The Accidental Smallholder Forum
Livestock => Pigs => Topic started by: Connor on December 12, 2014, 12:23:30 pm
-
I was thinking of starting into the pigs, was going to get a sow in pig or with piglets at foot. How can I make money at raising the piglets for meat! They piglets would be tammworth or saddlebacks! Any info on feed an all would be great thanks
-
The only money you really make out of pigs is bacon and sausage, it seems that not a lot of people buy joints, etc, etc. I have a friend who breeds pigs for meat and he despairs when he has to mince up good joints for sausages. If you can find the market for the whole pig then that would be good, but its finding the market. Whenever we have a pig killed we have all the joints back including the chops, but that's just for the family. We always kept large black pigs, what breed of pig do you have? Fat layer is also an issue with pork, I still haven't gotten the feeding regime correct yet. I was told to fatten pigs on barley mixed with whey and also sugarbeet. I hope this helps.
-
I know about the hard work, the feed costs, the potential for wastage and a few other pitfalls but so far the secret of making money out of small scale pig farming has eluded me. If anyone does have it, please share :) . I think the biggest barrier is that Joe Public doesn't care where his dinner came from so long as it was cheap and he didn't have to go out of his way to get it.
-
In my limited experience I would say that you can't make any money from small scale pig production. The best you could do is break even(possibly) As you said very few people are prepared to pay for good quality pork when they can buy sh##e quality at half the price.
You will though rear the best pork, bacon, sausages and ham that you will ever eat and may convert a few folk along the way.
-
It depends what you call making money, I usually raise 3 pigs at a time from weaners, I look for them to be older , as in 12 weeks if possible, lots of smallholders have piglets that they cannot sell at 8 weeks, I raise them to about 60-80Kg a local butcher collects them has them slaughtered at our local abattoir £12 killing fee, our butcher prepares the meat £26.00 for pork or £46.00 for gammon and bacon and then I sell the meat in my village to locals, I usually make about £200.00 clear profit from 2.5 pigs and keep .5 of a pig to eat.
from my point of view this isn't making money because 4 months of trudging 3 times a day to feed and water them equates to about .20p per hour but I have a lot of fun doing it, it doesn't cost me anything and have made a whole new bunch of friends in the village and eat my own produce.
it would be very difficult to expand it out as well as outside my village the market is very limited
Personally I wouldn't have a sow or boar of my own, the cost of keeping them outweighs the cost of buying in weaners
Also the great thing about keeping pigs is to consider them pets you can eat!
Hope this helps
-
Before this thread turns into a ream of negativity I would temper that by saying it's not impossible to make money out of pigs on a small scale, but it's not easy, and nobody who has managed to do it is going to let you in on their methods which will have been hard won with lots of mistakes and dead ends on the way. If you think you can do it, go for it, but don't expect it to be easy.
-
Echo all above, particularly re feeding regime for traditional breeds..... A chap near me seems to be doing well , but boy does he work hard (seems to do daily overnight runs to veg wholesalers in Liverpool)...... But he may be doing well because he has broken through the small scale barrier. We cover our costs and then a bit..... But probably does not cover time if we were to factor that in. Agree that sausages and bacon fly out of the freezer AND that there don't seem to be enough people who care wether their sausages come from pigs that have lived a good life outside and rooting :(.
The usual pig advice given on here is great advice.... Get some weaners a few times and reassure yourself that you LOVE all that pig keeping entails before starting breeding :-) . You've got to be a special sort, with the right land setup to enjoy them all year round day in day out?
-
I found it hard it hard to make money on them but you have to be strict with feeding feed them what they need no more no less....I have about 10 customers now who have 2 full pigs a year of me winter & spring summer at £200 a piece at this any pork I keep cost me nothing....
-
Have got to second the idea of getting some wearers in and fattening them before stepping into the world of pig breeding.
Make sure your 100% happy with the situation and move into the breeding side once you've got a couple of batches of fatteners moved through your holding.
We have had a few batches of weaners at our father in laws farm next door, I've worked with cows for 20ish years and had sheep for the last two and I'm still nervous about getting some weaners of our own in the spring!
