The Big Pig Post

We are just over a month away from sending our pigs off to be processed into edible bites.  Lots of people ask,  "will you be sad?", to which I answer no.  We will see.  We didn't name them which has kept us from becoming too attached or humanizing them..... and they don't talk or haven't made friends with any spiders or sheep (baa-ram-ewe).  What they have done is grown, at a nice rate for pasture and free will feed pigs.  When we first got them in mid-May they were just weaned and 8 weeks old,  weighing about 30ish lbs (this is an estimate).  Preface posts- Fence Building 101 and E-I-E-I-O.

They grew fast.  2 weeks later and 10 weeks old.  (Homemade trough credit to Jonathan)-

 15 weeks, around 95 lbs each-

And now 22 weeks-

Ha ha.... just kidding, this is a pig at the zoo.  Here they really are.  The male weighing in at 209 lbs and female just under 200 lbs-

Nice and think-

Hams and tenderloins!!

If they reach 240 lbs by the time of slaughter we will get around 140 lbs of meat from each pig.  We will keep one for ourselves in the chest freezer and sell the other to friends and family.  One whole pig will probably take up about 6 or so cubit feet of the freezer (depending on what cuts we get).

Photo compliments of Sugar Mtn. Farm in VT, click here for more info.

How do we weigh our pigs you might ask?  We do not have a scale large enough to do such (actually we don't own a weight scale of any sort).  You estimate their weight by measuring their girth and their length, then do alittle math (girth x girth x length / 400 = weight).  The Pig Site gives a more thorough description if interested.  Here is our pig's growth chart-

The great escape is not figurative, it happened when we were on vacation in July and a neighbor farmer kept them for us in his cattle trailer for a week.
So that's the latest on the pigs.  They will most likely be taken to the slaughter house in October.  The nice farmer we bought them from has offered to pick them up when he is taking his.
Looking forward to having home grown meals-