Why You Should Consider Adding Hogs to Your Homestead
This year our household took the plunge and added pigs to our homestead, and couldn’t be happier with that choice! They’re pleasant animals, easy to raise, and fill several very important niches on our permaculture farm. In six short months we turned $240 of feed, untold pounds of weeds and food waste, and about 10-15 minutes of labor a day into nearly 300 pounds of high quality meat, fat, and bones for broth.
We chose to add hogs to our homestead to fill two key niches: cooking oil production, and food waste utilization.
Pigs are omnivores. They can (and should!) eat a wide variety of foods. Whether its weeds & grasses from the garden, kitchen scraps, foraged nuts (even black walnuts), slaughter wastes, or dropped fruit from the orchard, pigs can eat it. We even partner with a local food retailer to divert hundreds of pounds of pre-consumer produce waste weekly, reducing feed costs and food waste at the same time. A varied diet increases the well being of the hogs, increases the micronutrients in the meat, and improves the flavor of the pork. Eating fresh foods is as good for our livestock as it is for us! We provide our pigs a base diet of commercially blended hog grower+ feed, but heavily supplement with these fresh foods that would otherwise be wasted.
This quality allows us to use our pigs to manage all our edible farm wastes, turning them from trash back into usable product, twice over. We run our pigs on a deep litter system, meaning we bed them on large amounts of high-carbon bedding (we use straw). Rather than mucking out the pen daily or weekly, we manage it like an active compost pile, continuously adding carbon to balance out the high-nitrogen inputs from the pig. This allows for low-maintenance, low-smell, and sanitary manure management. This material creates a perfectly balanced garden compost, rich in organic matter and key plant nutrients like nitrogen and phosphorus. We don’t have to turn a compost pile and we don’t have to buy fertilizers. We have a sustainable, on-farm source of continued fertility for our gardens!
All that fertility is essentially a byproduct of pork production. In addition to healthful, flavorful meat, pigs are great at producing one particular food that can be very difficult to produce on a small homestead: fat. We all need fats in our diet and in our cooking. They’re critical for brain health, cell function, and uptake of certain vitamins. They make our food taste good, especially all those beautiful fresh vegetables!
Most cooking oils used in modern kitchens are pressed from seeds or nuts. There are oilseed crops that can be grown on the homestead: black oil sunflowers are a great option, or some nuts. But oil seed crops are labor intensive to harvest, thresh, and winnow, and require specialized equipment that can be hard to source at a reasonable small-farm scale to press into oils. Pig fat, however, is extremely easy to render into lard in a home kitchen using tools already at hand. One pig can yield around 18 pounds of fat, which can in turn yield about 18 pints of finished lard. Heritage lard breeds can even yield more! One or two pigs a year could easily supply a household with their cooking oil needs.
Overall, pigs have proven to be easy to care for, highly productive additions to our homestead. We strongly encourage any homestead with the space and inclination to add hogs to their operation!
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