Raising Pasture Pigs For The Homestead and Profit - Pastured Pork For Meat Pig Farming For Beginners

[Music] hello everybody thank you so much for joining me for another episode of backyard bounty i'm your host nicole and today i'm joined by chuck with sheridan park farms and today we're going to talk about raising pastured pigs both for use on the homestead and hopefully to make a profit so chuck thank you so much for joining me today thank you nicole i appreciate you having me on absolutely um so you know i'm really excited to talk about pastured pork i think the more that um folks can raise food in their backyard the better and if they can make a profit from it even even better yet um so can you tell me a little bit more about your farm operation and how you got started sure yeah so we're in uh we're just south of greensboro north carolina which is the third largest city uh in north carolina we're currently farming 32 acres uh 20 acres of that we own and then we lease an adjoining 12 which is just conveniently it's right next to us it's it's actually our neighbor's property so that worked out really well um because there's you know no right-of-way issues or anything like that it's just it's right next to us so we've got 32 acres um my wife and i started farming this will be um 18 19 20. this will be our fourth full year uh we started in february we got our first animals on the farm in february of 2018. um we started this venture with zero farming experience um i've got about 28 years in the healthcare industry my wife has 20 some years in the health care industry and she works for an accountant's office by trade now what she is what she does and so we got it we you know we the good lord looks out for drunkards and fools i tell everybody and so he's kept his eye on us um what got us into this um my wife had done a little bit of a summer internship at a local small butcher shop in the foothills of north carolina and she came home one day and she said to me she said you know i think there's something to this local food like locally raised ethically raised food movement and up until then i really didn't know much about it i was i was pretty you know pretty blind to the whole idea so started doing a little bit of research and hang on she was she was right she was onto something so we watched food inc we started reading and listening to a lot of joe salads and stuff and learning about regenerative ag and that kind of thing and so we got really interested in um in in farming and raising our own food about that time um i had a job opportunity that was going to require a move for us and so we decided during the move we were going to buy some buy some land and start raising some chickens on our own and for you know basically for meat for us maybe have a few extra to sell i mean it wasn't you know it wasn't really we didn't go into it planning to to be a business essentially if we said we sold a few to cover our cost hey that was great we got some good food out of the out of the whole deal and so we found this property here in greensboro and uh and bought it and like i said our initial goal was we were going to go all in on pasture poultry we were going to do the moving the chickens every day and you know the whole pasture poultry movement and i was commuting back and forth to work and i was i was consuming every bit of content that i could consume to learn about this farming thing that we were getting ready to start and so i was on my way to work one day and i was listening to a podcast and the name of it is the grass-fed life darby simpson and diego footer and they were talking about um farming enterprises and darby made the con the comment that pound for pound hour for hour that pigs were a much better investment than pasture poultry so i came home and made the grand announcement hey we're getting pigs so my wife looked at me like i had two heads um but she being the patient the patient woman she is she agreed to she agreed to pigs so i started searching on craigslist had no idea what i was doing i mean i was i was completely in the dark on the whole deal and so searching craigslist found a guy about an hour away that had some pigs for sale and so we kind of worked the deal over craigslist so one rainy nasty saturday we go up to this guy's uh farm to buy these pigs and we pull up and it's a it's kind of a it's a it's a beaten up farm and it's kind of run down there's this huge barn there we pull up a couple of guys start walking out and then there's you know four or five guys before you know it there's about 15 people there and i'm like oh what have we gotten ourselves into and i said yeah i'm here to buy some pigs and one of the guys said oh you're looking for daddy let me go get him so they go down the barn this little old man comes shuffling out so he takes us up to where these pigs are and he's got i don't know eight or ten pigs on just this little landscaping trailer with some sides on it and they can tell that i am a green horn from from i have zero experience and the old guy looks at me and he says boy i'm gonna pick his pig up off his trailer when his feet get off the ground he's yours if you drop him and he gets gone i'll catch him i don't know how long it'll be but i'll catch him and i'll get him back to you so he starts handing these pigs over to me and i've never i've never touched a pig i mean these are they're eight weeks old you know they're pretty small and you pick a pig up by the by its hind legs and it's like a washing machine out of bounds that thing just shakes you know i mean they're just squealing and crap i mean it's unbelievable at the noise they make so we finally get these pigs loaded over into the into my truck and so we we come home with them and you know out in the pasture i've i've done all the