"Raising 3 Pigs: How Much Money I Made This Year"

Good morning barn cats. We've got a wet and rainy day today. Or at least it was a wet and rainy night and it should be a wet and rainy morning. But it's actually also a very big day here on the farm. So it's been a couple of weeks since we dropped the pigs off at the butcher. I got a message yesterday that all the smoking and curing is done and so I got to go back to the butcher to pick up the pigs. I guess I should say pork. And by the end of this video I will break down for you guys like all of the numbers. Like how much did it cost to raise the pigs? How much pork did I get? How much money will I ultimately make? How much did the disappearance of Sir Porkington actually end up costing me? Like I'll go through all of those things by the end of this video. But before I can do that I got to get the pork and the numbers and I got to go do morning chores. I don't see any goats or livestock guardian dogs out right now. Of course they're probably all hiding under shelters to get out of this rain. Good morning chickens. I got some scraps for you. Hi Abs. How's it going? You're looking a little soggy. Where's Mr. Toby Dog? Doesn't look like he's underneath there. Oh there he is. Toby was actually hiding in the greenhouse. How's it going pal? Lately Toby really likes to hang out in the backside of the hoop coop. Keeps them nice and dry. Abby Dog's a little bit muddier this morning because of where she chose to hang out overnight. And of course the one cluster of animals who is not unhappy about all this rain are the ducks and geese. And yes as expected the goatee otises are hiding out in their goatee otis house. The ducks and geese love the rain. The cattle are kind of indifferent to the rain. The dogs, the chickens, the barn cats, and yes the goats they all hate the rain. And generally this human doesn't mind the rain except when it's like 45 degrees Fahrenheit and rainy. I think the only thing worse than that is when it's like 35 degrees Fahrenheit and rainy. It's hard to stay warm. Like everything's just so cold and raw when you've got weather like this. All right let's see if we've got any chicken eggs this morning. We got one right here. This chicken is always so broody. Here let me just see what you got underneath you. I'm just taking this one egg. You can go back to sitting if you really want. Ah son of a gun. I was trying to transfer hands with the camera and then drop the egg. That's just one of the perks of being a livestock guardian dog. Okay goats I'm gonna feed you. Would you look at these teenage chickens? You guys might have noticed that I have this board up right now. Really the only reason I have this board up is because these chickens keep trying to escape. That actually keeps them from slipping underneath the gate. All right boys I'm gonna let you go into your daytime yard. You can come with me. You guys I didn't say steal the food bucket just yet. We're gonna feed you over here because you still have a little bit of stuff to clean up in this area. Uh-oh where did Telemachus go? Barnacus and Lauren have become used to Abby dog now and they kind of walk around here. Telemachus who is definitely our most shy goat, he always is like a little bit shy if he sees Abby in his way. And so like you'll see Telemachus is over here. The other goats are over there eating their food and Telemachus is still a little bit too shy to just go over there. He's had to like wait for me to like be his protector because he's still nervous around Abby. I usually just give them a little bit of alfalfa to get them going in the day and continue to like train them to respond to me in a very specific way. But then over the course of today and maybe even tomorrow they'll continue to mow down this whole area. They don't eat nearly as much as I expected when I first got the goats on the farm and so the brush clearing is a little slower. But of course I do just have three little goats and so I don't know if I really wanted to make them brush clearing machines I probably need more goats. I'm really starting to cherish coming up here to move the cattle in the mornings because it's probably only a couple more weeks before I won't be able to do this anymore. You know the other day I was actually talking to somebody about this where I basically was asked like what's my favorite season and the reality is I love living where I do because we have all of the seasons and usually by the end of the season I'm ready for that next season. But I think the one exception to that is like fall. I would love it if fall lasted probably I don't know three or four more weeks before we actually got into stick season. This is the one time of year where I wish time would go by just a little bit slower. Morning Coos! How's it going everybody? Looks like Betty White ended up on the wrong side of the fence and she probably can't get back. Hang on I'm gonna move you guys. Relax, relax. I don't know Belinda. Looks like Betty White is stuck. Betty you're starting to get to be too big to sneak underneath. Here, here. I know you want some milk. You gotta just go underneath this now. All right let's try a different approach Betty. For just the brief of a moment I'm gonna move this fence. Go, come on. Well that didn't work either. All the charlay calves are still just extremely shy around me especially when compared to the highland calves who are at least interested and curious about me. Our two heifers that are charlay are just constantly nervous. Both Buffy who you see way out there as well as Betty White. I'm sure she'll figure this one