This little piggie went to the market....

[phoenixmama]

I want to raise a pig so badly! My husband thinks I've gone completely insane. He already let me get another dog...I better not push my luck. Yet.

Mmmm...I can smell the bacon already!

 

[cw]

so far there not that bad/ why wont he let you raise them?

 

[phoenixmama]

I think his problem isn't necessarily the pig itself, just that he doesn't want to have a pig...along with a bunch of meaties and turkeys. We don't have a huge chunk of land like a lot of you do...we are only on an acre.

I will need to stagger my meat animals.

 

[cw]

pigs do just fine in a stall
a neighbor of mine raises his in a 20/20 pen outside (as much as 6)he says it keeps the weight on them in the summer so he can butcher them in the fall
but they do fine and always look good, the pen itsself is made from 3 cattle panels

 

[phoenixmama]

That seems easy enough. Think it'd be easy enough to butcher it ourselves? The meat processors around here only do beef and buffalo.

 

[cw]

how big are the trees around you? do you do you own chicken?
do you have tractor? meat ginder?
deep freezer?
yea you could do it yourself

if you do get a hog for eating make sure if its amale you get him cut or he is already cut

 

[cw]

how cold does it get there? in arazona

 

[Hillsvale]

Quote:
WEINER pigs

Did you mean weaner?

cough... smart ass!

 

[becky3086]

Quote:
This is our problem too but I believe I could do one pig here(the neighbors have one on the same amount of land) and at one time Phil was all for it(of course, now we have been through chickens, ducks, rabbits and quail so he maybe isn't as enthusiastic as he once was, lol).

Ok, I came on to tell you all how my cousin used to raise two pigs a year on a his very small place. My cousin made a movable pen out of wood. It had the three sided house in the back and the sides were all wood(they may have had wire over them too, I can't remember). However, moving it was not an easy chore. On a visit to his house one time we helped him move it with 2 very big pigs in it. By we, I mean my cousin, his 16 year old son, my 16 year old brother and myself (I was 15, I was such a tomboy). On this day, my cousin admitted that the pen should have been moved long before, so consequently it was really icky. Anyway, we used long poles to pry under it and move it over. It just had to be moved over to dry ground. If it hadn't been left so long, it might have been a lot easier to move but as it was it took us a while and we weren't real pretty afterwards, lol.
Anyway, my cousin was quite self sufficient and wanted to process some himself but not actually do the killing/gutting part. He found a processor who would kill/gut and saw the pig completely in half from nose to tail. Then my cousin would bring the halves home and cut up the meat himself.

 

[dancingbear]

Quote:
That's true, you can raise them like that.....depending on how many you have, they get pretty odoriferous that way. So if you don't mind the stench.....I know many say, "well, just keep it clean", but have you ever tried to clean a mud wallow? Plus, once those pigs start to get some size on them, you don't really want to be in there with them all that much, or I wouldn't, anyway. I've read all the neat magazine articles about how to keep a pig pen clean, and I have to wonder if the writers have actually raised pigs. They're not the most cooperative of beasts.

A neighbor told us they get bigger confined to a smaller space, and that may be, but we had no trouble at all keeping weight on them, in the big pig yard. They grew like weeds. And they're nice and tender, despite a delay in butchering, a couple months past what's recommended. We would not have wanted them bigger, they were hard enough to move around for processing, as it was. It's not only the weight, but pigs are hard to get hold of. There's not really any place to get a good grip. We had to drag them by the hooks through the rear hocks, after they were dead. Even that wasn't easy.

You can make movable connected paddocks with electric fence, just have solid gates to move the pigs through. They are hard to move where you've had the fence part, they have a good memory for being zapped. Really, if anybody's raising pigs, or thinking about raising them, watch those 2 videos I put the links up for. They're really informative. Joel doesn't move his fence, but he does move the pigs. You could have pigs moving from spot to spot, clearing undergrowth in wooded areas, and digging up all the weeds and grass, clearing for re-seeding or for a garden. I'd rather have that, than a stinky, muddy, pig pen. If a small pen were my only option, I don't think I'd raise them at all.