stuff i've bought the netting i've bought the uh the energizer i've got the feed and the water i mean it's it's just it's a pastoral setting that to look at it's beautiful so we pull the truck down there and i jump up on the back of the truck and i hand one of those pigs off the truck to my wife and she puts it down on the ground so this thing starts sniffing around and looking around it gets up next to the fence and i had read and heard i don't know i don't know what i was thinking but i had read and heard that when a pig touches that electric to their nose if they're not trained they're going to go through that that that fence that's absolutely correct that's what they will do and so this pig is out here running around outside of this netting and you've never seen a sight to you've seen two middle-aged slightly overweight human beings chasing a crazed pig across a soybean field so somehow we managed to get that pig back into the netting and in the interim my wife has the wherewithal to turn the power off so this pig gets caught back up in the netting so she does this wwe suplex move on this thing and pins this pig to the ground it's squealing my dog's barking so we get this pig up and put it back on the truck and we do what any two normal rational sane adults would do we go to the house and have a beer um so saturday night so saturday night these pigs end up sleeping like in true redneck fashion on the bed of my pickup so about four o'clock sunday morning um we're both awake she's mad and snot what are you gonna do about these pigs and so i emailed a guy that i had been watching on on youtube and explained my conundrum to him and he said you've got to set up a training pin you've got to have a hard structure that the pigs can't get through and put your electric in that so when they hit it and they get shocked they go forward they can't go anywhere they got to go back he said after about two days they'll learn that the electric they want to stay away from it they can't go through it so we wait till about nine o'clock we hook the trailer up to the truck and me and my wife and the pigs go to tractor supply and get some pig panels uh and some green tea posts we come back we set that up so now we've got a structure that the pigs can't get out of we put our netting inside um and then we hand these pigs off into this netting and she and i drag up a lawn chair and um enjoy watching the pigs squeal as they hit that electric so that was my first experience with pigs and i think the take home message there is if you're interested in pigs find a mentor that can help walk you through some of the very very basic steps of getting started with pigs pigs are much different than chickens or rabbits or any other bees or any other type of livestock that you can manage so get a mentor and and learn the ins and outs of pigs but again pigs are wonderful animals um getting those pigs has been the best decision we could make for our farm from the business aspect and also from a land management aspect pigs are wonderful so obviously you um kind of had trial by fire yes and went through all the beginner mistakes it sounds like absolutely so are our apologies sorry uh so yeah we we did learn a lot of hard lessons um and even now pit you know folks will will call me up or email me and say hey can you tell me how to raise pigs no but i can tell you how not to we've made all the mistakes and i'll be glad to share those with you and steer you clear of those well that's that's an important part of getting started i guess and is making those mistakes and knowing not not what to do again um but would you say that pigs are are for everybody or are there um certain people that maybe shouldn't have pigs yeah so um no pigs are not for everybody um there's a couple things that you're gonna that you're absolutely gonna to need if you want to do pigs particularly on scale pigs do require a bit of space you can keep a pig in a confined area you know a pen a 10 by 10 a 20 by 20 pinned area you can do that but if you're going to do that you've got to have some pretty significant infrastructure in terms of fencing and confinement because those pigs once they get you know 100 pounds 125 pounds or so pigs become very very strong in their head and neck and it's really really easy for them to get out of out of a confined area so if you're going to do them in a small space you've got to have some pretty significant infrastructure in terms of fencing and confinement if you decide you want to do a pastured pig which we think is a is a better way to to raise those animals we think it allows them to express their more natural tendencies there's a lot of valuable land management things that you can do with pigs you're going to need some infrastructure there in terms of electricity electric fence some energizers feeders waters and there's there is a space requirement again we're on about 32 acres i've got 37 pigs all together right now we're working to ramp that up but we're very quickly learning that we're going to run out of space so having a good having a good chunk of land is also something that you're going to want to think about um pigs are very strong animals uh so you need to be somewhat nimble and quick and be able to get that get out of their way so there may be some folks you know if you have maybe some physical challenges and some of that kind of thing pigs may be something you want to think about or at least make sure that you've got plenty of help with but you know pigs are once you kind of get them trained on that electric and you learn some of their tendencies pigs are pretty easy to manage our daily routine now on our pigs we've got some uh some automatic watering systems in place we've got some automatic feeding systems in place on some of our pigs they're just