never tried to collect data about our laying hens either, but when we decided to raise pigs I was determined to put some real numbers on the concepts I talk about.
And by *jon* I certainly meant *job*.
This is great, thanks for the excellent info you collected. Im thinking of two pigs this spring for the first time. (:
They are delicious.
Really nice writeup, Lee, far better and more detailed than anything I’ve seen on the topic. You bring up some realities that so many gloss over in their admonitions that everyone should raise their own.
A few dietary items that would make a difference in the calculations:
1 – if a person had access to waste dairy
2 – if a person could obtain restaurant or grocery scraps in bulk
3 – in our case, hickory and acorn nuts are a fairly big part of diet, and are a dense supplement.
I think the reality is basically what you concluded, though – raising hogs means an outlay of cash for processed grain/by-products feed. If you butcher your own, you can save a little money over the grocery store. Part of the motivation for raising my own, then, is that I feel the end result is far superior in taste and consistency vs. store-bought. Plus it’s fun to do. Money-wise, I figure it’s about break-even.
For myself, I found that raising our own gave me a deeper appreciation for the factory system of ag, in spite of its problems. It’s easy for people who haven’t raised their own food to pine about the virtues and righteousness of growing it themselves but, once a person has experienced the growing side of things, I think there are realities that come to light. Not a bad thing, but unexpected since virtually no one talks about the realities in a frank and honest way. For me, those lessons have helped to refocus goals and ambitions.
Could we live off the land? Yeah, but it wouldn’t be very fun. Our main goal is to grow better quality produce and meat than we can buy, for roughly the same or less money, and have fun doing it.
Ron
One other nut to consider is hazelnut. They are gaining traction in the upper mid-west and are an easy plant to grow. We are planning to plant a couple rows to use as wind blocking and pork finishing.
Thanks, I’ll look into that Evan.
Ron
I should have thought to list hazelnuts. We have a couple dozen volunteer trees (i.e. low-yielding), and I’ve thought about penning the pigs around them next time. My calorie equivalence calculation for hazelnuts suggests you would need only 880 lbs of hazelnut meat. They are also high in protein.
Oregon grows most of the hazelnuts produced in the U.S. The Oregon extension reports that a mature hazelnut tree can produce 20 lbs of nuts each year, or 2000 lbs per acre at typical orchard planting densities. They also say squirrels and blue jays can eat half your harvest. (This is true.)
Nuts are probably your best bet for putting a measurable dent in pig feed costs.
I checked out hazelnuts, and I want to plant them now. They would work out very well on the fringes of our clearing, where it changes to more dense woods. The Missouri Dept of Conservation has a bundle of 25 for $8 (plus some other charges… probably $20 when all said and done).
Unfortunately, they are sold out this year. Next year, I’ll get some. This year we’ll just plan on gathering nuts again and graze in the woods.
Ron
Good points Ron. I agree. There are many sides to look at, not just the costs and efficiency, but also quality, flavor, control over your food, the experience, etc. I’m okay with raising really good pork at break-even prices too. For our land, I think sheep or cattle should provide a much cheaper source of high-value protein, but there really is no substitute for ham or bacon or lard.
Access to high value feed sources could certainly change the calculations. I’d add spent brewers grain to your list as well. I forgot to consider nuts as an option, although I’ve read of people using them. Ah well. The post had to end somewhere.
Really, there’s nothing wrong with enjoying a few luxuries. While I’d like to eventually feel confident that we could produce all the food we need for a year, there’s no reason to live an ascetic life when there are other affordable options.
I agree… while I love my bacon and sausage, if we had to we’d simply forgo it. There are fish to catch and deer to hunt, too… they just aren’t as predictable. Not to mention chickens, squirrel…
Heck, people in other countries eat crickets for protein, and we’ve got plenty of them.
Ron
I’m always intrigued by the idea of insects as a food source. They are high in protein, easy to grow, and reproduce well. There’s just this little problem with palatability …
You’re probably okay eating crickets, but make sure you cook your grasshoppers. The raw ones can give you tape worms.