out eventually. Right now I'm just not in the shape to go chasing her around the pasture. Good morning Annabelle. You're looking wet look crazy this morning girl. You're still beautiful. You got plenty of fresh grass to munch still. It is kind of incredible to see how brown everything's starting to look over here but where I still have the fresh grass everything is looking wonderful. So now I'm on the road heading to the butcher to pick up the pigs and for those of you guys curious about the pig business case like I said I will go through all the numbers. Probably the first number that's worth noting is that this year each piglet cost me two hundred dollars. That's two hundred times four. As I'm doing all of the pig math to figure out how much money I made raising pigs this year I'm definitely going to include the costs for Sir Porkington who was the pig who disappeared and is now rumored to have become Pigfoot wandering around our farm even though I don't think he's really wandering around our farm. It's been more than two and a half months. I have no idea what happened and no I do not think any friends or caretakers or anyone who works around the farm actually took him. No I don't have any evidence of anybody coming on to take him. No I don't have any evidence or tracks of him wandering around the woods in our farm or even within like a five ten mile radius. It continues to be this incredible mystery that I scratch my head at. But yes I am heading to the butcher right now to pick up three pigs even though I purchased four pigs at the start of the year. And so my initial cash outlay I'm including here for the cost of wiener pigs is eight hundred dollars. I'm driving up to the slaughterhouse realizing I'm wicked imprecise with my language when it comes to this. You know I guess technically a butcher would be somebody who breaks down a dead animal into different cuts of meat versus the slaughterhouse where they kill the animal and may or may not process it down to pieces of meat. And so the place we're heading is actually technically a slaughterhouse or if you want to get French and fancy abattoir. They also do butchering and so what I'm going to pick up are like all the cuts of meat. I'm not picking up like whole animals. When I sell these cuts of meat I'm actually selling them only to a handful of customers. Four customers including Allison and me just because I was selling them as half and whole pigs versus selling them as retail cuts. They are packaged as sellable USDA inspected cuts of meat but I didn't really want to have to sell like piece by piece. Go to farmers markets or set up like a farm stand or something. And so I basically just found it much easier to sell them as half and whole hogs at actually six dollars and 25 cents a pound was my per pound weight. So we'll see how we do. And as I'm pulling in here I'm gonna have to turn off the camera because there's no filming allowed. All right we are all loaded up. The entire pickup bed actually has the pork in it and I have a spreadsheet with all the numbers in it. But before I dive into any of that stuff I am going to rush back to the farm so I can get all that back into the freezer. And because we're still having some off and on sprinkles here I covered everything with a tarp just so the boxes don't get wet and fall apart when I try to move. So back to the farm my friends. So this right here is what three pigs looks like when processed and boxed. You'll actually notice they have their hanging weight written on the side. So like this is one pig, this is another pig, I think this is the third pig. My three hanging weights ended up being 186 pounds, 180 pounds, and 179 pounds. So now I've got to go through the process of sorting and packing my customer orders. So because people got half or whole hogs I want to be able to separate out certain things and some things like the smoke products are still commingled and so I got to separate that out as well as take the stuff that I'm keeping on farm and pack it into this freezer. If you're curious about what it looks like when you go to a real deal slaughterhouse this is how it typically comes packed in. So all the product is labeled by cut. You actually have your weights right on the package. For a couple extra dollars they'll put the farm name right on it too. And so while it's a lot more expensive than if you went like the backyard butchery route that I went last year, the trade-off is that your end product looks a whole heck of a lot more professional. They even package the tail for you which I'll probably end up giving to the dogs. And with that I think I've got everything packed and sorted and ready for the pickups. In fact my first pickup should be happening in just a few minutes. But while I wait for my customers to show up I did have a gift I wanted to give out. No that gift is not for the goats. That gift is for very good livestock guardian dogs. So a lot of times when we butcher our animals and we have some of those less desirable cuts of meat like for example the feet, I like to let the dogs be rewarded. For my abbey dog I have a pig's foot. You can take that. And don't worry Mr. Toby Dog, I didn't forget you either. Oop, fell out of your mouth, huh? Any sort of butchering day is always a big hit with the dogs. I could have defrosted it but I think they'll have more fun chewing and gnawing on this thing as it's still just sort of a pig popsicle. so involved in making the spreadsheets and doing the number analysis and like all of that stuff. I just went to the post office box. I've got something exciting to share with you