a daily check make sure the fence is clear make sure that they've got plenty of feed and water so pigs are they're not for everybody but they could be for most people so do you um do you pretty much just raise them for meat or do you also breed them what's what's the best way to i guess to do that we started out just raising pigs for uh for meat that was the initial plan and so we were buying feeder piglets piglets that are eight weeks old that we're going to raise out we're going to feed them up to you know a certain weight our target weight is about 325 to 350 pounds before we go to processing so our initial deal was that was what we were going to do and then we learned that we were losing our source of piglets we had found a really good source for a very high quality pig that done well that done really good on pasture foraged well grew quickly easy to manage so we started doing some artificial insemination so that we could continue our line of pigs and have and have plenty of pigs later on then late last year i attended uh the pharaoh to finish school which is a school that's put on by jordan green and his wife laura they have a farm janelle green farms up in edinburgh virginia and then talking to some of the folks there and talking to to jordan and the guys that were in the school and just basically some general observation we kind of figured out that good quality piglets were becoming more and more difficult to find so now we've entered into a bit more of a breeding operation we now have four bores on property we have we've continued to do some artificial insemination because our male pigs just aren't big enough to fulfill their duties yet so we're continuing to do some artificial insemination but we're going to try to work and help fill that need for those good quality piglets that folks are looking for more and more folks are getting interested in raising their own meat knowing where their food comes from providing some good quality food for you know their local communities and a good quality piglet that has proven genetics that does well on pasture those things are getting a little tougher and tougher to find so we're going to try to fill that need and that's something that we're working on right now and and remind me um maybe you mentioned it and i missed it but what breed of of pigs do you have so our two initial sows that we've started our herd off of were they were just kind of a mutt pig had a little bit of duroc a little bit of berkshire a little bit of yorkshire a little bit of tamworth and we've started um breeding those pigs back with some purebred duroc and some purebred berkshire so that seems to be the combination that we're working on right now is having berkshire and durock uh primari as the as the foundation of our herd um we have we are adding a little bit of ham shire a little bit of uh herdford pigs so we're experimenting just a little bit but we've found that a good mix um mixed breed pigs seem to do well some of the more purebred pigs can have some health problems we've just found that whenever you start crossing those you get some hybrid vigor those pigs grow well they do well they grow fast and that just seems to work for us so we're experimenting a little bit with our breeds but primarily durrock and berkshire so for folks that might have um options or maybe there's not a mixed breed available what are some of the better beginner breeds so i would go with um with a again with a duroc those pigs uh put on weight well um they grow fast they're easy to keep you know another question that i get frequently is what's the best breed of pig to keep what's the best temperament pig well all pigs are easy to deal with and all pigs can be difficult to deal with depending upon how you manage them uh one of the things that we found and noticed is that if you're over in those pins with those pigs and you're giving them belly scratches and scratching them behind the ears and giving them treats and that kind of thing those pigs are very receptive to you they come i mean in lots of ways they act like a much like a pet on the opposite side if you just feel that bulk feeder and fill that automatic water and just walk away and never interact with those pigs they can be a little bit difficult and a little bit cantankerous to deal with so i think the the the it's not so much the breed of pig as it is the management and how you how you interact with those animals sure i think that's to be said but with you know most most animals i don't know that you know you can you necessarily tame an alligator or something but you know chickens are the same way if you just throw them out there they're not going to be super friendly but if you pet them or interact with them they're going to be much nicer and with pigs i will make i will make this disclaimer pigs are large strong animals and you always need to keep your head on a swivel know where they're at be cautious um but again the more you the more you uh get over and and manage them and work with them and spend time with them the easier they are to handle so i've i've heard some um stories maybe is the right term for it that um pigs can be dangerous is that is that um more so just because of their size and maybe people not not interacting with them as often as yeah those those certainly are contributing factors um whenever the females are in heat we've noticed that they tend to be more aggressive um than whenever they're not in heat so there's typically a couple of day period there every three weeks that that our females can be a little bit aggressive um and then on the on the boar side whenever those females are in heat those bores have one thing on their mind and you've got to be careful around be careful around the males um during during the mating time so those are typically