I notice the project has not started yet, what is happening with it?

I would like to research and pull together the threads of a solution but I need to know who to correspond with and how they would like to receive the info.

Also I would need to know a start point.

Do you have a project plan for this?

Regards All
Phil

I am researching a business plan for presentation to potential external funders for Michael and Esther at the RCMI. Trawling the web for ideas and experiences this article from a man called Derek Cladek popped up. He came to Uganda last year to build a pig farm or two outside Kampala.

Full page can be found here: http://www.derekcladek.com/

Getting Ready To Build Pig Farms In Uganda Africa
Derek Cladek on July 21st, 2009

I leave for Uganda Africa on August 10th for 39 days! The plan is to build at least one pig farm. The last time I was in Africa my friend Jack and I looked at what kind of business we could start in Uganda that would actually make money.

Most businesses in Africa are copied and what I mean by that is when a person opens a shop to sell paper within a few month that shop will be surrounded by at least 10 of the same exact stores! Talk about killing a market! That would really tick me off if I started a business and then had a ton of copycats, but I guess that is how business is. Just look at the thousands of ‘make money’ blogs on the net today! Everyone thinks they can make money just by having a blog, its not true.
What I learned in Africa is that you MUST have a unique idea and plan to succeed. After looking at everything from paper and ink to iPods and iPhones, we ended up finding that a piggery would do really well in Africa. While I was there in September 2008 we bought 9 pigs (6 females and 3 males) for about $15/each pig. When a pig is fat and ready to be sold to the market, they can go from anywhere between 250,000 Shillings to 400,000 shillings. At today’s exchange rate of a Shilling to US dollar it would be $119-190 US dollars.

While I was there in 2008 I was emailing a guy named Clark Covington who has his own online business helping other businesses. I told him what I was doing in Africa and what the plan was with building a pig farm. He told me he would love to help and within a day he sent me $300 US dollars which looks like a ton of money in Uganda. ($300 in Uganda is what an average person will make in a month).
Most Africans cannot afford to raise more than one pig so the competition is fairly light in Uganda for raising pigs. A man named Jacob who lives with his wife and children about 1 hour outside of Kampala Uganda started with a few pigs two years ago and when I saw them last, they had 48 pigs. They have a large covered pig pen with about 15 different stalls. The only problem they have with their pigs is the lack of food. Since Jacob lives so far away from most of the population, they have to feed the pigs scraps, any left over food and plants that are growing around the house. To buy

food is a struggle for them, since they are already living off the land, but if you had the money you could go into town and buy bags of bran or pig food. Most of his pigs where way under weight, malnourished and needed to be fed more. Pigs not only are one of the most popular foods in Uganda but they are easy to raise and feed, if you have the money. Pigs also reproduce at outstanding rates as a large female pig can give birth to 8-12 pigs at a time.
The Plan for August 2009
The plan for this trip is to transplant the original 8 pigs (1 killed itself) and their babies to a much larger pig farm. Right now they are in little houses built two feet off the ground. We are renting land at $6 each house per month and now have access to land where we can build a farm at any size we wish.

The picture above is from September 2008, so these pigs are much bigger now and are all pregnant.

These are the houses we had built for the pigs so that by the time we came back this year they would have enough room with all of the piglets.

