Back in 2017, one of our first homesteading adventures was buying four piglets, aka bacon seeds, to raise our own pork. We decided on pigs as they don't require a lot of space to grow out, and are ready for slaughter in six months. So, it's a relatively quick turnaround time for meat in your freezer. We also had an old cow pole barn we were able to easily convert a portion into a covered run, and with a few hog panels made a nice attached outdoor area for them too, giving them plenty of space.
As newbies we ordered a ton of feed, in bags from a feed store, thinking we were getting a good price and keeping our costs down. Little did we know there were other options in the area where we could have purchased a 1-ton tote of grower feed for half the price we paid for our bagged feed. That was one of our first mistakes, the 2nd mistake was the place we chose to process our pigs. We asked around and got good references for a slaughter/processing business, but little did we know the great references for the place apparently created a bit more demand for their services than they could handle. We delivered our pigs to the slaughter house and quickly learned after slaughter our pigs got set aside because one of their bigger clients had a priority order. Poor communication with our cut orders, lots of mistakes, and bacon missing from one of our customer's orders really had us bummed. They found the bacon in the freezer, but their smoker schedule was booked so our customer didn't get their bacon for another month. The entire experience had us questioning our decision to raise our own pork and motivated us to look for another processor to take care of our beef.
Thankfully we discovered a mobile slaughter operation for our steer, Farmer's Helper, and they've been doing such excellent work for us that it gave us new motivation to try raising pigs again. This time we purchased just three bacon seeds, Berkshire-Yorkshire crosses, and built a small hog hut and setup a pig run in the area we've been trying to get a garden established. We're hoping the pig manure is going to give us the fertilizer component our garden area needs, a mutual benefit from raising pigs. Unfortunately, COVID had an impact on the meat processing industry which had our small mobile slaughter operation booked out farther than our six month finishing period, so we had to settle on nine months before we process. We were worried about the cost vs benefit of growing the pigs out three more months, but it all worked out. Our pigs finished out nicely and the processing job Farmer's Helper did for us was awesome. The pork is fantastic!
We're getting three or four more piglets this spring and our next adventure is slaughtering and processing our own pig! We'll continue to use Farmer's Helper for our customer's processing, but we're gearing up for the big DIY pork!
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