Everyone talks about the dangerous and disease ridden hogs that only machines can safely manage. This is the pork that ends up on the grocery shelves. When I mentioned I wanted to raise hogs, many in my family thought I was insane and literally feared for my safety. Granted, I am not claiming hogs as soft creatures that won't eat meat...But I knew there must be a better way of raising hogs than inside cramped barns that WREEEEAAAAKK to the point of nausea if you get within a mile... Have you ever heard a hog barn? It sounds like something only the devil could create. Hogs in such confined spaces, underfed certain necessary things and over fed things they don't need just cause their cheap, lead to aggressive violent hogs.
Our answer, like most everything that is going to be on our farm, is pasture raised hogs.I am not talking pasture like cow pasture. There is a time and a place for everything. I do not believe pigs need acres and acres of alfalfa, clover and timothy grass. Hogs, if you look to their ancestors the wild boar, love being in the woodlands. They root around for nuts and roots. They relish in the shade and go to open meadows upon their choosing. On our farm, they pigs will inhabit the land with trees on it. We may clear some of the trees out leaving trees like sugar maples so we can make some syrup on the same acreage. Point being, not all 50 acre farms have 50 acres of perfectly flat pasture. Why fight nature? If you have a 50 acre farm where 12 acres are wooded and full of hills, put the hogs there. They will love it.
To see this kind of operation for myself and to answer my typical 100s of questions, we visited a farm about 2 hours from here called Savannah River Farms. They advertise they are a diversified pasture based meat farm. When we got there, the first thing I noticed was a lack of big machinery and a lack of bad odors... The air was light and country fresh. They invited us in to their beautiful home which they built themselves. We talked for an hour or so while they gladly answered my questions. Then we toured their farm. To us it looked like they had between 200 and 300 hogs split between three large fields. They put our family on a motorized Mule and took us right into the hog pen. Trusting these people knew what they were doing, we had no concerns. She opened the gate, drove the mule in, and went back to close it. There wasn't a mad rush to escape their imprisonment. As we drove through that hog pasture, they probably had between 30 and 70 hogs. Most of them were adults. We eventually saw one of the boars. Now, a market weight hog is generally accepted to be between 250 and 270 pounds. The massive boar in front of us was pushing 1100 pounds!! He wasn't fat, he wasn't agressive, he wasn't mounting every female he saw and the females weren't afraid of him. What a sight! The pigs didn't fight, smell, jump or screech. We looked one way and some pigs are laying on dry ground underneath a shade tree (it was 95 outside). In another spot, 10 pigs were playing in a mud hole. Some were coming from a more heavily wooded area. They hadn't destroyed the grass. There were butterflies and birds in the area of their pasture. It was quite a poetic sight. The pigs seemed so happy it was quite moving and inspiring. They also have grass-fed cattle and sheep and pasture based chicken. They were so kind, they gave us one of their whole frozen chickens. We noticed it was very "plump" and solid just by looking at it. The legs were very filled out and it wasn't all breast like so many of the supermarket chickens. We put it in the crock pot a few days later and it was amazing! It really made me realize the supermarket chicken we buy is very watered down, both in taste and weight. Literally... You pay for chicken by the pound and they can absorb up to 30% of their weight in water after being slaughtered and put in the chilling tanks.
All this positive outlook on raising hogs really gives us hope. Over the last two months we have been diligently pursuing methods of funding our new farm. There exists no sorts of grants and the extremely low rate loans sponsored by the government for new farmers are only for "new" farmers that have 3-5 years of experience. That saga will have to be it's own post. For now, suffice it to say that cattle take a lot of initial capital investment that we won't have. Hogs are much cheaper to start and so we will put most of our eggs in that basket and grow from there.