We need enough funds to build a pig farm that can support between 150 to 200 pigs at a time. I have a friend named Vincent who has been coming to the US for the past three years and has stayed with us each time he comes. His family owns 40 acres just outside the capital, Kampala and has said that we could use 10 acres to build whatever we want. This land will be our starting point for building the pig farm and the funds from this farm will help support more to come.
Where Will The Money Go?
The purpose of these pig farms is to help build and finish orphanage villages that are being constructed today throughout Uganda. World Out Reach Ministries is a Non Profit organization that has been in Uganda for over 20 years building schools, churches and taking care of orphaned children and widows throughout Uganda. Today there are many obstacles in finishing projects that have been started for years. When I was in Uganda in August 2006 one of the orphan villages was being constructed and three buildings were finished. Going back in September 2008 they had a total of 12 buildings finished but no one was living in the completed houses. Right now only 490 children are sponsored and have homes. Children who would otherwise have no place to live, no family, nowhere to go, no hope, no job, no homes and no family.
I felt called in September 2008 to start building businesses in Uganda that will support the cause over there without having to rely upon the support of outsiders. People in America and the UK are the biggest supporters of what is going on in Uganda today, but in the near future I would like to see that the majority of support is coming from their own nation and to one day make everything self reliant on the businesses that we build today.
By starting today we can help change a nation and help them become reliant on themselves and not other peoples and nations.
What we need and what we expect in the next 365 days.

• $3,000 – $6,000 to start 1 or 2 pig farms within 1 hour of Kampala
• After building the first pig farm we will buy up to 50 pigs. (Each farm will hold 150-200 pigs)
• Buy enough food to feed 50 pigs for 3 months (1 Bag of food cost about $20)
  
• Pay a doctor to vaccinate each pig to keep them healthy. (Medicine Cost about $2/pig)
• Pay 3 people 50,000 Shillings/month to tend to the pigs. (Cost About $75/month)
• Plant a crop next to the pig farm to help feed the pigs.
• After the first pigs are born, sell a few to start a cash flow to buy more supplies, feed the pigs, pay the workers and doctor.
• Once the pigs have reproduced twice we should have enough funds to build 1-2 more farms, buy land and keep the process going.
• The end goal is to support the Orphanage Villages and Baby House to take care of babies with no parents.

If you ever wish to support what I will be doing in Uganda, please contact me and I will get you details on how you can support us! All donations will be 100% tax deductible. Thanks!
More Updates To Come!

###

Derek Cladek's Follow Up Article May 27th 2010

You Attract WHO You Write About
Derek Cladek on May 27th, 2010

Whatever you write about on your blog is who you will attract. Kind of like whoever you hang out with is who you will become like. My mom always told me that when I was growing up so hanging out with some kids was out of the question. It wasn’t like we were smoking pot or doing drugs back then, we were just being kids and possibly being a little mischievous. You will find a ton of blogs talking about making money online because that is the crowd they are trying to attract. These people are looking to make their living online and so selling to them is much easier than some random visitor.
I only bring up this point because I talked about going to Uganda Africa to build a pig farm and many of my visitors since those first post have been people begging me to give them money or to help them start a pig farm somewhere in Africa. I did go to Uganda in the summer of 2009 and had a 45 foot by 15 foot building built to raise pigs. The farm is about an hours drive outside of the capital city of Kampala Uganda. It always depends on the condition of the roads because any road off the main road to Kampala is dirt with rather large ruts. After a few rain showers and you will be fording small rivers in the roads making your travel time to the pig farm much longer.

The purpose of this pig farm is to help support orphanages that are being built by a non profit organization that has been in Uganda for the past 22 years. The idea was to build a pig farm to generate money to help start other businesses throughout Uganda. These businesses would then generate enough capital to support the overall cause of raising orphans and to better help these people’s lives. It was a project that made sense, so I asked a few friends who donated money and in 2009 I brought with me $3,500 to build the farm.

