>>5110485
My german shepherd farm is coming along nicely. I have 5 longhairs in a coop and run arrangement. I expect world class kung pao before november.

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Lots of babies born the past month. We're at 47 pigs and one calf. Expecting 20+ more piglets and another calf in the coming months.
Had the first calf born on my property slaughtered last week. Curing his hide before sending it to a tannery to make a rug out of it, and excitedly awaiting the meat to be ready.

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The baby pigs are a joy to have around, but they are already starting to cause trouble. It is especially challenging to keep them contained because they are so small compared to the other animals.

>>5110486
Post some pics of your hobby farm! The puppies must be adorable.

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Last year 25 piglets were born. All gilts giving birth to their first litter. This year over 50 for sure.

One gave birth to 12 or 13 today. Pics tommorow.

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12 piglets total. Everyone survived the night. I think this was her first birth. Seems to be a pretty good mom.
For the first few days the momma pigs just lay in their nest all day so you need to bring them water and food. The watering can is ideal for this. She will chug the whole thing multiple times per day.
The less a sow needs to get up for any reason the better because laying back down always has the risk of accidentally crushing the piglets.

>>5110492
how stinky are they

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>>5110711
About as smelly or less than the 3 cows I have, and only in the area where I feed them just like the cows. The pigs themselves smell pretty neutral.
Very rarely pigs carry a genetic trait that makes them smell like maple syrup. Not sure if I have any, but a while back I got to smell a maple syrup pig and it was pretty good.

>>5110489
omg post more piggies

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>>5110739
:D

>>5110807
Do the moms let you touch the babies?

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>>5110836
Yeah all the moms are very trusting with me, but sadly my pig's stupid genetics are all very skittish. The sows and boars are all super friendly, but their children are skittish for some reason. Apparently it is called hesitancy or something and it is at least somewhat genetic.
Slightly skittish pigs are sort of easier to manage in some ways than super friendly ones, so it's whatever.

>>5110879
I want to play with the babies.

Great pics
I wonder what happened to Tunior (and co), I love cowes

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>>5110975
She and another cow died in a very unfortunate accident. Im not going to share any more details than that.
2 years on and it still bums me out. The calf born last month just randomly died the other day also and I need to bury the corpse today.
The mom was crying about it for the last day and half and wouldnt let me get near it. I feel really bad for her. Thankfully she seems calmer today.

The joy of life will always be balanced by the sorrow of death. Such is life on the farm.

>>5111035
>Im not going to share any more details than that.

Alien cattle mutilations.

Dropped the calf off at a corpse disposal spot nearby because I didn't want to dig a big ass hole. There were 3 large cows that had probably been sitting out decaying for a week or longer. Tons and tons of maggots. Never smelt such a strong decomposing flesh odor before. The smell changed from that normal sickly sweet rotting flesh kind of smell to something more chemically, fermented, and alcoholic. It made me nauseous for about an hour after. Damn.

>>5111099
At least they were used for alien science I guess.

>>5111035
That's sad to hear but thanks for sharing, it gives a random internet stranger some closure

>>5110711
Pigs are pretty smell neutral naturally, they just have very low ventilation requirements, so when not kept free range they'll spend their whole lives surrounded by the intense odor of their shit, piss, and feed. It rubs off on them just like it does the workers.

>>5110486
German shepherd is a poor substitute for proper east asian mutts.

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Going to schedule a meeting with my local NRCS to work on getting land conservation grant money. Hooking up a well for cover crop irrigatio /pig watering, lots of new fencing to protect a riparian corridor, and establishing silvopasture throughout my entire pasture.
Didn't realize how sick a well strategized grant could be. If all works out I could be saving tens of thousands of dollars on shit I was already to build entirely out of pocket.

I've also been looking into getting USDA certified and there is a shitload of forms you have to fill out for your OSP. Goddamn I hate paperwork enjoy some baby pigs.

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Picked up my beef today. 643lbs total. All in I'm somewhere between 5-6 dollars/lb in terms of feed and butchering costs. 181lbs of ground beef, six bags of bones, and the rest is steaks, roasts, and stuff for grilling.
The meat straight out of the freezer bags has an aroma of grass and milk. Really nice smell.
Bull meat is always going to be leaner than steer, but apparently the flavor is much stronger. For a 2 year old grassfed bull this is relatively decent marbling.

After sous vide for 3 hours @129F I'm going to fire up the grill for the final sear. Will post results.

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Nice place you've got there... would be a shame if the wind were to blow any of our pollen onto it...

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Here is the cooked meat. Overcooked it a bit on the grill trying to get a sear, but thankfully the meat was still very juicy and tender. I need to add some oil before searing next time because the meat is so lean.
I was suprised by how tender this sirloin steak was. Just as tender as a normal steak.
Taste was excellent. Beefier than usual with some extra minerally sort of flavors. Definitely not gamey like some people say. The fat was delicious. Firmer and less greasy feeling than normal with a good grassfed beef type of taste.