Thanks for the summary. We raised our pigs this summer for $1.97 lb (what ended up in the freezer and in the root cellar). Our costs included the piglets, the cost of electricity for running the well pump in addition to bedding and food. Here in Alaska, everything is more expensive, so we did several things to keep the costs down. First, the pigs cost $125 each at 6 weeks old. The only “cheap” grain available up here is barley. So I mixed the pig food myself from a recipe provided by the AK cooperative extension. It used ground barley and “pig concentrate” (basically soy, it was 40% protein). I purchased hog vitamins and added that to the feed based on the package recommendation. I didn’t like using the pig concentrate much, so I undercut that and supplemented in other ways. We purchased 1 55-lb bag of powdered whey to supplement when they were small. Subsistence fishing is a part of life up here so I cooked the fish carcasses for a long time with barley and water and fed them a small amount of that every day. We also cooked up all of our overwhelming abundance of moose liver and fed them that, in small quantities. And they ate garden scraps, weeds, eggshells from our chickens (we did not have enough to share actual eggs), and leftover dinners.
You are right though about the butchering costs. We did that ourselves. Its about $1.20 a pound to pay someone else to do it up here. I had calculated that to buy hog food and pay a butcher would put the pork at over $4.50 per lb, so we decided we need to do all we could to cut costs. Our pigs were about 230 lbs live weight and 6.5 months old when we butchered.
My parents (farmers) really argued against feeding the pigs meat scraps. But, the cooperative extension recommended fish protein, and we know lots of people up here who do it. We hear people in the lower 48 pay a lot for Copper River red salmon, and the pigs sure liked their share. Pigs are omnivores like people. And protein is what was missing from the diet (and calcium, etc). So we talked about for a while and decided that our wild caught proteins were the way to go for us. I was a little nervous it would affect the flavor at the end, but it didn’t. They taste great.
I just thought I’d share my story because I learned something from your story. Alaska is at the end of many delivery routes and we always take a hit first when fuel costs and food costs rise. One advantage of raising livestock instead of relying on subsistence hunting is that getting meat is more of a sure bet. So we feel like we need to do what we can to try to raise our own food as cheaply as possible, without compromising quality. However, I think its going to get harder up here with the incredibly high costs of fuel. Thanks for sharing your breakdown of calories and costs.
Hey, thanks for taking the time to post such a detailed comment! It’s nice to hear how people raise small-scale pork in other parts of the country. I’d say you did very well for living in Alaska.
I also appreciate your description of creating a complete diet from a variety of more affordable and available feed sources. It’s a good lesson for those of us in the lower-48 as feed prices continue to rise.
It’s fascinating to hear how people in other parts of the country are doing this! I simply cannot fathom living in a place where it makes sense to give your pigs Copper River salmon and moose liver (an abundance?!).
If I were a pig, Alaska might be my domicile of choice.
Thanks for sharing your piggy details, Trish — it’s really helpful to those of us thinking about following suit.
..Wow..great breakdown..mindblowing really. I have not seen that many graphs, charts and breakdowns since I went and saw Tron in December. I am more of a deadly-discs action Tron fan and not the drama-ish Tron from 2010..but I digress. I wish I had the gumption to log all of the things you did on everything I do but I do not for the most part as I usually am doing things to learn or for the future… One thing that I have read somewhere in this series of tubes that we call the internet is free-range/pastured pigs..maybe it was your site..I cannot remember now. But if memory serves me correctly the pigs had a large area to graze so feed costs were lower..I think I read that a free-range chicken can eat 60% of its food in the yard during the day..I wonder what it might be for pasture pigs. I am sure you would need a bigger plot then you have now..then you get into fencing off a large area, predators, feral pigs, etc… not saying that is what you should do.
I think I had a point in there originally. either way great work..not sure if you ever saw ‘Deadwood’ but I am sure the feed costs in that town were very low..actually in many cases the pigs got paid to eat!
also: If you are worried about power loss and all that wonderful bacon going bad I know of an address that might be able to put it to use..
Thanks. Yeah, I went a little graph-crazy. Pastured pigs is certainly doable, but the pig digestive track is much different than cows. They cannot derive nearly as much nutritional value from forage crops, and many breeds do not naturally graze. You may be thinking about something written on the Ebey Farm blog. In recent memory, he’s linked to two practical-sounding articles on pastured pork. One described feeding pigs 60% forage and the other almost 100% forage. Both methods required raising large quantities of high value forage. Neither seems to have been actually tested yet. There’s a lot of controversy in the realms of pastured pigs and chickens. Overall, I think people don’t keep very accurate records and are then inclined to overstate the nutritional value gained on forage.
By the time we raise pigs next, I hope to already have some sheep on our property to gain more hands-on experience with forages. I’d be very interested in seeing how much we could reduce our swine feed requirements through a combination forage crops and hazel nuts.
Oh, and thanks for the freezer space offer, but our power is quite reliable here at the moment. I’d like to think our bacon is safe.
Thanks for the great analysis, Lee, and to Tamar for sending me this way.
I’m glad some people find the numbers as interesting as I did!