We find that sausage sells and that no one really wants the joints so we have to go with what the market wants as our own freezer wouldn't cope.
If you factor your time in then most things on a small holding make little money, don't get me wrong their are people who do make plenty but it's mostly a lifestyle choice :farmer:
Good luck with your plans and enjoy some lovely home produced meat!
-
It depends on how much money you want to make. We just about double our money on our pigs. This last lot of 6 cost £40 each, £40 to feed and £40 to kill and butcher and were sold for £65/qtr (with a waiting list) before I'd even picked the piglets up. As others have said, it's selling it that's the hard part but my business makes that easy for me. But that's only on 6 pig's and too many more then that and i might start finding it harder to shift them.
Is £600-700 enough to make it worth the time and effort I put into them? Probably not, but we've got the land anyway, it puts a few more quid in the kitty, we end up with a freezer full of the best meat available and I enjoy the whole process.
I've got another 10 ordered for spring but intend on killing in smaller batches and bringing a couple onto bacon weight.
-
what do you feed to finish a pig on £40?
feed is expensive up here.
-
They get a mixture of sow rolls (harpers) which i get @ £260/T and a grain mix from a local arable farmer/miller @ £150/T. Plus between 20 and 30lb of fruit and veg every day between them. The grain price crash this year has made feed a good bit cheaper. I've just worked it out and they cost me exactly £38.47 each to take them from 8 weeks to 26 with all but one smaller pig giving me a dead weight of over 50kg
-
I'm not meaning to diss anyone's contribution as all experience is useful but in reality anyone who keeps half a dozen weaners or so isn't really making a business out of it and so isn't really exposed to the risks and problems which become apparent when you are keeping enough pigs to potentially make a living from them. To give an example if you had maybe 100 or so pigs of various ages on your holding, and you had a couple of poor weeks sales, or maybe a vehicle breakdown which prevented you getting to the abattoir for instance, then those pigs can eat a massive hole in your finances very quickly. Likewise if you have an outbreak of a disease or even if someone nearby has and movements are put on hold. I know these things are unlikely but they could happen. I suppose what I'm saying is that there's a point of no return when it becomes impossible to stop or even slow down because you need the turnover to keep your pigs fed and everything else going. This isn't the case with a few weaners but if you want to make a living you need more than a few weaners. It's a treadmill just like any other business but it's one that you'll need to be on 365 days a year.
-
I'm not meaning to diss anyone's contribution as all experience is useful but in reality anyone who keeps half a dozen weaners or so isn't really making a business out of it and so isn't really exposed to the risks and problems which become apparent when you are keeping enough pigs to potentially make a living from them.
With all due respect the OP was asking about a sow and piglets so was not talking about making a living from it. They asked if you could make money from it on a small scale and the answers is yes you can. Just not much.
-
Excellent question and efficiency is the name of the game - we follow Joel Salatin - he choses grazing pigs that are happy to chomp on grass and be fed from a grain feeder surrounded by a top notch electric fence in the wood. Food waste (veg of course) has to be involved over endless grains which pigs are not supposed to be fed on.
Getting the blighters on the trailer to the not so local abattoir, then picking it all up again is so time consuming. Finding an excellent butcher and packing is such a headache.
I truly think the only way to make money is to raise and cook it. Burgers, sausages, bacon baps are always in demand at events etc.
We did a direct meat selling business for a number of years - it became a nightmare. Unless you can shift a quarter or half at a time which is the best policy.
You wont make money from it, its a hobby and passion.
-
I always get the abbatoir to butcher the pig carcase for me, then I have a friend who breeds and sells pig meat himself to cure the bacon for me.
-
Yes. Easy.
The complexities come if you direct market.
We sell direct to our local abattoir keeping one porker from every litter and produce two litters twice a year.
Abattoir check animals a week or two before they are ready and ask if they want higher/lower weight and we adjust feed as needed. They charge £10 to collect each animal, deducted from killed-out cost. We have never had a problem, are paid by transfer within two or three days of slaughter.
LB's are not paid for above the norm but are always taken. Our local abattoir is certified for organic slaughter and the animals are received and processed quickly, quietly and cleanly.