I visited the pig farm a few weeks ago, May 2010 and their biggest complaint was that they needed more room. With six large pigs, four girls and two boys, one had just given birth to 10 piglets and three others were about to give birth. One of the obstacles, and there are many, is to teach these Africans to take the money from selling piglets to buy food, medicine and to start building onto the current structure. Instead of relying upon or always asking for money, they need to start using the resources they have to get the job done. In the America if we need to expand our business we either take the profits we have and build, or we go to the bank and get a loan. In Africa its something that needs to be taught.
Feeding the pigs is one of the biggest headaches right now. Cost of feed keeps going up and for a bag of Bran, it cost around 30,000 shillings (the current exchange rate is 2,233 shillings to the US dollar, the highest I have seen it). This could make a bag of Bran cost $13.44 and the bags usually last one week. We had planted Matoke trees around the piggery to help feed the pigs when those trees started producing its fruit. Another resource we are looking to plant are sweet potatoes to help supplement the food the pigs eat. Eventually we want the pig farm to be completely supported by the land and not outside food sources. This is also something that needs to be taught to the Africans because they expect the white man to pay for everything, including food.
Matoke Field
I write all of these because I do get request for help, to send money to help someone start a piggery. I understand its difficult and I had to start a business with very little, but once you start something continue to grow it and expand and eventually you will have a successful and unstoppable business.

###

Interesting... All sorts of practical information about rearing and costs AND philosophy.

I like the idea of building up from a small base but always with planning for a substantialy larger base in mind.

Working up a business plan turns out to be easy and complex at the same time. The easy bit is having an idea which seems to work well somewhere else and transplant it. Piggeries seem to be a very popular choice world wide but they are not a Panacea.

Without understanding the business model RCMI want to adopt it is difficult to realisticaly cost the alternatives, so I need to find out more. To do that I am preparing a questionaire for Richard and Esther to fill in, which will start out at a high level with general ideas and concepts then progressively work down to the detail.

Once we have the detail, the start-up and running costs of the business will be known along side the method of operation then the business plan can be written.

My brief survey of SMALL-MEDIUM SCALE pig rearing all over the world revealed that substituting wishful thinking and guesswork for detailed planning is a recipe for failure, not good, even if it is not for profit.

Some sites I am looking at for ideas about business planning are:

Alliance and Leicester (UK): https://www.alliance-leicestercommercialbank.co.uk/bizguides/full/pig/pa...

This is really good as it has two downloads to help structure a business plan and calculate costs which I will be discussing with Michael and Esther in due course. Download free Business Planner Software

Business Link (UK): http://www.businesslink.gov.uk/bdotg/action/detail?itemId=1074447887&typ...

###

Ultimate Objective: Produce a generic business planning guide for Animal Husbandry to share on this site

Although New Hampshire, USA is a world away from Jinja, Uganda and allowing for those differences there is a wealth of information in this story to help ask the right questions in the business plan.

Raise a pig in your backyard

By Todd Quinn, Contoocook, NH

I never thought I would raise my own pig, but as Thomas Jefferson once said, "I am an old man, but a new gardener." Well, I am only 35, and I am but a new pig farmer. Here is what I learned while raising a pig during the summer of 2001:

Why raise a pig?

There are lots of reasons to raise a pig or two in your backyard. It seems like every day we hear stories in the news media about the potential health risks posed by the routine use of antibiotics in animal feeds. Diseases like "mad cow" and foot-and-mouth outbreaks raise further concerns about the safety of commercially-raised meat, and prompt questions about the wisdom of large-scale livestock farm practices. By raising your own pig, you can decide how it is fed, what kind of drugs it is given (if any), and how the animal is slaughtered and butchered.

When we decided to raise a pig on our New Hampshire homestead, we had never raised any kind of animals for food before. Inspired by a neighbor who purchased two piglets, I furiously read and researched all the information I could find on small-scale swine farming. It was a steep learning curve, but within a couple of weeks, we were raising a pig of our own. We were fortunate that our local public library had a copy of COUNTRYSIDE'S own Jerome Belanger's excellent book, Raising the Homestead Hog. (Ed. note: This book is out of print; however you may find a copy at used book stores or on-line auction sites.) It was an indispensable resource, and I highly recommend getting your hands on a copy before you take the plunge.

Ask yourself: Can you do the big "S"?

If you are new to raising animals for food, like we were, the first big question you should answer is whether you can bring yourself to slaughter your backyard pig. Do not tell yourself that you think you can do it, or even that you will be able to talk yourself into doing it. From the outset, you must regard the pig and the entire enterprise for what it is, a food-growing operation.