Holy smokes, Lee, that is an amazing post.
One thought came to me. You fed your pigs over 30 dozen eggs. If you sold them for $2 dozen, that would contribute more to your bottom line than the $4 you saved feeding them to the pigs. Not to mention the time you spent processing the eggs. Don’t know if you have the ability to sell eggs like that, but it is a thought.
Again, exception post. Thanks.
Thanks! Yes, it was pretty economically illogical to feed eggs to the pigs, although I wouldn’t have guessed it was that bad until I worked out the numbers. So far, we only sell eggs to one neighbor, so boiling and freezing the surplus was our solution. Eating a few chickens would have been a cheaper solution. Robin has plans to expand our egg sales in the fall with a self-serve stand, but that depends on a few other things coming together.
I think Buck meant “exceptional post”
We were discussing your post on the way to the scion exchange. I think you have done an amazing job on this subject and that you should think about turning it into an article. I think Mother Earth News would really dig such a thorough documentation and real life experience on raising pigs for the first time. Good job and thanks for doing the work for all of us!
Thank you for the complements! I wouldn’t have thought of submitting this as an article, but maybe I’ll look into it. That would probably require a lot of condensing than I’m used to.
Really enjoyed this. We have been on our farm for 3 years, with pigs as our primary income so far. We raised 20 feeder pigs in a 1 acre fenced area last year and will be raising 45 this year between 2 one acre fenced pastures. We have a deal with a local goat dairy and we get approx. 100 gallons of whey weekly during her production season. In addition to this we collect windfall apples by the truckload from ‘organic by neglect’ trees in backyards and public spaces where we can find them. This has offset our feed cost to some degree, though even if it were not a major cost savings the benefit in better health from the varied diet would be worth it. I had read a few articles on how different food sources effected the overall flavor of the pork with the example in the article being apples – we attempt to maximize this by reducing grain input and feeding the pigs on mostly whey and apples during the last two weeks before slaughter. Our pigs are also out in the sun which helps with overall health, and have lots of room to run around which contributes to the same lean carcass characteristics you described. We attempted to gather acorns, which the pigs loved and gorged on as soon as they were made available, but we’ll be grazing sheep on that land soon and acorns are toxic so that’s not an option going forward. Thanks again for publishing this data!
Thanks for the comments. I’d agree that apples “by the truckload” and whey in quantity could certainly save you some money on feed.
You raise some good points about meat flavor and overall health. Both of these were outside the scope of my post, but the diet can certainly play a big role. Humans can subsist on a grain-only diet, but it would hardly be healthy. I would expect the same to be true for pigs. When we raise pigs in the future, we will continue to feed them our excess garden produce for this very reason.
Just wanted to weigh in that I’m an urban consumer [non-farmer] that butchers my own pork [I buy sides from local farmers]. My end cost is slightly lower than yours, and I don’t raise the animals! I highly recommend butchering your own – costs way less, and you get to cut it exactly how you want it in the kitchen. You might find this useful: http://www.kevinkossowan.com/?p=2611
Really like this post – nice job.
Wow, that’s a really well done video! Thanks. I’m going to have to come back to this in the future. I especially appreciate all the labels when the camera lingers on something.
Yeah, I know we could definitely save quite a bit of money by handling the butchering ourselves. I’m also interested in just getting a better feel for the carcass quality too. On the other hand, the transition from live pig to skinned and gutted carcase is perhaps the most intimidating part of he process.
Thanks so much for the detailed and informative post! In regards to the “calorie conversion efficiency” of grain-fed pork production, surely it seems inefficient on the surface, but keep in mind that pork meat and fat and bones (if all are properly utilized for lard, stock, etc) are MUCH more nutrient-dense than grain which are largely high in calories and fiber, but pretty poor in protein and minerals, especially when you consider how well the human body assimilates the nutrients contained therein. Also, as you mention, the traditional method which largely relies on “mast” crops (wild acorns, nuts, mulberries, etc) as primary feeds for the pigs with kitchen/garden scraps and perhaps a small amount of homegrown corn and/or whey and other “waste” products of the small homestead resulted in a highly efficient, low-cost production system which provided a high-quality source of easily storable meat and fat. J. Russell Smith’s _Tree Crops: A Permanent Agriculture_ is an excellent source of information on mast crops for pigs.
Thanks again for sharing!