Overall I would say this was a great success, and an amazing culmination to over 2 years of work. It will probably take the two of us over a year to finish all the meat.

>>5112665
It is still crazy to me how they can sue farmers for cross pollinated plants growing in their fields.

>>5112645
all that meat and you start off by boiling it in microplastics? embarrassing, anon

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>>5112674
>muh ck memes
It's all already been packaged in plastic. Sous vide is great for going from frozen to cooked without waiting for meat to thaw, and 129F is pretty low temp. I admit it is not ideal, but I'm willing to sacrifice a little for the convenience. I avoid so much plastic in other aspects of my life it barely matters, especially with a fairly inert type of heat resistant plastic.
Also a fun fact for you.. 90% of all restaurants use sous vide for heating/cooking food and will also microwave your foods in plastic containers/bags, which is orders of magnitude worse than low temp heating in plastic. :D

>>5112676
>It's all already been packaged in plastic.
that's different from being cooked in plastic.

>90% of all restaurants use sous vide for heating/cooking food and will also microwave your foods in plastic containers/bags
so because retards jump off a bridge, you follow them?

whatever, enjoy fucking up your T levels with your plastics-laden meat.

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Samoans want to buy 15 of my pigs for a wedding, but I think they're too cheap to pay the prices my high quality pork demands. Lol.

The business side of small scale livestock farming is so interesting. Your story is almost more important than the actual product, but the story also needs to be why the product is so good, which then justifies the price being 3-4 times more expensive than shitty pork. But on the flipside organic feed and slow growing breeds of pig are innately expensive to grow out for 12-15 months.
Thankfully I'm in an area where a lot of people know what higher prices gets you in terms of health, flavor,humane conditions, etc. A supermarket has already told us they want to do a trial run with some pork chops and shoulder maybe. We would be in a butcher display fridge right next to niman ranch pork as the local option.

>>5112685
Remarkably bad faith reply, but whatever. I hope you don't use any synthetic bed sheets or clothes.

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>>5112685
He’s already trans it doesnt matter

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Sometimes the piglets are in such a deep sleep you can pick them up and they'll still be sleeping for a little while.

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Illuminati confirmed.

>>5110594
that's a good picture

>>5112690
How do you feel about factory farmed pork and the conditions most pigs are kept in by other farmers?
How are your pigs slaughtered, not CO2 gassing I hope?

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>>5113599
Factory farmed pigs are possibly one of the worst because pigs are such smart and feeling animals with strong natural instincts. Rotational pasture like I'm currently re-establishing on my property is ideal because they live outside with plenty of space, always have fresh pasture to forage, and actually get to be pigs.
Rotational pasturing done right also improves soil quality and even helps with carbon sequestration. Eventually I will have meat birds following the pigs, which is one of the best combos for rotational pastures. The birds spread the pig manure, add their own, and help eat/kill parasites.
There are other ways to raise pigs outside that don't include rotational pasture that I like, but any sort of bare earth/heavily mulched feedlot style outdoors is kinda cope for a humane/natural life system. Outdoors is better than 100% indoors, but still not ideal.

I believe my usda slaughter guys do the electrical stunning + bolt gun.
Aside from healthier and tastier meat I raise pigs and chickens on 100% pasture specifically because it is more humane and the animals get to live a more natural life. I've heard so many people tell me that they could never go back to storebought eggs or pork after trying my products even though the eggs and pork are 2-3x more expensive than what you could buy at costco or whatever. It's pretty cool.

>>5113608
Have you seen Clarksons farm? What do you think of his efforts?

>>5113612
Ive only seen some clips, but I should give the series a watch. Top gear was great.
Culling bad moms, dead babies, and the occasional gore are really sucky things that are basically unavoidable when raising any animals, especially with on farm births.

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>>5113476

>>5113608
How much do you make per year as a pig farmer?

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>>5113652
Zero dollars for now lol. Every penny goes back into feeding the next generation. If all goes well my batch of 25 piglets born on property will at least double the money I put into raising them.
200-500 dollars profit per pig depending on if I sell them whole or as individual cuts. This year 25 pigs, next year 50 pigs. After that probably still 50, but I will make that call once I see how my land handles that many piggies.
The pigs are kind of the side animal compared to our eggs and chickens. I've always wanted to keep pigs, so I'm fine with the relatively low income they generate.
We move around 2k dollars of eggs per week, gross, with 500 hens right now(plans to double that to 1k hens once we improve egg handling infrastructure), and we are working on establishing a minimum 20-30 cases bi-weekly of fresh gourmet/heirloom meat birds for supermarkets and restaurants, which we would sell for somewhere between 5-7 dollar per pound to start off with, so that could potentially be 10k-14k gross per month.
The meat birds are interesting and difficult because you have to grow out/ keep a new batch every 2 weeks. So for a 10 week bird you would need 5 seperate flocks of 200-300 birds. 3 in brooding rooms with heat, and 2 on pasture. 30 cases bi-weekly = 1500 birds in total.
We also want to work on making our own signature breed of ultra premium meat bird that would could sell for even more/lb. Maybe 8-10/lb if it is good enough.
Workload atm is fairly minimal aside from the egg washing/packing, so I look forward to having significantly more work raising the meat birds considering the massive potential they have.

