Animals we eat, get nutrition from in some form or make products from them or what they produce: eggs, meat, dairy, aquaculture, pelts, hides, leather & textiles, wife just made $500 selling 3 lambs. 2 wethers and a ram. we already have two 14cuft freezers full of lamb, hogget & mutton, so we didn't need them for butcher. they were just taking up space and consuming feed. we already have 3 select breeding rams. we only keep the ewe lambs for dairy. ewe lambs sell for a premium price but like many species, males tend to be more numerous than needed, so $500 for a trio of males is spectacular. they went to a "pet" home so definitely worked out in their favor as well. what are you raising and for what purpose(s)? what would you like to raise? what do you just have questions about or a general interest in?
I'd like to raise utility pigeons. They seem quiet and easy to keep.
>>5137403I want to get into keeping heritage turkeys I just don’t have the space for it right now
>>5137433we did turkeys for a few years. couldn't make the balance sheet work. their voracious intake vs their value juat couldn't pencil out. the flavor of turkey, in general, is mediocre. sales were difficult because you had to price high to offset inputs, which turns away lots of potential customers because people are dumb, can't math, and dont value quality product vs cheaper, mass produced/marketed big-box options. they can go through 50lb bag in a matter of days.we raised bourbons & standard bronze. they were fun. they are friendly and curious. >>5137410interesting choice. I have considered it as well. im honestly concerned about escapees starting a pest/invasion scenario. Im sure the ones I have seen at apartments and bridges are different, but the amount of filth, mite and disease i witnessed have made me shy away.we do quail instead. if i want something a bit more squab-like ill shoot a dove hanging around the poultry coops.
>>5137403Piggies, chickens, cows, and a few goats.Getting ready to finish 6-8 pigs. I had a bunch of them ready to sort and hold in segregation, but they busted through the gate holding them in. Post was rotted at the bottom and they just ripped the gate screw out. -_- Swapped the screws over to the other non-rotted side and will try again today or tommorow.
Got the numbers back from the feed store today. 42k lbs of organic pig feed the past 12 months. Nearly 18k dollars in feed cost. Lost out on 2.5k because we weren't buying bulk feed for a while. Thankfully the math still works out favorably for both whole hog and farmers market selling. 4 whole hogs confirmed sold so far, but I think maybe one or two more after we post about it to our newsletter. We will also have 2 slaughtered and cut/wrapped for selling at the farmers market. I'm putting most on a finishing ration for one month to improve fat quality/marbling, but one guy who does cured meats with the pigs doesn't want them finished. Very interested to be able to compare the finished vs. Unfinished meat. Recently the cured meats guy one an award for charcuterie he made with our pork!Finishing feed is my pig grower blend cut with corn, black oil sunflower seeds, and barley.If the thread is up in a couple weeks I'll post some pictures and a review of the unfinished and finish meat.
>>5137433>>5137529How much space does one need for turkeys. They seem like fun pets. I’m not sure I’d even bother with meat, I’m not crazy about it
>>5138483when we lived inside city limits we kept them in a 10x12" enclosure, but let them out into the full backyard daily. once we moved to the new rural acreage we built a 60×80 pen an no longer let them roam free. in both instances they seemed healthy. no fighting or stress plucking. we would limit adults to 1 Tom and 2 hens, but would periodically have poults or adolescents in a grow-out pen.
Bump
First 3 pigs went to slaughter without giving them a finishing ration. Firmer fat is a lot better for cured meats.Average weight 204lbs, which is perfect and better than expected.Already have 4 sold at 5/lb. I decided to take one for myself to get a little headstart on selling at market. The pig we took for ourselves is a kune kune x red wattle x yorkshire cross. Very excited to see how the meat turns out.
>>5141294Investing in this to see the finished product
19 piglets were born last night. Total of 27 from the past 5 weeks. 35 born in february. 12 born in april. The most ideal spread is to have them born every three months because the ideal slaughter window is from 12-15 months old. Meat quality should remain quite good after that, but your margin drops due to reduced feed conversion.Got the very pregnant looking one into the stall. I thought the other one had a week or so left, but she also decided to give birth.The larger brown pig is a super runt, so I'm letting him chill in there and steal some milk. She's alone in there so I can give her plenty of food to support one extra.>>5141371Hoping to get the meats either tommorow or next week. Getting a variety of sausages made with the leg meat + ground to see how they sell at market. A couple people ask for sausage almost every market, so they should sell okay.