Yes, you raise some good points about the quality of nutrition. For the sake of analysis, it’s useful to boil it down to just one number, but that definitely doesn’t tell the whole story. The single number makes it easier to compare various animals as a meat source. Once we get familiar with raising sheep, I hope to do a similar analysis of the total life-cycle calories to raise a sheep for meat production. My expectation is that the ratio will be extremely low, because so few calories of human edible grain are required to feed sheep. (Really almost none, depending on the breed.)
I agree that there is a huge difference in nutrition between pork and grain though (unless you are starving). Recent research has emphasized the enormous impact that the invention of farming had on our ancient human ancestors. The transition from a hunter-gatherer diet of game animals, nuts, tubers, and berries to the farmer diet of cultivated grains allowed the population to grow exponentially, but as a result humans became shorter, weaker, and less healthy.
I completely forgot to consider nut crops in my analysis. They are perhaps one of the most practical routes to providing most of the required nutrition for pigs using only on-site food sources. I’ll have to look into the book you mentioned. The permaculture Forest Farm tomes are also on my list.
Cool stuff, where did you find a $25 feeder?
Yeah, that was a lucky find on Craigslist. The galvanized single-door ones are about $100 at our local feed store.
I’ve heard of people building large gravity trough-feeders like our chicken feeder out of 3/4″ plywood. You’d need to shelter it from rain, but it would be cheaper and last about as long as the metal ones. The secret to all feeders is to keep them full.
We nerly bought 10 pigs to sell. opps then found out the price of corn.
Thank you so much for putting this information together. We are halfway through our first “pig” experience and it has been positive so far. Your site/information was invaluable in my decision to try pigs. Thank you again.
Jeanette
5 Solas Homestead and Farm
Thank you for your analysis. We have raised Hampshire and Landrace pigs and found the experience to be dizzying in cost. While slower-growing heritage breeds may be more expensive at the final tally, spreading the expense over a longer period of time is much less painful for us and allows more time to supplement. (I can gather a few five gallon buckets of apples and pears from abandoned trees each week, but do not have time to do so each day. The same goes for gathering fish and crab protein – and feeding whey from the cheese making from our very small herd of dairy goats.)
Heritage breeds are more expensive as piglets and are very hard to come by in my neck of the woods (Cape Cod), so I am investigating growing common breeds slowly. (I’ve heard of good results growing jumbo Cornish cross meat chickens more slowly than industry standard recommendations, though I have completely abandoned growing them at all.)
GREAT POST..I had a friend that owns property in Hawaii about 3 years back she had a bad boar infestation so she put a add in the paper for hunters to come out n thin them out…They did a great job,she did not put a add up the following year but her phone was ringing off the hook from the hunters that had been there from b4,she was curious as to why all these people kept calling and sounded so dissapointed when she wasnt having them hunt this year…LONG LONG STORY SHORT,She asked the next caller and they went on to tell her it was the best meat they ever had the hunter made a comment saying it was like it was already marinated???so she thought to herself and come to find out all the hogs were eating on her property were PINNAPPLES..SO IF U CAN GET AHOLD OF SUM PINNAPPLES THERE SUPPOSE TO REALY HELP THE FLAVOR…
Ha ha! I guess I’m not surprised. Their diet during the last couple months is supposed to affect the meat flavor quite a bit. I’m not sure where we’d get a supply of pineapples around here, but with the right contacts I’m sure it’s possible.
Thinking of raising two pigs. Want this to be a fun adventure. So afraid the cost will be too high. For a two hundred pound pig, two people eating, (DO NOT EVEN KNOW HOW TO PHRASE THE ?) Will it last a year or is that too long to freeze?
We haven’t had any problem with the meat keeping in the freezer. Our supply is about 14 months old now and we have quite a bit left to eat still. It’s important that it be wrapped properly and stay completely frozen. We keep all our meat in an inexpensive chest freezer which stays around 0°F. We only open it to transfer packages into the fridge freezer. This setup has worked really well for us.
Just started a small farm, Ive purchased 3 piglets that are now 1 yr old, A bore and 2 sows. The older sow is just about due on her first lay and her suitor (the bore) couldn’t be more rambunctious. The initial cost of the piglets were minimal less than 100.00 dollars and maintaining them have been kept to a very low cost level, under 70.00 a month. Ive asked local farmers markets to save their scraps such as fruits and vegetables that can not be sold for what ever reason and put them in a bucket and I drive around once a week in the growing season and once a month in the off season and pick them up. This has been very successful in subsidizing the feed cost of the hogs and at the same time very good for the hogs. I’m always open to new idea as to saving money and sharing what I know so far. Hogs are also a good pet too, so i have a increase of people that show interest in raising hogs. Still need to be penned and not so safe around very small children, but beyond that, very good as pets.