Post by finallyfarming on Jan 31, 2012 18:58:49 GMT -5
Well, I will dive in here as I raised 2 pigs last year for my very first time. Sorry for the long post but everyone seems really interested in pigs. I was really nervous and read everything I could find on the subject. Especially here. The whole experience turned out fantastic (for me, can't say the same for the pigs) and I will be doing it again this year! My DH and I bought to 8 week old mixed breed pigs, both castrated males, in June of last year. They spent 2 weeks in a box stall with straw bedding eating Del's Pig Grower. It can get cold in June here, too, but with a bale of straw they just dug in and were fine. After a couple of weeks they were starting to stink up the barn and I didn't have anymore straw so they went outside in a 20 x 20 pen with chain link fencing. I used hay bales with a piece of plywood on top for a shelter with more hay for nesting in and fed them 2x a day with bucket of pig chow and whatever extras I had. I had been saving all the whey, buttermilk, leftovers and old milk from the kitchen and had an entire freezer full of zip lock baggies. So the pigs got that spaced out through the summer plus all the extra veggies from the garden. It was a bad year, weather wise, so there wasn't an abundance from the garden till fall when we had lots of pumpkins and winter squash. (Which they loved) We also butchered chickens and the pigs got all the heads, feet and entrails. They were still small when I started butchering and wouldn't eat everything but within a month they cleaned up 5 or 6 chickens at a time without a problem. I fed them 2 or 3 times a day as I did not have a regular pig feeder, the kind you just pour in a bag and the pigs lift the lid to eat. I will definitely get one of those for this year as the chickens probably ate more pig food then the pigs did at first. I also filled a rubber tub for their water, I am home all the time so that wasn't a problem, but when they are big they tipped it over pretty fast. So a way to water them, besides by hand, would be necessary if you are not home all day. By September the pigs had outgrown the space they were in. There was a heat wave so I worked really hard to keep them cool by making lots of mud puddles for them and running the hose for them to play with. Then it started to rain and whoops, a nice pen turned into 2 feet of mud in an instant. They also dug under the chain link, we put pig panels up and used zip ties to attach it to the chain link. I had to replace a couple of zip ties but strangely enough, that worked quite well to keep them in, but the whole place got nasty fast once summer was over. DH finally got pressured to finish the pig tractor that was the original plan for the pigs to live in. I got the plans off a link from this forum. It turned out fantastic and the pigs did really well in it. I moved it around an area that is our sacrifice horse pasture. They definitely churned up the dirt wherever they were but there are no weeds now where they were. If you have a tractor to move one, I highly recommend building one! We butchered the pigs the first part of December when the weather got cold enough. We did the deed ourselves. Spent an entire day skinning and butchering the boys and then the next 4 days cutting them up. I have no idea how much they weighed but the metal spreader (made for deer and elk) we hung one of them up on just folded up and dropped the pig. And that was only one of the many mistakes we made. But in the end, we had 2 freezers full of very tasty meat and dog food.
So a few of the things I learned:
Pigs can live in any sort of pen as long as it is dry outside. In the rain things get nasty fast. Pig panels are the greatest things made. A bale of hay or straw will get them through cold without a problem.
If you feed them lots of milk and goodies in addition to bags of Pig Grower, they grow much bigger and fatter. Which sounds good until you are trying to handle that big a carcass. Impossible without a tractor and hard with one. If you are butchering them yourself, do it at 6 months no matter what.
If you do butcher yourself, save every scrap. My chickens love the pig fat and nasty bits I froze for them. Kept them going all winter. The dogs have eaten every bone and the heads got dragged into the back yard for further enjoyment. They are still digging up feet from where ever they stashed them. Good thing is it still cold outside!
If you butcher them yourself, do them one at a time. A pig really doesn't care when you shoot his buddy if his nose is buried in milk.
It is alright to kiss them when they are little. They will be rude nasty creatures that need to go away by the time they are 6 months old.
Pigs are the easiest and cheapest animals on the farm. We added up everything and even with over feeding them and buying way too much feed at the feed store we spent less than 500 dollars for lots and lots of really tasty meat. I will do it better and cheaper next time.
Don't grind up everything. We have hunks of meat in the freezer to be ground later and I use it for everything. Tastes just as good in chunks as it does in chops.
And that is all I can think of off the top of my head. Good luck with your pigs, they are easy peasy and if you train them to come to a bucket cause it has MILK in it, they will be easy to handle and move and get back into their pen if they get out.
So a few of the things I learned:
Pigs can live in any sort of pen as long as it is dry outside. In the rain things get nasty fast. Pig panels are the greatest things made. A bale of hay or straw will get them through cold without a problem.
If you feed them lots of milk and goodies in addition to bags of Pig Grower, they grow much bigger and fatter. Which sounds good until you are trying to handle that big a carcass. Impossible without a tractor and hard with one. If you are butchering them yourself, do it at 6 months no matter what.
If you do butcher yourself, save every scrap. My chickens love the pig fat and nasty bits I froze for them. Kept them going all winter. The dogs have eaten every bone and the heads got dragged into the back yard for further enjoyment. They are still digging up feet from where ever they stashed them. Good thing is it still cold outside!
If you butcher them yourself, do them one at a time. A pig really doesn't care when you shoot his buddy if his nose is buried in milk.
It is alright to kiss them when they are little. They will be rude nasty creatures that need to go away by the time they are 6 months old.
Pigs are the easiest and cheapest animals on the farm. We added up everything and even with over feeding them and buying way too much feed at the feed store we spent less than 500 dollars for lots and lots of really tasty meat. I will do it better and cheaper next time.
Don't grind up everything. We have hunks of meat in the freezer to be ground later and I use it for everything. Tastes just as good in chunks as it does in chops.
And that is all I can think of off the top of my head. Good luck with your pigs, they are easy peasy and if you train them to come to a bucket cause it has MILK in it, they will be easy to handle and move and get back into their pen if they get out.
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