Believe me, raising pigs is fun, and they are intelligent and entertaining - but your animal is not a pet. It is easy to get attached to it when it is a cute little piglet. You and your family may even be attached to the animal when it weighs 200 pounds. But no one will be happy if you do not slaughter your pig when it is time, letting it grow to weigh 500 pounds or more and becoming a major consumer of your cash and time. An animal that large is also that much harder to contain, and could pose a safety risk to your family and others. And, by the time your pig gets to that size, it is of no real value to you or anyone else as a food source. The optimum slaughter weight for your pig is 200 to 250 pounds. Anything more than that, and you are putting too much money and too much feed into adding fat, not meat. Remember, one of the reasons you may have decided to raise a pig was to save money and grow healthier food!

I cannot count the number of times people told me that I would never be able to slaughter the pig. For every person who told me that, another would tell me about how their family once raised and slaughtered a pig, only to discover that no one could eat the pig when it ended up on the plate. But my wife and I had no doubts in our mind that we had no interest in caring for a 500 pound pet! We knew that it would not be easy to slaughter the pig, but keeping it would not be an option. Come fall, the pig would be going to the freezer.

I do not want to belabor the point, but it is important. To all those who asked how we could kill an animal that we raised and obviously cared for, I would usually ask whether they were vegetarians. If not, I pointed out to them that one way or the other, they were causing the same thing to happen to animals every time they purchased meat. Then the question I would pose to them would be this: wouldn't you rather know how your meat is raised, what kind of conditions the animal lived in, what it ate, and whether it was slaughtered in a humane fashion, without suffering? Buying meat in a store may be easier, because you can pretend not to know what really happens on factory farms and in commercial slaughterhouses, but it sure isn't easier on the animal. My wife and I know that for the time our pig was on the earth, it lived in a veritable pig paradise, especially compared to the animals raised on factory farms. Think about that the next time you have a piece of bacon, or buy ham from the deli.

One, two, three...?

How many piglets should you buy? If it is your first try, I would not buy more than two. Despite what everyone will tell you (even people who know no more about raising pigs than you do), you can raise just one pig. It is better to raise one pig well than to try and fail to raise two. It stands to reason that two pigs will take more time, money, and effort on your part. However, if you do raise only one, do not leave it isolated from people and other animals. I think the reason that our pig never seemed lonely was that we spent a great deal of time in our backyard, playing with our son, working in the garden, and just enjoying the outdoors. After she got used to us, our pig was always happy to see us and happily accepted pats on the head and treats.

Another issue that should guide your choice of how many animals to raise is the manure. It is an obvious point, but it must be said: two pigs produce twice as much manure as one pig. How ever many animals you buy, you need to have a plan to deal with the waste. One consolation: pigs really are naturally clean animals. Our pig would defecate and urinate in only one place in the pen. Because we had just one pig, it was a quick job for me to scoop the manure each day and put it in a large compost bin. Occasionally, I would really muck out the pen and put in fresh soil. That greatly reduced the problem of manure odors, except in the hottest of weather and only in close proximity to the pen.

Where you find a piglet or two will depend on where you live. In New Hampshire, the state Department of Agriculture publishes a weekly market bulletin that contains free classified ads listing all things agricultural for sale, including livestock. Another idea is to check with your state department of agriculture, county extension office, and farm supply stores for information on farms and breeders in your area. Also, check to see if your state has a pork producers association; if so, you should have no trouble finding a breeder eager to sell you as many animals as you need.

Although I had read up on the various breeds of swine, and their various advantages and disadvantages, I just wanted a good pig. And as luck would have it, that is what we found. As near as I could tell, our pig was a Tamworth cross. It cost $65, and was six weeks old to the day when I picked it up. Since I did not have a large pet carrier or a cage to put the pig in, I simply spread a tarp in the back of our SUV, and put in the pig. It worked out okay for me, but you might want to take into consideration other possible ways to transport your animal.