the times that you that you need to kind of keep your head on a swivel and know where everybody's at and be cautious is during during the mating in the heat and the heat cycles so do you keep them separated or are they all intermediate we do yeah we keep uh so right now we're keeping our bore separate from our from our breeding gilts primarily because our boards are brand new on the farm those guys are still i've got a couple that are about 10 weeks old and a couple that are three and a half four months old so they're not to breeding aids yet but we will keep them separate um we will put the boars in with the females whenever everybody gets to size and gets to the appropriate age and we'll leave them in there until um until they're about ready to faro so pigs will carry um their gestational period is three months three weeks and three days and ends up being about 15 about 115 days so we'll put the boars in with the with the females they'll stay in with them for about four months and then we'll pull them out and they'll go to another group of females okay so i imagine most people are um you know going to be raising them for meat more so than um than production of of offspring for whatever uh purpose there um so what's kind of the basics to get started with that what are um you know you mentioned fencing is pretty important but what are some other things before you even bring the pigs home that you would need to have yeah so just a couple of and you know managing pigs is is doesn't require a whole lot of infrastructure if you're doing it out on pasture you're going to need a training pen so we use just some pretty standard 16 foot long pig panels you can pick those up at any local feed store animal supply store tractor supply type rural king type stores so we use those to set up a training pin we use a couple of rolls of some fairly inexpensive um electric poly wire we use a gallagher brand or a speed right brand usually we can pick those rolls up for anywhere between you know 40 and 80 dollars a piece depending on what we're doing with them you'll need an energizer we've used a couple of different types of energizers we've used the kind that operates off of a 12 volt battery and then we've also got some solar energizers we're starting to experiment with those a little bit right now to see how they do some type of container for feed some type of container for water we found that just a black pickle barrel usually you pick those up on craigslist or marketplace for 15 25 bucks with just some pig nipples and again those you can pick those up at uh at tractor supply or your local feed store that's really all you need uh and then the pigs so the the beginning stuff is is really pretty simple um one thing that i would say is that if you're going to get into pigs and raise pigs for meat always get at least two pigs are herd animals you're going to find they do much better they're easier to manage they're much happier if if they have a buddy or they have a partner so don't ever try i wouldn't recommend trying to raise just one pig at a time get at least two so if you're wanting to raise them for me does it matter um male or female or and i guess what age is a good a good place to start is it something that you're better off with a younger pig sure great question so um on on the sex of the animal females are going to be fine you're not going to have any issue there if you do elect to raise a male you really need to castrate uh castrate those boys and and turn them into what's called a barrow that's a castrated male pig there is some um some controversy slash discussion around what's called boar taint and that comes from an increase in the testosterone hormone that can be um some folks can taste it in the meat some folks can't um where we're raising animals on a production scale and we're selling that meat to the public by the cut for us it just does not make sense to risk whether someone can or can't taste that bore taint so we just go ahead and castrate if you're gonna if you're gonna do males go ahead and castrate them that's best done whenever they're young i would recommend starting with a young animal typically piglets will get winged off of the sow at about eight weeks of age that's a great place to start get those pigs as soon as they're weened off with their moms and go ahead and put them in your training pen and get them started early they're going to learn that electric in about they typically will learn it in a couple of days we'll usually leave pigs in a training pin for a week or so just to make sure everybody's comfortable and they know that they know the fencing really well before we turn them out on pasture and then what kind of housing do they need um is just some sort of a basic structure or anything particular so in the wintertime we provide and and keeping keep in mind we're in central north carolina we don't have a lot of really really bad cold frigid deep freeze kinds of winters like folks in the northern uh the northern part of the united states can get we can get some nights where it'll get down in the teens occasionally single digits but during the day it warms back up so we provide some three-sided structures for those pigs that are portable we call we call them the ham house i can pick those up with the forks on the tractor and move those around and the reason we provide those is just to keep those pigs in out of the out of the wind in the spring summer and fall we don't provide a structure for those animals we provide them with some you know with some junk hay they will typically kind of make a nest we do provide them especially in the summertime you've got to make sure you provide those animals with plenty of shade and some areas where they can build some wallows pigs don't have the ability to sweat