New additions

[STx]

Got some now additions today, Roastputin, Chopsy and The Baconator. I have a lot of experience with wild pigs but, have never raised any domestic pigs before so this should be fun. Learned how to castrate a boar when I picked him up so, it's already paying off!

I've been thinking about maybe doing some breeding or just finishing pigs out on pasture and selling them either as 1/2 and whole hogs or as cuts at farmer's markets and stuff. These 3 are my test batch to see what's really involved in caring for them.

 

[Redlands Okie]

Well the names should help you from getting to attached to them

 

[EddieWalker]

I have one pet pig that will die of old age, and after that, never again. Friends of ours retired last year and thought they would raise pigs for meat. After a year of the mess, the stank and the struggle of fencing and then getting them to the butcher, they are done with raising pigs. Have fun with it, they are too much trouble to mess with in my opinion.

 

[STx]

Eddie, I've seen your thread on Wilbur, I've been trying to come up with a baby feral hog to raise as a mascot for years but have never been able to find one young enough.

I know raising any livestock is going to be work. My plan is to perimeter fence in an area about 5 acres and then rotate them through it with electric fencing. I'm training them to the hot wire in the small pen right now. From what I've been told, if they stay on fresh pasture they don't root much and it keeps the smell down. The place I picked them up from is pasture raising in this way and had about 40 pigs in 5 acres or so with no odor. You could tell pigs were in there but, it didn't look bad, definitely not like a hayfield after a group of wild hogs has been through. Right now, I'm just going to move their round pen as they start to wear the area they're in down. I need about $1800 to do the fencing the way I want it and am hoping to do it next month. I'm going to have to do it regardless since we're going to be getting a couple of cows and probably some goats before long.

I have a lot of experience with wild pig behavior and biology from hunting and trapping them. This is my first time dealing with domestic pigs though, that's why I started small. One of these is for our freezer, the other is for a neighbor and the 3rd will either get sold or we'll split it. I expect all 3 to be gone before February so it's not a huge commitment and gives me a chance to see if I think it's worth the effort.

 

[EddieWalker]

Oscar has 11 acres now. I used to let him wonder around on his own, but he is just too destructive. At 500 pounds, he can do a lot of damage. The digging is probably the worse. He will pick a spot and just destroy it!!! The hot wire works great. Once zapped, he learns to avoid it and never challenges it again. Same thin with my friends. Before the hot wire, they where constantly scratching and digging around the posts of his fence. Their pens are too small too, so it's a muddy, stanky, mess. With 11 acres and just one pig, the smell isn't bad most of the time, but every now and then, WOW!!!

We also have wild hogs on our land, and lately, there seems to be more and more of them. We shoot a few every month and use the meat for our home made dog food. I enjoy pork, and wild pigs are pretty tasty when they are the right size, but I like beef a lot more. For my land, we plan on fencing in the entire place eventually and raise a few steers for the table. Those same friends did this too, and I have to say that the steaks they served us where the best I can ever remember eating. We only buy USDA grade meat from the store, and it's night and day different then what they raised.

Goats are our favorites. They are clean, they are fun to watch, and they are easy to take care of. We have 7 right now in that same 11 acres that Oscar and our 5 horses are in. They cleaned up all the blackberry bushes around the pond, and are doing an amazing job cleaning up all the branches growing near the ground on our trees. My wife and I where just saying yesterday that we would be very happy with 100 goats on our land once it's all fenced in. I don't know how many is too many, but we're looking forward to finding out.

 

[STx]

Long term, I'm planning to add a some cows at least a few goats. I want to use the animals to maintain the property instead of mowing and they all eat different parts to I'll probably run the goats through a pasture first to get the brush, then the pigs to eat what they want, fertilize some and keep the soil loose finishing it off with the cows to keep the grass short. My plan is to AI the cows and keep the calves for 24 months before slaughter so, I'll have 6 here at the most. We've got 36 acres that I can run them through and the neighbor that loaned me the dozer has another 36 acres next door that we could probably use as well. He's been talking to us about selling that 36 to us but, he just isn't quite ready yet.

I doubt that it will ever fully support us but, I'd like to be able to generate some income off the land. Every little bit adds up. I like being able to feed myself as well and to be able to work with the animals diet and slaughter timing to get the best quality meat. With the cows, for example, I'm going to get a couple of registered Angus and AI them with Wagyu. While I won't know for sure until I've done it, my research says that this cross butchered at 24 months instead of the usual 16 will often grade out to about 80% prime on the carcass. I'm still going to finish my cows off with some grain, probably a mix of corn and molasses oats, we did a 100% grass fed custom calf one year and it wasn't for us. The fat tasted horrible and gave us all some gastrointestinal discomfort. We ended up trimming all the fat off of everything we cooked and threw away a lot of the ground beef.