guys too. I'm super excited. This is what I think it is. You guys are going to like it. One of the things that I mentioned that I have as a problem is the fact that pig foot or Sir Porkington, my pig that went missing, I'd mentioned that that's going to be factored into my profitability calculations for the pigs this year. And so I was like trying to come up with a way to like close the gap financially and so one of the things I decided to make is pig foot merch. And I think this is the latest batch of pig foot merch. Yeah, this is like a drawing that I made and I've got now officially pig foot water bottles, pig foot t-shirts in multiple colors. There's also pig foot shirts and graphics in the child size which I'll probably send to my nephews. We even have our own pig foot hoodies now. It is kind of a unique privilege to be able to take a business disaster for our farm like losing an entire pig and turn it into merchandise lemonade. You can also actually see my friend Jeff. He's up there right now painting the church. Like the church in our town is kind of iconic. It's like one of the biggest tourist attractions we have in town and he's up there right now painting. Which with my fear of heights is a job you could not pay me a million dollars to do. The other interesting site that I've been seeing around town lately, particularly because we're in peak foliage right now, is like there's all these folks from out of state who are here taking pictures and video. In fact there's this like one hill where you come out in the morning to like go to somewhere like the post office and you just see all these cars and all these people with like cameras and tripods set up taking pictures and it's like this one picture of the church from this one angle that if you look online and like you search for Peach from Vermont you'll see this one image absolutely everywhere and it's kind of nuts. And even though technically I would argue that peak foliage was achieved last Thursday at 3 30 p.m. we're still kind of at the height of foliage season before we get to stick season. Okay with farm chores now out of the way, Ginny please don't knock over my water bottle. Let's sit down and have a conversation about our pig numbers and how pigs in 2024 fared for our farm. Of course let me get these out of here first. We actually had the kids from the Peacham elementary school here recently and they did drawings of the farm's ecosystems so that's what I think the last project we were doing here up on this table was. But yeah let's talk turkey or pigs I guess I should say. So I actually took a minute to prepare some slides for you guys to help me better explain what I need to explain and break down all of the numbers. As far as my pigs for 2024 go these are last night what I came up with as the numbers. So the first thing to think about when you're raising your pigs is just how much that pig is going to weigh. That's going to dictate a lot because I'm charging per pound. Again the price per pound that I was charging for each half share of pig was $6.25. There was also like a butchering fee which I'll talk about in a little bit but $6.25 was the base charge per pound that I was selling to people and so the weight of the pig matters a lot. But that said I was trying to charge a premium price and have really good pigs and you know last year I let my pigs grow probably four or five weeks longer than I would have liked. It wasn't really that big of a deal from a feeding cost perspective because I was continuing to luck into a lot of free food sources but it made them bigger it made them fatter but the quality and sizes of the meat were like a little bit less than ideal. My goal was to try to raise my four pigs to each be 250 pounds on the hoof when I took them to the processor. Usually people are going for like somewhere between 250 and 275 maybe 300 on the outside. Let's take a look at the hoof weights for my four animals. So when I brought them to the slaughterhouse and like when you saw Zach walk them off the trailer this is how much they weighed immediately as they got into the building and got weighed. So Prince Philip was the largest at 259 pounds. Penelope who was our lone female she came at 251 and then Percy came in at 249 pounds and then obviously our friend Pigfoot he uh I don't know how much he weighed I mean he was actually always the smallest of the four pigs but I don't know what he came into as a weight. And one of the interesting things about this exercise right is if you're going through a proper butcher you have to set up your butchering date months in advance and so typically you're trying to set that target weight without even knowing how things are going to go over the course of the summer. And so I feel very good about the result that I got here where again my goal was 250. Yeah I couldn't be happier with what happened from a hoof weight perspective in terms of hanging weight. So again this is how much the pig weighs after it's butchered and you take out the guts and the grossness and like this is how much meat I actually have to sell. That's that 186 pound number for Prince Philip, 180 pounds for Penelope, 179 pounds for Percy and so as far as a target weight for the whole animal this is right in line with what I was hoping for and I feel pretty darn good about it. And yes our friend Pigfoot remains a mystery. Now as far as price like I said it was $625 per pound that I was going to charge everybody because I was going through a USDA inspected butcher. I knew that my butchering costs and slaughter costs were going to be significantly higher than