to cool themselves so that's why pigs like to roll around in mud it's cool it provides a coating on their skin to keep insects flies mosquitoes and that kind of thing off of them so they need to they need an area that's got an area that has uh some water for a wallow plenty of shade and then in the winter time something to get something to keep them out of the wind again we provide that little three-sided structure works great for them some of our adult pigs we make sure they're in the in the in a wooded area and we give them plenty of hay and we may not even provide them with a structure so pigs are very self-sufficient they don't need a lot of a lot of housing no need for a whole lot of infrastructure related to the housing piece just make sure they've got some cover from some trees a little bit of hay to nest up in and they're going to be fine so it sounds like the startup costs as far as you know compared at least some other animals is pretty um pretty reasonable yeah so you really could get started with pigs minus the pigs for you know 300 bucks or less by the time you buy a couple of pig panels a few t-posts the energizer is going to be the most expensive thing that you're that you're going to have to buy we typically would recommend someone get you know a two or a three jewel energizer at at minimum because you do want to have a nice hot energized fence for those pigs especially when they're young you want to learn that that fence is hot they don't want any part of it you want to keep them away from that fence so the energizer is going to be the most expensive piece for you and you can typically pick those up for you know about 200 250 bucks not very not very expensive at all so yeah the startup costs are not bad at all well that definitely um helps you know some animals are so expensive to get started on um and and what about feed you know you mentioned that they're on pasture but i guess is it just uh uh a feed that you buy from the feed store or what feed uh options or nutrients or anything like that um do you give them yeah so we uh we buy our feed from a local milling company which is about 15 minutes down the road here they do a custom grind for us it's about a 16 protein feed if you've got some local feed meals in your area they're going to be able to provide you with with a good balanced swine feed the commercial feeds the purina southern states bartlett all of those companies provide a good uh typically a good balanced nutrition uh feed for those pigs we do provide our our pigs with uh free choice ration um we could get our pigs to you know the 325 350 mark without providing with a whole lot of extra feed but it would just take a lot longer so we make sure that they've got plenty of feed available for them but again if you've got a local mill close to you those guys are going to have what you need if you can't find that typically your feed stores are going to have a good balanced swine ration that you can pick up for you know pretty reasonable price okay and so i guess expanding on feeding again what uh what's the average age of butcher how long do we need to take care of these animals before we can so typically you're gonna take about seven to eight months that's from from birth to processing seven to eight months to get a pig uh to a good butcher size what we found with our animals and in talking to a lot of other farmers it seemed this seems to be um sort of the sweet spot is that 325 to 350 pound range on the pig whenever you go to processing anything smaller than that the pigs seem to be pretty lean and don't have quite as much fat and marbling as what you would hope to see through some of the carcass anything much larger than that and the fat tends to start retarding some of the muscle growth and you don't get a good loin you don't get good loin chops and that kind of thing so for us again we found that 325 to 350 pound range to be kind of the sweet spot okay and so if we're raising pigs for butcher um you know i in my mind i'm sure i'm wrong here feeding a pig for seven months to get to 350 pounds sounds um expensive but obviously you know if you're able to profit from it i'm i'm mistaken there so what um i guess what is the profitability of pigs is it how many pigs would you need to uh so that really is going to depend on the market that you're in um again we're in greensboro north carolina we're we live right outside the third largest city in the state we're within an hour and a half of about four million people so we have a large market and within that market there is the full gamut of uh socio-economic um events for folks um and we tend to we we target folks that are food conscious they are interested in where their food comes from they're interested in knowing their farmer they're interested in clean food that's raised on pasture and folks understand that that does take a little bit more money to to to purchase that high quality of of product that we produce so if you're interested in in doing pigs as a production model or as a as an enterprise i would recommend starting with three that's going to give you one to put in your freezer and two to sale and for those two that you sell you'll be able to pay for for your pig that you've put in your freezer we're to the point now we realize we can realize about a 700 to a thousand dollar profit per pig um once we raise them up that count that includes feed costs butcher costs the whole the whole deal we can realize somewhere between 700 and a thousand dollars per pig we didn't get we didn't start out there um you know over time we've built a clientele we've built a reputation we've built um folks understand that they're buying a high quality product from us and so we can command a little bit higher price than and then folks other folks may be able to again