Here is the other new sow. Mixed race litter.
And here's the calf born last saturday. Doing quite well so far. The mom is our dairy cow so he has more than enough milk to drink, and soon we will as well. We were getting 2-2.5 gallons from her a day last lactation cycle.
Okay, well I got some chops from the charcuterie guy. He got his pigs yesterday and has almost completely sold out of all of the chops he packaged. Two pack is kune kune x red wattle and the single is yorkshire cross.Kune kune x red wattle had lard pig levels of backfat, which was expected. The yorkshire cross actually had more meat even though he was 50lbs lighter.Marbling is a lot lower than my previous pigs, which is somewhat concerning, but I have a few ideas why that may be. Thankfully exceptional marbling isn't all that makes an excellent chop. Dinner will be done around 7 where I will post a review.
>>5141575Couldn't tell a lick of difference in taste between the two chops. I think finished vs. unfinished pig is going to make a more significant difference and I will be testing that out in 5 weeks when I send off the first of the finished pigs to slaughter.The chops were really good overall. Juicy, pretty tender, and a nice sweet pork flavor. Very clean fat flavor as well.My biggest goal is to keep pushing up the intramuscular fat to the level I had before.The apricot peach sauce I made was amazing with the pork. Harvested fresh fruit from my trees for it. Added a splash of the rose I had with dinner, vanilla bean, star anise, thyme, ginger powder, a little brown sugar to balance the acidity, and a touch of salt. Gently simmered until the alcohol cooked off and the flavors melded together.All in all I'm a bit dissapointed with the level of marbling I got from these pigs, but I wasn't expecting perfection from the very first batch of pigs born and raised on my farm.
Well, I got some of my pig back yesterday and the chops look much nicer in terms of IMF prior to their finishing ration and I had a bunch of people saying they looked quite good. My guess is that people picked out the nicest looking chops from the charcuterie store and the four or so that were left over were the least marbled from the bunch. The shoulder pieces have excellent marbling on them.I was actually feeling a bit of despair over my pig's genetics the past couple of days, but reframing, informing the consumer and selling the value of a lard/half lard pig to actual prospective buyers at market today made me feel a lot better. People who were interested in buying a whole/half liked the idea of getting a bunch of top quality lard to cook with as well as great quality meat.Despair is always the enemy.
This thread is NOT kosher
>>5142133Us when the apple pie isn't kosher.
BUMP. I got the rest of my pig back. I'm going to breakdown the yield and costs/prices. The profit margin is looking pretty good!
Okay. I have everything except bacon, so we will assume 16lbs total from the pig. If you don't care about the breakdown costs/profit from an organic pasture pig please enjoy the cute webm of a dreaming piggie with her baby.Shoulder 18.33lbsChop 12.67lbsGround 8lbsSirloin chop 3.42lbsTenderloin 1.5lbsLeg 17.18lbsFat 12.57lbsFeet 4.5lbsBreakfast sausage 26lbBacon 16lbCut yield for 228lb pig was 56% of hanging weight, 128lbs.Total expected gross revenue 1750CostsKill 130Cut and wrap 513Feed 440Egg sales pay for all other overhead like gas and we have no employees working pigs.Expected profit from market pig 650Expected profit from wholesale pig 500-550This is right in line with my goal for this year. Growth. Invest money in to pay for feed for 20-25 pigs this year and at least double it. Next year we will hit maximum pigs of 50 total with little additional money input. Year 3 decide if we move up to 75 or stabilize and we will start to see profit of around 35k-45k per year. Not terrible for what amounts to like 5-7 hours of work per week lol.Egg sales are over 2k gross per week now, and we aren't even doing meat birds. Meat birds will be huge and could gross us close to 18k a month from just 350 birds processed every 2 weeks. Logistical and infrastructure improvements will be necessary for meat birds and we will probably hire our first real employee when that begins because it will add a significant amount of additional work to our day.