>>5113648
Beautiful.

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PIGPILE!

>>5112676
You warming up plastic brings out much, much more of the harmful substances in it, such as pthalates[1] and bisphenols[2]. The amount can hardly be compared to you packaging the meat in plastic and freezing it.

1 https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8157593/
2 https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27143250/

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My thread got bumped, cool. I'll post some more pics. :D
The piglets have been free ranging my property for a while, but they finally went too far and started going down the driveway. Patched up all the exit points and now they're stuck in my fields for good.
For the first couple days they'll try to escape and start whining when they fail. It's very satisfying to witness.
Also got 560 more laying hens yesterday. Got a stupid good deal on them at 6 dollars per bird. Normally you pay around 14-15 dollars per bird for 20 week pullets.
We are feeding 10-12 5 gallon buckets of food per day now.

>>5114824
omg

>>5112676
I use silicon sous vide bags

>>5116542
I've got some more cute piglet pics coming up soon. My film is drying right now.

>>5116562
If you're really nitpicking silicon still releases some stuff into your food, apparently. I just use high quality HDPE bags. Ironically they don't contain bpa, bpa analogs or pthalates. Still not ideal, but it really doesn't matter in the grand scheme of plastic exposure.
Recycled black plastic cooking utensils are extremely bad. Synthetic fiber underwear and bed sheets are terrible, microwaving in plastic is terrible.

Heating food up to 125 degrees for 2 hours in virgin HDPE or silicon is really not so bad in the grand scheme of things. Don't all canned foods have a plastic liner and go through a heat pasteurization cycle?

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More pics as promised.

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Blurry but still cute.

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That's all for now.

I want a piglet. How much?

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>>5116904
Go to a livestock auction and you can get a weaned piglet for very little money. That's how I got mine.

>>5116990
I want one of YOUR piglets though.

Man I bought half a pig from a small farm in Virginia some years ago. I really should do it again. These pigs picture really tempt me. I bought a small townhouse last year but still no room for a chest freezer. If only my neighbor would be will to split.
How do you guys market your business? I found that small farm because they have a very simple website but the website is kinda shit. I bet there are many other small farms without a website.

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>>5117575
Do it. Support local small farmers! Ask if you can visit their farm to see how they raise their animals.
As a somewhat new farmer we get most of our exposure through the farmers markets we sell at. We are also starting to host farmstand/farm tours on sunday once a month or so. We have a sign on the side of the road, advertise it at the farmers market, and send out an email to our mail list.

>>5117178
To keep as a pet or to raise for meat? I don't really know how much I'd sell a live weaned pig for. Maybe like 120-150 bucks + S&H or something like that.

why are chickens so dirty

>>5118143
They aren't necessarily more dirty than other animals it's just that they're usually kept in environments that get dirty quickly and need cleaning often.

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Very nice pigpile this morning.

>>5118867
Comfy. What's your end goal for your piggies enterprise?

>>5110807
Cute oinker

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Pig pile from this morning.

>>5119070
Selling really high quality pork to fancy restaurants and/or supermarkets.
Next year plan is to utilize grant funding to add easily accessible water to my pig pasture area, go hard on semi-irrigated forage/cover crop, and plant loads of trees to provide lots of varied forage and shade for the piggies. The trees are obviously going to take years to start producing, but you have to think long term for land development like that.
Set up a really good rotational system for the pigs and then finally bring some meat chickens in to enhance the rotational pasture and produce super meat birds once the trees are all in.

I only have enough land to hold like 65ish medium sized pigs on rotation, so I need to make each one count if it's going to be worthwhile.
I had a guy from NRCS come over and we spent three hours discussing my land, operation, and goals. He was saying it would be pretty likely to get funding for a well hookup, plumbing my fields for water, about 1500ft of permanent fencing, possibly the silvopasture/trees thing, and a long term soil testing/land management practice.

>>5119098
Cute piggies

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Is /o/ a better place for farmville general? There's no other hobby farmers on /an/ it seems. :(

Blog update: I finally have the space in my secondary mini pasture to choose 4 pigs to put on finishing ration for 45 days before I send them off to become pork chops. 2 are already sold whole, and the other two will become cuts of meat for me to sell at the farmers market. This batch will be the first generation born and raised on my farm. Very excited to see how the meat quality is. The first ones will be red wattle X kune kune + red wattle X kune kune. The yorkshire X red wattle X kune kune will be 1 year in august.