because you know we target the folks that are interested in quality meat locally raised know your farmer and just a high a high higher end product so what are some of your main outlets i saw on your website the um the farmer's market do you also ship or is it all pretty much just local local business so far everything's been local we do two farmers markets per week and then we also sell to a small local niche grocery grocery store just down the road a little ways and that's another outlet we do a lot of own farm sales we have a lot of folks that come direct to the farm to buy we're trying to craft it's trying to crack that shipping nut we did do a shipping experiment a couple of weeks ago didn't work out very well but we learned some valuable lessons so we're working on trying to get the shipping piece uh down and get that to get that to where that's something that we can offer to customers and we can you know get our product out to a little wider audience the shipping of meat is just that's just a you know the packaging the dry ice the the time in which you have to ship it the cost for shipping um it's just it's a it's a little bit of a cost prohibitive thing but we're trying to figure that out sure well especially right now there's a lot of shipping challenges for everybody with big delays and things and you know frankly amazon is spoiling us all i mean you know it's it's super easy to you know order uh you know a computer mouse on your phone tonight and it's at your door you know tomorrow by lunch um so amazon's kind of ruined us all and those of us that don't have that those big outlets and those big connections with ups and the postal service we're still floundering and trying to get that deal figured out yeah i definitely experienced that with our our little shop as well um i wanted to ask you um kind of going back to the husbandry side of things um can you you mentioned that there was a lot of benefits of raising them on pasture and the land management aspects and i just was hoping that you could touch on that sure so that first set of pigs that i was talking about when we bought the farm that we're on there really hadn't been a whole lot done to it other than um there were some crops just some some row crops that were being raised corn soybean tobacco winter wheat and so the pet water pastures now were previously fields where these these crops are being raised and that soil was hard packed soil didn't absorb any water there was a lot of runoff i mean it was just no nutrients whatsoever i mean it was just it was in pretty rough shape so that first year we ran those pigs across one of those fields let them till that up and stir up that latent seed bank put down some manure we were throwing some junk hay out there so they were kind of stomping that carbon in and so now those fields that were originally just a hard pan hard packed dirt we've got some some really nice grasses growing on it so pigs are great at stirring that latency back up aerating the soil fluffing it up and just adding some life to it we've also found in running our pigs through some of our wooded areas they do a fantastic job of clearing some of that understory some of that underbrush and knocking that stuff down we'll follow them with a chainsaw and start cutting down some of the junk trees some of the smaller trees opening up some of that canopy and so we've started in some of the areas on our farm now we've started to build some beautiful silvopasture that are perfect to run our sheep through for example and so this all becomes a very symbiotic relationship and everything just kind of feeds on itself we bring the pigs through and let them stir the ground up and fluff that up we come along and so maybe a little bit of cover crop behind it a little uh you know some rice and wheat some oats and that kind of thing let that start springing up we bring the sheep back across that so we're now generating some forages for our sheep we run the sheep across that then we'll bring our pasture chickens behind that and let the pasture chickens you know take advantage of some of the sheep manure and you know dig around for grasses and bugs and worms and all that kind of stuff and then it's time to bring the pigs back through so we just create this continuous cycle of animals moving across our farm and we can increase the production capacity of the land while we're getting you know we're building soil you know everything's putting manure down we're stomping the carbon back in and we're just building some life back into this farm that when we bought it was i mean it was just becoming barren and you know unless you were just pouring the chemicals to it nothing would grow here and so it's that symbiotic relationship and the pigs play a huge role in that they're our tillage tool there are aerators there are a land clearing tool there i've got a group of pigs right now with some bamboo that's 30 feet tall and these girls are just tearing this stuff down and pushing it over and they're just you know it's a great they're eating it and they're just opening the opening that stuff up so i get excited talking about pigs and what they can do what they can do with land because my grandmother told me she said oh you'll never grow you'll never grow any grass and then pigs around and now she comes down and she can't believe what we're doing on this farm with getting this getting this grass to grow and we've had pigs on us it's just unbelievable sure that's amazing so do you need to rotationally um to rotate their fields and things for um for disease and and worms like you do other animals yes absolutely so we keep those pigs moving i like we typically will leave pigs on a spot and that's another question we get how long can pigs stay in an area well it depends on how big the area