Containment

Success or failure in your new pig-raising enterprise may hinge on one of your earliest decisions, about where and how to contain your pig. My advice is this: build the pen strong, and build it as if it needed to keep a mouse contained. Piglets are escape artists (as I learned), and you will not enjoy pig raising if you are constantly having to catch escaped animals. So do it right the first time. Read all you can about pens and fencing in books and on the internet. Again, your choices have to factor in how much fencing will cost. But a shoddy fence could end up costing you a piglet or two, with nothing to show for it.

I have to admit, my first foray into building a pig pen turned out to be a learning experience. That is a nice way of saying the piglet got out! Not once, but twice on the day we brought it home. But after two frantic pig chases through the underbrush and not a few scrapes and scratches, I had learned what I did wrong.

Initially, I built a pen out of posts and rails from small trees that I cut down on our property. It was woefully piglet-porous. I had planned to copy a neighbor's example and use electric fence as a cost effective way to fence in a large area for our pig. But with a toddler in the household, I wanted to have at least part of the area surrounded by conventional fence. So I constructed a pen near our garden and compost pile, of approximately 8' x 12'. The location made it relatively unobtrusive, and there was plenty of shade, a necessity for pigs especially during the hot summer months. On three sides, the pen was made of rough posts and rails. The back wall was open to a wooded area surrounded by electric fence.

No sooner had I placed the pig in the pen than she made a beeline for the woods. When she reached the wire, almost without pausing she scooted under the bottom strand and out into the great beyond! After about a half hour, with the help of my wife I managed to catch the piglet, and put her back in the SUV's cargo area. Then I quickly improvised a fence from posts and welded wire fencing to enclose the open side of the pen.

Once again, I placed the piglet in the pen. She headed right for her earlier exit, and after about a minute's investigation and probing, she managed to root under the fence wire and make another run for it. After another chase and more reinforcing, I set out for the nearest home supply store (a half hour away). Returning at dusk with a roll of welded wire fence, I worked furiously by the dying light of a flashlight to fashion a stronger pen, one that proved to be enough to hold our pig. But I would say that the wire fence alone would not have been enough, without the rigid post-and-rail fence that I had originally constructed to support it.

After about a month, when our pig was very tame and welcomed our company (not to mention a good ear scratching, yogurt, and other treats), I re-strung the electric fence wire, adding another strand as close to the ground as possible below the two other strands that I had already strung. Then I reopened the back of the pen and held my breath. For the first week, the pig never left the original pen area! Free to explore a much wider zone, she chose to stay in the secure environment of her pen. When she did eventually venture out into the wooded area, it only took a couple of shocks from the fence for her to learn the new boundaries of her home. Each time she received a shock, she would run back to the smaller pen. That told me that even if she did manage to escape, she would not go far. She would eventually escape one more time, when I mistakenly left the electric fence off (on September 11 of all days), but a neighbor and a passing motorist managed to lead her back to the pen.

Pig Shelter Design

What kind of shelter will you provide? If you get your pig in the spring and slaughter it in the fall, you probably do not need an elaborate shelter. In the early months, our piglet found shelter in a heavy-duty plastic doghouse, extra-large size. Why a doghouse? Because we had one already, and it did not cost us anything to let the pig use it for a while.

Later, when it outgrew the doghouse, the pig took shelter in a simple lean-to which I constructed out of scrap lumber and a heavy duty plastic tarp. Make sure that it is sturdy, though, because pigs love to rub against anything that can be used as a scratching post, including shelters and fence posts. But when it comes to shelters for your pig, you have many options, and you can find an endless number of designs for shelters and sheds in books and on the Internet. Just remember that the more elaborate the shelter, the greater the cost. That cuts into your bottom line if part of your motivation for raising a pig is to save money on food.