>>5143826> we aren't even doing meat birdsDo highly recommend if you’ve got flatfish land that isn’t at 100% utilization. My broilers cost me ~$2.33/lb carcass weight, with processing, for pasture organic, now that the pens and other hardware are paid for. People happily pay $4/lb for halves and $4.25/lb for quarters, especially since the grocery store chicken is basically all JFC and JFC can’t stop killing workers with forklifts. If I was buying feed bulk instead of bagged, there’d be cost savings to be had, but I’m only using 1200 lbs of feed per batch because I’m just in it to eat good ass chicken for free, not make a living. It’s about 1.5 hours/day for labor, feeding, watering, moving pen.If I had another 30 acres of flat ground to put more movable pens on, maybe I’d make it a proper business, but my dirt is too hilly to do much more than 100 birds at a time using moving pens and predator remediation is too much work if I were just to keep them in fences. The chicken manure really supercharges the grass for other pasture usage and it’s also great to keep the early season birds where you’ll plant your garden when the frost risk is over, my sweet corn and squash go bananas for it.
Great day at market. Got our first deposit for a whole hog. Very exciting. Sold lots of meat as well.We got some reviews from customers and they loved the quality of our pork, so I am very happy now. It was a huge gamble to let unknown genetics play out like we did, but it seems to have turned out quite well and now we have our own unique pork to offer!WAGMI>>5143995We did a batch of 450ish a couple years ago. Cuts sold extremely well, but whole birds took a loooong time to offload.If you want to do a 10 week bird and have product ready every two weeks you need to keep 5 individual flocks of birds 2 weeks older than the next, so for 350 you would need to keep 1750 birds. 2/3 indoor brooders and 2/3 seperate outdoor rotational flocks. We have 10 acres of good flatland we should be able to fit the 700 extra birds on along with our 1k laying hens. Need to build the coops and the brooders.6 hour round trip to the closest USDA poultry processor. Load birds night before into boxes and onto trailer, Wake up at 2am, hitch trailer, get there at 5ish to offload birds, drive back. Then we would rent a reefer van to bring the fresh birds back and route in our delivery line to offload fresh birds to supermarkets and restaurants. We will have funds for all that once the pigs start paying for themselves. Right now eggs have been paying for pig feed leaving us with basically no leftover cash.Bulk feed is essential. We save around 40% on feed costs buying bulk. Our local feed store sells us 1 ton totes we pick up.The birds go through roughly 1 ton a week, and the pigs take around 8-10 days to go through a ton depending on how lazy I was with feeding them. If you can manage the increased flock size it would absolutely be worthwhile upping your batch size to go through a ton of feed.I may try cutting the pigs feed a lot when the pastures are really green to force them to consume more forage, but we'll see.
>>5137881how do you protect your piggos from getting a pestilence that wipes them all out?
>>5142129Looks so much better than the shit in the supermarkets. That’s what I get for moving away from the country market I guess
>>5144109It's fun converting people who have never tried pastured pork. For both our eggs and pork I've had a bunch of people tell me they simply cannot go back to the store bought stuff. Today someone told me that the only reason they come to the farmers market is to buy our eggs. Rotational pasture makes a difference consumers actually notice. It's really cool because treating the animals well and giving them a more natural life gives you back a truly high quality product.>>5144106Mostly biosecurity measures, which is extremely easy for us. There's almost no other pig farmers in my area and I'm not planning on bringing any new pigs into my herd for the foreseeable future. They are very robust animals and only really need good parasite management once they get past 3-5 months old. Problems can crop up with piglets if you don't manage farrowing properly, but that isn't necessarily game over.
>>5144058>6 hour round trip to the closest USDA poultry processorWoof, I felt like a sucker driving 3 1/2 round trip, because it would have been a 30 minute drive if I had over 200, but the local processor won’t touch poultry unless you’ve got that minimum.
>>5144252Wow, america’s semi-communist farm system is so fucking gayJust mandate replacing all lawns with vegetable gardens and chicken runs except for a dog/recreation allowance in the back at this point
>>5144252It really really sucks, but there is still great money to be made. Hiring out is ideal for such shitty situations as long as you have a reliable worker that can get the job done. 25-35 bucks an hour for 4 8 hour days of driving per month is only like 1k off the top of a potential 16k-18k gross/month. >>5144262The funny part is that there are usda exempt pathways to poultry sales, but it's such an arduous task getting either a zone change or use permit that just dealing with a 6 hour round trip 4x a month makes more sense, and you can only do 1k birds per year through that channel, and sales are limited to direct to consumer.