That's the fun thing for me, experimenting with different stuff to see the outcome. The nice thing with pigs is that it's only a 6 month experiment. Cows take a lot longer but, they're also a lot less maintenance and won't pressure fences as much. All of our fences need to be redone right now, which has been a hold up, especially for the goats.

 

[EddieWalker]

For eating steers, I'm leaning towards trying dairy cattle. I seem them for sale on CL for $200 as calves, and from what I've read, the meat tastes amazing. It just takes them a little longer to get up to size, but for our own consumption, what difference does it make it it's a couple hundred pounds lighter then an Angus or some other beef steer?

A client of mine has 60 acres of all grass split up into three pastures with his handling pens, hay barn and house in the middle. He runs 20 pairs year round with one breeder bull. I don't know how much he makes off of the cattle, but for a living he drives a truck back and forth to Dallas twice a day. He pays cash for everything and seems to have a lot of it.

 

[STx]

Speaking of Oscar, look who popped up on Facebook today...

 

[EddieWalker]

Speaking of Oscar, look who popped up on Facebook today...

View attachment 516620

I didn't realize that was you!!!

 

[M5farms]

For eating steers, I'm leaning towards trying dairy cattle. I seem them for sale on CL for $200 as calves, and from what I've read, the meat tastes amazing. It just takes them a little longer to get up to size, but for our own consumption, what difference does it make it it's a couple hundred pounds lighter then an Angus or some other beef steer?

A client of mine has 60 acres of all grass split up into three pastures with his handling pens, hay barn and house in the middle. He runs 20 pairs year round with one breeder bull. I don't know how much he makes off of the cattle, but for a living he drives a truck back and forth to Dallas twice a day. He pays cash for everything and seems to have a lot of it.

I can tell you the cash comes Dallas and not 20 pair. There is some profit to be made but not what most people think.

 

[Tractor Seabee]

Hogs only smell when you keep them confined and/or give them a wallow. You will find they always defecate in a small area, easy to keep cleaned up. I raised breeder registered stock as a 4H project when a kid. For my age I made a whale of money. One big old sow dropped 8-10 pigs at a time and had teats for all, seldom lost one. Excess boars/barrows and ones not salable for breeders were sold for the meat market (find a specialty meat market as they pay more). There in Texas, like phoenix for me, they need shade in the summer. I set up concrete floor sheds with water misters draining the water away from their yard. You need to have separate farrowing sheds to keep the other hogs away from the little ones.

Ron

 

[STx]

Hogs only smell when you keep them confined and/or give them a wallow. You will find they always defecate in a small area, easy to keep cleaned up. I raised breeder registered stock as a 4H project when a kid. For my age I made a whale of money. One big old sow dropped 8-10 pigs at a time and had teats for all, seldom lost one. Excess boars/barrows and ones not salable for breeders were sold for the meat market (find a specialty meat market as they pay more). There in Texas, like phoenix for me, they need shade in the summer. I set up concrete floor sheds with water misters draining the water away from their yard. You need to have separate farrowing sheds to keep the other hogs away from the little ones.

Ron

I'm rotating these guys through pasture. Surprisingly to me, I'm learning they prefer my grass over corn. This is their current on, about 2,000 sq/ft. My long term plan is to perimeter fence 5 acres, divided into 10 pastures by hot wire with their shelter, water and grain feeder in the middle. Then I can close a gate and open another to rotate them without having to move everything. I want to keep them off concrete and raise them as naturally as possible. Happy pigs are tasty pigs.

 

[STx]

They came home from graduation yesterday and have moved on to freezer camp. We had fried pork chops for dinner last night and they were delicious!

 

[EddieWalker]

Friends raise pigs for the table and they are really tasty. I'm done with pigs, but I sure do enjoy what our friends share with us.

Was that all of your pigs or do you still have some alive?

 

[STx]

All I have right now is the little wild boar piglet. I'm going to go get a young Duroc gilt later this week though. She's going to be a breeder and has a good pedigree. I'm hoping to AI her off some quality boars and sell 4H and FFA pigs.

She was born 12/13 so is only a couple of months old. I think she looks really good for being so young.

 

[STx]

I also cleaned up the area the pigs were in last year. It was a total moonscape. I'm going to take advantage of the free fertilizer they left behind and put the garden here this year. Amazing how after a couple of hours on the tractor you'd never know it was a pig pasture.

 

[EddieWalker]

Are you going to do the AI yourself? If not, what do they charge to do that?

 

[STx]

Yes, pigs are pretty easy. Semen only needs to be stored around 65 degrees and when they go into standing heat they'll stand perfectly still once you straddle their back and sit down. Then it's just matter of inserting the straw, screwing into the cervix, attaching the semen bag and squeezing the contents into the pig.

There are a bunch of YouTube videos on it. Although I've never done it, I feel confident I can. Can't be that much more complicated than castrating a boar.