Pigs need shelter from the sun and relief from the heat. Even in New Hampshire, the summer months can get very hot. The design of our pen area, with most of it in the woods, ensured that our pig could find refuge during the sunniest hours of the day. We would also wet an area of the pen using the garden hose, providing a mud wallow for the pig, something she clearly appreciated.

Daily needs

Pigs need lots of clean, fresh water. As we discovered, pigs will step in buckets and troughs, with the mud and manure on their hooves soiling the water. Following their rooting instincts, they will get their noses under a newly-filled pail or trough and upend it in seconds. It can be frustrating, but you need to keep the water source filled. Some people use nipple waterers, but that requires piping or hosing; that might be more elaborate than what you really need. We found that a heavy-duty, flat-backed water bucket with mounting brackets (purchased at a local feed store) worked well, and could be easily attached to the side of the pen to cut down on spillage.

The basic food for pigs is grain. In some areas, it may be more cost effective to provide corn (as opposed to other grains) as the dietary staple. But I found that I had less waste with grain, and that our pig preferred grain to corn.

In choosing grain for your pig, you have two basic choices: pellets or mash. I preferred pellets, again because I found less waste and that our pig seemed to prefer the pellets. No matter what you settle on, many people raising their own pig will be doing so because they want healthy, naturally-raised meat. That was our primary reason for venturing into pig farming. We wanted to raise our own meat, ensuring humane treatment for the animal and food reasonably free from antibiotics, pesticides, and genetic engineering.

If that is important to you, you may wish to consider raising your pig on organic feed. We decided not to go that route, mainly because of the cost factor involved. In our area, we found that the cost of organic grain was approximately twice that of non-organic feed. We did manage to find, without any difficulty, swine feed that was produced without added hormones, antibiotics, or animal products. For us, that was a good alternative to organic feed.

Part of the experience of raising a pig for the first time is watching and learning. With no previous experience, I had to learn on the job. So each day, I would observe and track how much our pig ate, and how much was left uneaten. Then I adjusted the amount of grain I fed the pig. If the pig ran out of food at any time during the day, I would give it more grain. My goal was to ensure that our pig always had grain available when it wanted it, but not so much that grain was spilled, fouled, or spoiled by rain. After I got a feel for the optimum amount of daily feed, waste of grain was virtually eliminated. Obviously, the amount of feed is never static, since it will always increase as your pig grows. But your goal should be to feed the right amount and no more. Again, as with your waterer, the food trough should be secured in such a way that the pig will not be able to tip it over.

When it comes to feeding your pig, be creative. In addition to the staple feed of grain, our pig had a wide range of food on a daily basis. After a few weeks, when we released our pig into a larger area surrounded by electric fence, she was able to root and forage. Providing enough space so that your pig can do what it does best - root for food - will help ensure the animal's health and happiness.

We also fed our pig our vegetable table scraps, garden scraps, lawn trimmings and nontoxic weeds and grasses. A favorite treat was apples, old bananas, and generally any kind of fruit. We did not feed our pig any meat products, although she did enjoy egg shells, cheese, and her most favorite food of all - yogurt!

Yes, yogurt. And this is where creativity can really pay off in raising the backyard pig. We are fortunate to live near a major yogurt manufacturer, one that also happens to produce organic and all-natural varieties. Not long after we purchased our pig, I happened to read in our state market bulletin that the plant gives away buckets of yogurt byproduct for animal feed. This product is not intended for human consumption, but by all appearances it is indistinguishable from yogurt, at least to a layman like myself. Once a month, my wife would stop by the yogurt factory and pick up sixty one-quart containers of yogurt, which would go into our chest freezer.

Then, every few days, I would thaw out 10 to 12 quarts in our refrigerator. The pig would get two quarts of yogurt each day, one in the morning and one at night. It was such a favorite of our pig that she would begin squealing and grunting loudly whenever I appeared in the backyard at feeding time, and believe me, a quart would disappear in about three minutes flat!