they were last year and so to offset that for each half share I was selling I actually also had a $200 processing charge that I tacked on on top of that. I set that number back in the summer when I was actually giving out the shares to folks. I had a rough estimate of what it was going to cost to butcher the pigs and so that's how I got to that number. We'll compare to what it actually cost in a minute. In terms of what I was going to generate for revenue it's essentially the hanging weight times that $625 plus $200 for each half share and I had six half shares to sell. Now let's talk about the other costs that came in here. So it was $200 per feeder piglet this year. That came in higher actually a lot higher than it was last year. I think last year it was like $150. Much like everything out there right now costs are starting to skyrocket and I'm finding that that's making some of this much much harder. It was $200 per piglet that means actually $800 total because even though I didn't get to harvest Sir Porkington aka Pigfoot I still have to pay for him and so that's where you get that $800 number that you see here. In terms of infrastructure costs this was actually lower than last year because last year was the first year I ever had pigs and so I bought a lot of stuff and applied that to the business case for the pigs last year. This year I didn't really have to buy much at all until we had the flooding in July and I had to buy some fencing materials to re-fence them in after my pig yard got washed out because of the flood. That was about $100 of expense and so I had to defray that cost across the whole pig project this year and so you see it there. My entire feed bill again this is an insanely low number if you don't raise your pigs the way I raise my pigs was only $503 this year. So for pretty much the five and a half months that they were here it was about $503 which for four pigs is an insanely low number for three pigs even that's an insanely low number but as I try to make this operation profitable I really had to keep my feed costs down and I did a pretty good job and based on weight I found that about 87% of what the pigs ate was from free sources and so that includes brewer's grains, that includes apple drops, that includes vegetable scraps, that includes kitchen scraps from us or neighbors. I'm just going off of weighing that stuff and I just did some general estimates so for example like I figured out how much a bucket of apples would weigh and then as we were dumping loads and loads of buckets because we were doing like almost dump trailer loads of buckets I had a rough estimate of what that was and I just kept track of how many times we dumped and then used that for the math. Same thing with the brewer's grains I weighed a whole thing of brewer's grains had a sense that each one of those weighed about 47 pounds as I had other things that I had to like basically feed them I just used that as a rough estimate and now in terms of the processing cost the grand total of what I paid the butcher or the slaughterhouse to process them. So everything after me taking them off the trailer to me showing back up there a few weeks later to pick up all the boxes and take them away that cost $1,300. So there was three hogs they were actually really nice and they charged me just under the $2.50 rate it goes up higher if it's bigger pigs but because my guys were very easy to work with and everything was nice they were really nice to me. There's a rendering fee which is $15 so that's $2.40 $2.45 then they're charging you a $1.10 per pound for all the processing and butchering and cutting and packaging and so that's where you can see kind of for each pig they're noted by their hanging weight numbers that you see right down there. There's an extra cost because I wanted to have sausage made and there's seasoning packages that they'll use for sausage and the way I treated it was essentially to have each pig have a different seasoning so one pig ended up hot Italian one pig ended up sweet Italian and one pig ended up maple breakfast. They also did my bacon and so when they're doing that smoking and as well as for the hams there's a charge there and then there's a charge for the boxing everything up and then ultimately you have the product list which is like an extra administrative thing and so there's a little fee there and so all of these things together ended up equaling out to be this $1,300 number which is definitely more expensive than what I did last year. You know I had my friend Cody help with the butchering last year he did like everything kind of soup to nuts and he did a really good job the one drawback was it wasn't USDA inspected and so I couldn't technically sell it I could only like give it away to friends and so that only cost me $800 or so I believe it's definitely probably about an extra $500 to process these three pigs versus doing it the backyard style where we slaughter them here on farm and honestly I get why because you know the packaging is just extremely professional you have the USD inspection costs the whole nine yards and so it is more expensive as far as if I ever do this again in the future which way I'd go whether it be the slaughter on farm or slaughter at an abattoir I don't know I think I'd probably do the abattoir just because it gives me more flexibility for how I can use and sell that pork but at the same time there is an argument to be made around the DIY side of things so with all of that said here's what the true financial picture looks like what you see here is I have six products listed I have six halves