The Accidental Smallholder Forum
Livestock => Pigs => Topic started by: waterboy on October 17, 2010, 10:17:33 pm
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Hello all,
I was watching an old episode of River Cottage and Hugh was talking about crossing different breeds of pigs and that certain crosses worked better than others but didn't go into any further detail, are there any hard and fast rules when it comes to cross breeding or is there any books on the subjet that anyone knows of?
Thanks
Rob ???
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There's a wee bit of info on it in 'Starting with pigs' I don't know if there are any dedicated books I'm afraid !
Usually breeds are crossed to speed up finishing time and sometimes improve the flavour.
Generally crossing rare breeds with commercial breeds will speed up finishing.
Kune x Berkshire is rumoured to be really tasty and the Berkshire speeds up finishing times and increases the size slightly. I believe large blacks are good crossed too, but mainly I think it comes down to personal choice.
HTH
Karen
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We do lots of crossing. We have saddleback and GOS boars, to breed with their respective halves, but as we have large black, large white, berkshire, tamworth, KK, landrace, OSB and just got a Mangalitza, we cross-breed these to our SB and GOS boars.
The results are some really interesting markings, and in many cases you get what is called Hybrid Vigour, that is the young grow faster than either pure strain would.
Favorite of ours is SB boar X Landrace, stonking piglets! A friend swears by large white boar to large black mum.
Yes we need to keep the purebreds going (and we try to do our bit with SB and GOS), but crosses are also great fun, and taste just as good !
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Thanks for the replies everyone, the more i learn about pigs the more there is to learn :yum: