What we learned raising American Guinea Hogs

um today i'm going to talk about the pigs that we have they're called an american guinea hog it's a heritage breed that seemed to be making a comeback there was a small amount of these in america a while ago and people now that they're being drawn more towards being sustainable and homesteading type thing these pigs work really well for that situation they're an extremely slow growing pig this is our big mama right here and we've had her for coming up on three years now and she's had like this is one of her piglets and then these three piglets come from this mom right here so you can tell she's quite a bit smaller so her piglets are smaller and then the only piglet that we have left of hers is this one you can tell she's bigger than the other mama we we haven't figured out to where we would butcher them right at 16 months so substantially longer than like a butcher hog would be the reason is because we feed them produce from one of our local markets they uh have leftovers that they're just going to throw away so we stop by every day and get their leftovers and then they're mostly on this pasture right now they're just eating the clover out of this field and the plan is to let them work this whole square right here and then we're going to reseed it once we get water on and as you can tell they are eating the grass but this was all full of clover in here and they've really rooted it up and it's not terrible bad where it's bumpy everywhere and they've been in this area for a week and then next week we'll move them again so with these piglets they're extremely docile with kids adults everything some of the problems we've had are the bores we just have struggle keeping them contained once the females go into heat i don't think fort knox could keep those bores in there they get out of everything they just cause problems so we've kind of adapted the buy a bore use them then turn them into sausage and the sausage does have a little bit of a gamey taste because it's an intact bore most of the people my family don't mind it some of those that do they just don't eat it when we're eating it so um amazing pig i would absolutely recommend them um we've had three batches of piglets out of them and then we sell the piglets we get 75 dollars a piglet and then we really encourage people to buy at least two of them because they're a very social animal and so if there's only one they can get bored and they're always trying to get out but if you keep two of them together they keep each other entertained keep each other warm at night and so we'll sell them for sixty dollars a piece and people will buy two of them so we're not making any money off of these because in the wintertime we do feed them grain because there's no grass for them to eat so feed them grain and then we'll also give them alfalfa to keep them through the winter but i haven't fed them grain in over a month because they've been in this and they're putting on field but looking really good so we'll go over to the piglets and kind of show you those as well so these are what we have left for the american guinea hog piglets they are almost eight months old so substantially smaller than a butcher pig um we had 16 of them and now we're down to four and in the lat we're gonna keep two for ourselves and someone's coming today to pick up those last two um they're a little scared of us right now just because we've been catching them we've found that once we get it consolidated to the group that we're going to keep and then we leave them just we're feeding them instead of chasing around all over they will really become attached to us so we're narrowing the herd down right now and they just eat the grass as you can see we got a pile of fresh produce for them we got some radishes in there some beet tops some lettuce um pepper turnip they always eat all the fruit out of there first so there was apples there was strawberries and blackberries so they'll eat all those first one thing that is extremely important is water we've found that you can just find these barrels that people are selling and then just rinse them out really really good and then you put these swine nipples on them and they can just come up to it and get as much water as they want and this will last them a couple of days we used to just have um just a one of these cut in half like a trough set up and they would lay in it and knock it over so we were having to change it three or four times a day and so this they can't knock it over and they actually will create a little mud puddle under it if they want some like a place to wallow um and then in the winter time we just stick one of those heaters in there um and it keeps it from freezing it actually it keeps it really warm for them so i think they like that in the winter having some warm water so it's important we can actually tell when they run out of water because they start thinning out really quick and then for the house i just built these a-frame things because this is what we had and i didn't want to go buy anything so we had a bunch of leftover metal and they they love the straw they'll bury themselves down in there on cold nights and they keep we don't need any heat lamps or anything like that because they're so hairy and with a little bit of straw they will stay warm at night and then also they'll nibble on it throughout the night too and one thing that is extremely important when people see this like oh you didn't want to cut that i left this long on purpose so we can carry these around because we're constantly moving them so this is probably 18 inches long here so leave it so then you can just put it up on your shoulder and you can carry it all around so yeah it's something we've done for almost three years now we love these pigs they can be kind of a pain because we have to move them on a weekly basis but as far as pigs go they're very containable and as far as containing them if i was to do it again i would only buy hog panels instead of ranch panels one reason is they're shorter so we can get in easier they're easier to move around and then when the piglets are born they can actually fit through the ranch panels and they cannot fit through the hog panel um so if i was to do it over i wouldn't have bought any of the ranch panels i would have just bought hog panels and attaching them we just throw on a couple zip ties and it makes it easy to unhook them and move them so yeah if you're ever interested in getting american guinea hogs i highly recommend it there's starting to be a lot of information on the internet about them so yeah

Channel: Paloma Farm & Landscape

Views: 9,647

Rating: 4.9203982 out of 5

Keywords: Pasture pig, American guinea hog, farm hog, family pigs

Id: gmSX7cfgdFI

Length: 8min 14sec (494 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 29 2020