Free's piggie thread...new pics p 19

[Dace]

Very exciting news!! I hope that your little piggies end up being easier on you than Quails and Sally's are. I am still a bit dumbfounded that pigs are so troublesome.

Wilber certainly wasn't....I guess that is just how childrens fairy tales go.....and girls really beleive in Prince Charming too. Dam Disney

Kim, those are some nice looking piggies!

 

[freemotion]

Yep, we have electric fence. I will section off a bit of pasture FAR, FAR from all houses, and surrounded by trees for shade. The pasture is fenced with four foot woven wire horse fencing with electric on top, so it will be a simple (ha! Is anything on the farm ever as simple as it is in your head?) matter to splice in a wire and make a fence within the fence. I have all the stuff I need, posts and wire and installators, water and feed buckets. I just need housing. Simple, free housing, or at lease very inexpensive. I'm thinking tarps on a frame.

Kim, if we hire out part of the job, it will likely be the cutting/wrapping/curing part, not the killing/cleaning/halving/quartering part. My dad will do that, and he got his father's bone saw on his trip to his house in Maine a couple of weeks ago.

I have a grinder attachment on my KitchenAid, but I'm not so sure that will do it, so I may just have it processed for me, we will see. I plan on doing a lot of canning, so that will keep me very busy. Then there is all the sausage making. And all the bacon eating!!!

A slicer is on my wish list. Someone here on ss mentioned getting one at Costco, and I looked at it...it looked like a reasonable deal. We don't eat a lot of sandwiches, but that is in part because deli meat is $6-8 per lb and up!! And I am fussy!

 

[Kim_NC]

There are some nice metal food slicers on the market at ~$100. Our nearest Costso is 50 min away, so I don't get to shop there much and haven't seen theirs.

Anyway, I would go for an all metal model....where the body base and back have no plactic.... just the collection tray and sliding guide/hand guard perhaps made of plastic. My BIL had one with with a plastic back, it did not last like our metal model.

 

[Farmfresh]

I wonder if bale housing would work with pigs?

My sis built a "house" for her dogs by stacking old hay or straw bales and then driving a rebar down inside of them and into the ground to hold them in place securely. She used some old pallets as roof support and then tarped the whole thing on the outside.

 

[ohiofarmgirl]

nope on the straw - the pigs go hog wild for it! it will initially ...but once they get big enough they will just destroy it.

brunty farms has a thread over on BYC and he build a shelter and used bales on the outside which helped to insulate - which worked really well with all this snow.

but - we use this rebar+straw for our geese - we build a wall on the open side of their shelter (its mesh but not solid wood)... not only did it keep the wind out... it sound proofed them!

yay!

 

[freemotion]

Any advice on cheap/free temporary housing? How big does it have to be for three pigs that will grow out to 200-250 lbs each??

 

[big brown horse]

Congrats Free!

I don't know the answer to your questions, I just wanted to say "YEA!"

(Kim, how much do your piggies weigh? They look as big as mine and he is about 92#...maybe I can butcher in a couple of weeks too!!)

 

[freemotion]

There are some nice metal food slicers on the market at ~$100. Our nearest Costso is 50 min away, so I don't get to shop there much and haven't seen theirs.

Anyway, I would go for an all metal model....where the body base and back have no plactic.... just the collection tray and sliding guide/hand guard perhaps made of plastic. My BIL had one with with a plastic back, it did not last like our metal model.

Thanks for the tip! I only looked at the Costco one in an ad, once, a while ago, so I'm not sure what it is made of.

Knowing me, I'll just hack slices off a ham for sandwiches!

 

[Kim_NC]

Congrats Free!

I don't know the answer to your questions, I just wanted to say "YEA!"

(Kim, how much do your piggies weigh? They look as big as mine and he is about 92#...maybe I can butcher in a couple of weeks too!!)

Ours are at ~190 lbs. Typical weight gain is about 1.5 lbs/day (or a little more). We want them to get close to 250 lbs for butchering. Doing the math, that means we have a ~40 days to go.

Any advice on cheap/free temporary housing? How big does it have to be for three pigs that will grow out to 200-250 lbs each??

You'll hear numbers quoted anything from 6 - 16 sq ft per pig in the 'sleeping area' for growing out finisher pigs. There are pigs who spend their entire lives until butchering age with that amount of space. We prefer to see them have a pasture area for daytime. They love to forage, root around, and will graze on grass to reduce your feed bill. And their enclosure stays much cleaner if they can get out during the day.

Here's what we do... We could do 6 -10 pigs in this space, but we try not too keep more than 2 or 3 over Winter. (More expensive to feed them with no grass to graze.)....

- Fortunately, we already had a shelter with a metal roof that is 20' x 20'. In one corner, we used pallets (free) and rough-cut lumber (cheap) to make an enclosure for the pigs to get out of the wind, sleep, etc. That enclosure is about 8'x 12'.

- We used dog wire around the perimeter of the shelter, with electric around the top and bottom to keep predators out. (Both coyotes and bobcats in the area.) We also have a line of electric around the inside, about 12" high, to keep the pigs from rooting at the fence.

- During the day we let them out of the shelter into a 40' x 100' pastured area. It is also enclosed with dog wire and electric. At night we lock them in the enclosed area to protect them. The dog wire runs ~$50 for a 100' roll.

The 40' x 100' also opens into a 3 acre pasture. For 6+ pigs we can let them into that area during daytime....or if we want to give their regular space a 'break' to regrow.

Hope this is helpful.

 

[freemotion]

The end of my pasture is roughly 60x60, probably bigger, and I will fence it off with electric wire. I am wondering if I can block off the high-n-dry corner with a simple frame of 2x4's and cover it with tarps for a shelter. I will keep them from June to December, likely, so they will be very big by the time the cold weather comes.