For finishing ration I will replace about 15% of their grower/starter mix with cracked corn, and add 1-2% Black oil sunflower seeds. The seeds are extremely high in unsaturated fat and make pig meat with a more buttery and luxurious textured fat. I am also going to reach out to some local dairy farmers to see if I can buy/have some of their high protein silage to feed to the pigs. The NRCS guy said that he saw a presentation about finishing pigs on silage, and it has desireable effects on fat/meat quality, while improving omega 3 to 6 ratios. Very interesting stuff, and free food is always a plus.

>>5120138
Ty. Here are some more pigs. This is what they look like when they're hungry. You must feed them over a fence or they will run between your legs and create a major tripping hazard. I don't think my pigs would eat me if I fell to the ground. It would still be quite unpleasant to get stepped on and nibbled on by a multiple large pigs.

Bump for pigs

>>5120978
you may fine some frens over yonder >>>/diy/farming

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>>5121564
find! don't give them fines please

more pigs!

>>5113665

Are you feeling any pressure from the big companies? As far as internet tells me, small farmers are getting shafted in favour of big companies. In my mind, I would never become a farmer for the profits, but instead only for the ability to make myself less reliant on the food industry. But I'd love to hear a first-hand account of what its like to - and whether it is worth - sharing a marketplace with big food companies.

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>>5122616
This is the boar when he was a wee lad. He still flops over like this when you scratch him. Idk if you knew this but boars grow armor plating on their shoulders. It's like a half inch thick layer of what feels like veg tanned leather. Apparently it can even stop some low velocity bullets.

>>5121564
TY.

>>5122695
Still too small to feel that, and my area appreciates local small farm type stuff so we have a good angle to try and sell at some of the nicer markets. Already have one market that wants to buy a whole hog.
What we have felt is when the other farmers market meat guys started selling pork again. They've been around a lot longer than us and have better brand recognition. The sucky part is that our pork is better than theirs.

Endgame for me is low volume ultra high quality pork sold to butchers, fancy supermarkets and high end restaurants at a premium. I know I can do it. It's just a matter of developing my land for it and establishing the consistency to provide pork monthly/bi weekly.

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>>5122616
This is the boar now. All grown up.

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Every saturday we go to two farmers markets. 6am wakeup, load the truck, leave by 745-8, 8-830 first one starts and ends at 1pm, then the second one is from 2 to 5. Putting on the fake-ish smile and selling eggs and pork is exhausting in a way that the manual labor of farming isnt. We grossed around 800 dollars today, so its worth it. 45 dozen eggs for 10 each, 9 flats for 20 each, 8ish pork chops for 16/lb, maybe another 6-8 ground pork for 10/lb, and I sold 7lbs of pork fat for 5/lb to a guy who asked for it the previous week. Today was a particularly good day for pork sales.
Still had to feed the chickens 12 5 gallon buckets of food, the pigs 250lbs of food, and take care of the dogs afterwards.
I drink once a week and it is on saturday. Usually a bottle of wine and a couple shots of booze. Fair enough trade in my books.
Thank you for reading my hobby farming blog. Here is a picture of the pigs when I got back home and they were all eating grass before I fed them. Good piggies. :)

>>5123514
Cute piggies. Are you doing most of the work or do you have help from your family?

>>5123629
I do almost all of the work with a little help from gf and her dad who has ranching experience. Gf does most of the egg washing/sorting.
With all the pigs and chickens we go through like 400-500lbs of feed per day, and I move most of it in 5 gallons buckets and a wheel barrow lol. Good exercise.

hens are the coolest animals ever

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Sometimes you see a lot of pigs at once, but most of the time you dont. It's a strange phenomenon.

>>5123752
I like hens, but walking through a sea of hundreds of them carrying feed buckets gets annoying. I always feel bad because I step on their toes.

>>5110730
Wow, do maple pigs taste different? And can you breed 2 maple pigs to make more maple pigs

>>5124923
Never tried eating a maple pig, and I'm unsure if the trait is heritable or not. Super tiny maple scented pigs could be a cool pet pig variety. Idk if you've seen anything about it online, but pet pigs are gaining popularity.

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We had a very good day at market today. 50ish dozens of eggs for 10 dollars each, and 24 flats for 20 each. 2 markets. One from 830-1 and the second from 2-5.
We had a new sign to advertise the flats and explain the savings in plain English. Worked great.
On top of the eggs we sold about 200 dollars of pork/chicken meat as well.

>>5125943
Man I need to get some land!

>>5126043
Find some raw land to rent for cheap. Water access is a huge benefit, but you dont even really need that if you get a water trailer.