Saw these guys today, they look kinda greek / turkish
>>5144703Do you know the breed?
I had a really good day at the farmers market. It feels so good to inform people about the difference between legally defined pasture and what we consider real pasture raised chickens. Rotational pasture means chickens always have access to fresh and almost always green pasture, where they can forage for bugs and just eat the grass to supplement the organic feed we give them. Not adding colorants to darken eggs means ours aren't that crazy orange, but we can claim the color of our eggs comes entirely from what they eat and we get dark yellow/ golden yolks pretty consistently. The other great part was informing people about how we raise our pigs. A lot of people love that we raise happy pigs, and we may have gotten another whole pig sold because of it. I was explaining our practices and how we can schedule an om farm kill with a whole hog purchase. Aside from castration day for the males the pigs lived an entirely stress free life until they're just eating food and get shot. Our chops were a little too expensive, but the lady ended up buying a pig foot from us and I explained how I liked to cook them. We got a few customers buying chops from us a second week in a row saying they loved them, and a little boy also got his mom to buy a pork chop from us, which was kind of cool as well.All the large pigs aside from the white/black one, which is a sow with her piglets are going to slaughter on aug. 21st after 30 days of my finishing ration. We are keeping 2 to sell at market and the rest are already sold. 3 years of keeping pigs and I'm finally starting to see the fruits of my labor. It's so awesome. Thos year is growth phase. Next year I may actually see profits, god willing.
BUMP. I may try to keep this thread up until I have the finished pigs processed to share the stats and meat quality changes.24 piglets born this month. Roughly even split between pink pigs, black pigs, and briwn pigs.
This is big momma. She's my favorite pig. Gentle giant and very friendly. She gets extremely vocal whenever she sees me. If you start grunting back she gets even louder. It's really cute.She sounds like this, but much deeper.https://youtube.com/shorts/0FoQ1KkOTxM
>>5148678I had her follow me over to the blackberries in the trees and she laid down afterwards and I was just chilling with her for a bit. This random piglet comes over and decides today is the day she won't be afraid of me anymore. I started giving her lots of good scratches.
>>5148679When I start scratching her belly she flops over on top of big momma and is in pure bliss.
>>5148680Eventually big momma rolls over a bit and the little piglet falls on the ground with a loud thud.Fin.
>>5146323> lived an entirely stress free life until they're just eating food and get shot.Based desuWish I could find anyone around where I am, but most of the small producers care more about how anti-vax their pigs are than anything to do with their quality of life.
>>5148681Cute oinkers. Thanks for sharin.
>>5148853That's kind of strange. Pigs dont usually need many vaccines. If you have some decent farmers markets in your area you may be able to find someone good. The main thing to look for is pastured pork. Regenerative practices is a major plus as well. Anyone worth buying from will be happy to answer any of your questions about how they raise their animals. For small farmers like myself every person that buys from us matters a lot!
Sold 1500 eggs today at two farmers markets from 8-5. 66 dozens, and 24 flats of 30 eggs.We do laid yesterday mixed sizes dozens for 10 dollars and mixed sized flats for 20 dollars collected over previous 2-4 days. Organic fed and rotational pasture. In my area eggs of that caliber are usually 12-14 dollars a dozen.We save 4-6 hours every week not having to weigh eggs individually to sort them, so we pass the savings onto the consumer. 2.5 dozen flats are much cheaper than dozen boxes and take even less time to package, so we pass those savings to the consumer. Right now we sell wholesale to one restaurant, one supermarket, and do 2 farmers markets every saturday and sell all the eggs produced from a 1k hen flock, which is over 3k eggs, every week.I still vividly remember our first day ever selling eggs at the farmers market. I almost didn't believe that people would just buy our eggs, but they did, and the longer we kept showing up the more regulars we got, and things just kept growing and 3 years later we are having 1.5k days. It's wild. Thats enough. Thanks for reading my tipsy aftermarket saturday blogpost.
The goats make me seethe, but at least they are cute and silly.