Once upon a time, pigs roamed free and were allowed to forage for food on their own. Acorns, beech nuts, and other kinds of "mast" were a major food source. Fortuitously, friends of ours have a yard ringed with beautiful oak trees. In fall, those oaks drops thousands of acorns on their driveway, patio, and lawn. They were more than happy to fill a shopping bag for us on a regular basis, and these went to the pig - who delighted in eating them by the handful!

Another idea is to pursue networking opportunities, especially for cooperative purchasing. It was not until after we had slaughtered our pig that I learned that one of the local feed companies offers a bulk discount on feed, giving 100 pounds of grain free for every 500 pounds purchased.

While that is quite a bit to have on hand for one or even two pigs, especially early on in the growing season, you might be able to take advantage of the opportunity by pooling with other pig farmers.

I would stay away from feeding your pig restaurant waste or garbage, especially since it is likely to contain meat products that could pose health risks to your animal and your family. Your state probably has strict rules about how such matter must be treated before it can be fed to animals, for very good reasons. One of the leading theories about how the recent foot and mouth epidemic in Britain started is that pigs may have contracted the disease from eating garbage from a restaurant that contained illegally imported, infected pork.

Slaughtering

One mistake that I made was that I did not have a clear plan in mind for how we would slaughter our pig. As the summer wore on, I kept telling myself that I had to find someone soon. Finally, I started asking around at feed stores. I found people who do the meat cutting, but could not find anyone who actually slaughters animals. I did find that I could send our pig to the one USDA-certified slaughterhouse in our state for a reasonable price, but I hedged on that one. I wanted to find another option.

After discussing the problem with my pig-raising neighbor, I learned the name and address of a fellow in the next town who does meat cutting, mainly for hunters. My neighbor also told me that he was planning to slaughter his two pigs himself, and offered to give me a hand with mine. Understanding that it probably would not be a very pleasant experience for me, I also realized that slaughtering the pig at home would be more humane for the pig. So I took my neighbor up on his offer. We would slaughter the pig at home.

If you transport the pig to a slaughterhouse, then you can have your pig slaughtered any time. But if you want to do it yourself, at home, you need to do the deed when the weather is cool. The optimal temperature is around 40 to 50 degrees - cold, but not so cold that the meat will freeze, because you will need to hang the carcass for at least twenty-four hours, to ensure that all residual body heat has dissipated.

After making arrangements with the meat cutter, we set the date for slaughter. On an afternoon in early October, my neighbor and I slaughtered our pig. The actual killing was quick and humane, and the pig met its end on the land on which it was raised. Within the space of two hours, the pig was skinned, gutted, and cut in half. After hanging the two sides in our shed overnight, I was off to the meat cutter. The hams, bacon, and shoulders went to a nearby smokehouse, and were ready in about ten days.

But how does it taste?

The meat from our pig is wonderful. Before we raised our own pig, we tended to eat beef and chicken. But our own pork is better than any meat, of any kind, that we have ever eaten. Even though our pig was a little larger than the optimal weight, the meat tends to be on the lean side. The range of cuts-ham, tenderloin, chops, roasts, and bacon -ensures that we do not get tired of eating pork. I would say that we are actually eating less meat, since we have virtually stopped buying chicken and beef from the store. The versatility of pork also ensures that there are almost countless ways to prepare it.

We have also enjoyed sharing meat from our pig with family and friends. Some of the people who thought we were crazy for raising our own pig have been the most enthusiastic about the meat that we have given to them. One friend even wants me to raise a pig for him next year!

So, looking back I can say without reservation that raising a pig in our backyard was a great experience. It went remarkably well, and we were tremendously satisfied with the end product. I have spent the cold winter months dreaming about my plans for next summer. Give it a few thoughts yourself, and you might find that raising a backyard pig is the right choice for you, too.