it is depends on how many pigs you've got there depending on how big the pigs are 10 100 pound pigs are going to do a different amount of damage than 10 200 pound pigs they're just there's more pressure on that so we do keep everything moving we want to get them off of their off of their manure of course pigs do tend to have a bathroom area within their uh within their paddocks so we do want to move them off that we also want to distribute that manure around we don't want pigs just in one place where there's just this this over abundance of manure and it's not being spread out and then also if you leave pigs on an area too long they're going to compact the ground particularly around feeding water stations and it's going to be more difficult to get grass growing in those areas and i've done that a couple of times i've left pigs in the spot too long and they've really compacted down around where the feeding water was we were moving some sheep today and we were moving their their hay feeder and guy that was helping me uh david he said something's been here before and i said yeah i had to pay i had the pig feeder there one time because it was just compacted and there wasn't any grass growing so yeah you got to keep those animals moving piggies pigs need to keep moving from space to space on a pretty regular rotation sure that makes sense so are there any other common um beginner mistakes or or even misconceptions about raising pigs that you've found along the way from um from talking to other people and then you know other mistakes that you've made yeah so one thing i one of the big misconceptions is that pigs stink and again if you if you're moving those pigs and you keep them rotated around and you and you distribute that manure out over over a broader area we have very i mean very little odor at all the only time we really get much odors if we've had just a ton of rain and that manure starts to liquefy some and you can get a little bit of an odor there but otherwise i mean the farm doesn't doesn't stink i mean you really don't smell those pigs um mistakes that we've made not moving them frequently enough we again we have had some pigs that we've left in an area for a little bit too long and we've and we've you know we're trying to we've had to go back and recover some of the damages that that's been caused there um making sure that that fence stays on we have left the accidentally left the fence off and they do get kind of curious and they will they will push across it and then also not making sure that the area around your fencing is clear pigs tend to burn they push leaves and sticks and material around and they will push that right up to the edge of that fence because that's as far as they can go and over time they'll push that up against that fence and that fence will ground out and you'll lose your you'll lose your energy on the fence so making sure fences stay clear but otherwise i mean just good just good general management practices always make sure they got plenty of feed they got plenty of water and the fence is good those are the three key the three key things to being successful with pigs wonderful well obviously um you know there's more than we could talk about just in our uh short podcast here but i know that you have some really great resources your youtube channel and your website so can you share those with us so that if somebody's wanting to get more information um they can they can get that information from you yeah so we've got a youtube channel um and our youtube channel it's it's kind of interesting how that started we started our youtube channel we wanted to just do some videos that we're going to post over on our uh over on our webpage to give our customers a little bit of an insight into you know who we are and how their food's being raised and give them kind of a behind-the-scenes look well one video turned into two into three into 150 videos now so we've got a youtube channel uh it's sheraton park farms if you just google or just search us on youtube you'll find us over there we talk about all things pigs chickens sheep just general farming stuff we do land clear and tractor work i mean we got all kinds of stuff going on over there but our primary focus is on pigs and on pasture pigs and then also our um we also have a webpage at sheratonparkfarms.com um you can find us there and then we're also on facebook and also on instagram uh love to talk pigs with folks so if you've got a question uh please reach out to us we're glad to try to you know provide what information we can and help folks out we think this is a great lifestyle we think pigs are a great animal to have on your farm and we we encourage folks to give them a try wonderful and of course as always we'll put the show notes i'm sorry we'll put the links in the show notes that uh folks can find you easier there um and chuck thank you so much for joining me today i really appreciate you sharing your time and your education with us nicole thank you it's been a pleasure and for those listening thank you so much for joining me for another episode of backyard bounty and we'll see you again next week you

Channel: Heritage Acres Market LLC

Views: 265

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: pasture pig, pastured pork, raising pigs, homestead pigs, raising pigs for meat, how to raise pigs, pigs for meat, make money with pigs, pigs on pasture, raising pigs on pasture, raising pigs on the homestead, how to raise pigs on a small farm, how to raise pigs for meat, how to raise pigs for profit, raising pigs for meat for beginners, raising pigs for meat homestead, raising pasture pigs for meat, pasture raised pigs, pasture pigs for profit, Pasture pig farming

Id: mzCjJ5NmRMc

Length: 42min 9sec (2529 seconds)

Published: Sun Feb 14 2021