that I'm selling they have a variety of weights so 90 90 93 93 89.5 89.5 what you're seeing here is all the costs are split in half so the piglet cost it's for each half is a hundred dollars then if I think about the cost for feed if I take that 503 and divide it by six that's where that 83 charge comes into play and I'm also realizing I misspoke when it comes to my infrastructure it actually totals out to be about 300 not 100 I was thinking about the per pig infrastructure charge and so that's why you actually see it as fifty dollars per pig of an infrastructure cost and then in terms of slaughter and processing I took that thirteen hundred dollars and basically split that six ways and that's where you get my full picture of all of the expenses now in terms of the sale price like I said that's 625 per pound there's a processing fee of two hundred dollars and so for example 180 pound pig each half ends up being 562 dollars in revenue plus the 200 and processing kind of just go down here and see just what that picture looks like and then also this becomes where our friend pigfoot comes into play I divided the 200 for the piglet pig that was Sir Porkington and I added that cost to each pig that I was selling so that way I can create a business case that truly reflects what my operation looked like this year and so you see this three dollars and 33 cent charge down the line I did 34 cents for one of these guys just so that I don't have the rounding problem and so it's almost a thousand dollars to raise each pig from buying the piglet the infrastructure the cost of butchering like everything it was about a thousand dollars per pig and so you see that 485 dollar charge per pig half and so when you take my revenue which was this 200 plus the 562 which gives you seven five sixty I really should never do math in public I don't know why I even try that's 762.50 so that's your total revenue for we'll just call it this pig one here and then you subtract the 485 that leaves you with 277.50 for each half that I'm selling and so as you do the math it'll be somewhere between 550 to 600 per pig that I'm making in profit as I go down the line and my total bottom line profit number for 2024 on the pigs is going to end up being almost 1700 and so that's with three pigs plus the loss of one pig it's still pretty good I mean that's why you know when I looked at it last year pigs were a really profitable enterprise and so like just doing a quick comparison year over year right my piglet costs got more expensive in 2024 my infrastructure cost would have been much cheaper but they were only a little bit cheaper because of the flood and then my feed costs were slightly higher even though I only had the extra pig and so I feel really good about that number the big difference is the cost of slaughtering and what that does to my numbers and just how it changes the picture so now I know the question a lot of guys are going to ask is will I do pigs again next year and I've already pretty much come to the decision that I won't not that it's not profitable not that it doesn't make sense business-wise for the farm I want to try to do some things new next year and I won't be able to expand my own like capacity to do more work without letting certain things go and I'm gonna just stop doing pigs for a year and see how I feel as I undertake some of these new experiments there is an experiment I'm running as we speak related to Pigfoot aka Sir Porkington if I can actually still make him be profitable and we'll see how that turns out and I'll probably report on that one by the end of this year so stay tuned for that and so yeah if you're ever considering raising pigs in your backyard and like you want to like maybe have one for yourself and you maybe sell one or two shares to some friends these are some pretty realistic numbers that you too could use biggest difference I think is just remember that I drive my feed costs way down in terms of of what I spend versus what a lot of other people would spend and so if you're doing your own assumptions just keep that in mind I think the other thing to note is too I can easily raise more pigs but the problem is I don't think I'd be able to find as much free food sources and so my feed cost would go up a lot higher and then that would make my profitability go way down and so if I were to try to scale this up to say doing like I don't know 30 or 40 pigs a year what would happen is I think my profitability would probably shrink down to like a net profit of about I'm gonna guess around $800 per pig which could make sense to do I guess but I don't think I really want to be raising 30 or 40 pigs a year just from uh like what do I want to do when it comes to farm work as far as animals on the farm go and I've been pretty open about this pigs are one of my least favorite I find them pushy I find them messy I find them kind of problem makers I very much prefer the grazing herbivores I have on the farm like the cattle or the geese or even the goats just there's something from a temperament and working with the animal perspective that I just find much more appealing and so I'm going to be leaning into that more as I look at my farm plans for next year and if you guys are curious about what my farm is going to earn next year I will be putting out a video in December at some point that breaks all the numbers down but if you're curious about what my farm earned last year you can take a look at that video right there and it'll give you the full picture of our 2023 numbers and you can even see kind of a full breakdown of what my pigs look like