Watch This Before Getting Your First Pigs: Choosing the Right Pigs

So pigs are by far the most underrated livestock that someone can raise on their farm, homestead, or even in the backyard. They're personable, they're easygoing, they're friendly, and very forgiving animals. But before you buy some pigs to raise for yourself, you need to watch this video to save you a lot of time, money, and even maybe religion when you acquire pigs. I'm Rob from Dottle Family Farms, and I've raised hundreds of pigs on pasture on our farm here in Mississippi. I've made money on choosing the right pigs, and I've lost thousands of dollars by raising the wrong pigs and then trying to breed them. I want to help you get started off so that you're raising your pigs much easier, cheaper, and it's an enjoyable process for you and your neighbors. There are two major decisions and several minor decisions that you need to make when you get your first pigs. First, let's look at the breed. Start off with a standard meat pig like Deerhawk, Berkshire, Hampshire, Yorkshire, Old Spot, or even Tamworth, Large Blacks, and others like those. A cross between any of these meat breeds works well too, as long as it doesn't have any lard genetics in it. I would not under any circumstance recommend starting off with a Juliana, Cooney Cooney, Idaho Pasture Pig, Pot-Bellied, Mulefoot, American Guinea Hog, and I certainly would not start off with Mangalitsas. Eventually, you may want to move to one of these lard breeds, but start with your standard meat breeds like I mentioned. There are several reasons. First, lard breeds are usually more expensive to raise. Piglets are often more expensive because the breeding stock is more expensive to feed, and they have smaller litters. It seems ridiculous to me to spend nearly $200 for a Cooney Cooney feeder pig that'll be 150 to 200 pound lard ball in a year or so. When you do process them for meat, you'll have a much higher fat ratio than you're expecting. Fat on meat pigs is great, but let's be real, most customers don't want to spend that much money on fat and less money on meat. Another reason lard pigs are more expensive to raise is that they grow slower and they're not as efficient at converting food to meat. They can convert it to lard quickly, but most of the lard breeds are much slower growers taking a year or two to get to market weight. Additionally, people will say that they eat less grain, and this has been my experience as well on a daily basis. They may eat one or two pounds of grain per day, but over a longer period of time. Just because pigs are free, like a pot-bellied pig, doesn't mean their upkeep is free. Now I've raised American guinea hogs, pot-bellied pigs as pets, and mangalizas, and I'm here to tell you that the mangalizas nearly broke our farm financially. That's not always going to happen, but the cost associated with lard pigs is so much higher than meat pigs, and you get a very different product. Also, the standard for raising pigs is set with meat pigs. What I mean by that is there's a lot of available information about caring for deer ox, yorkshires, chester whites, berkshires, deer ox, and many others. Also, you can give feeder pigs that are meat pigs access to free choice grain, and they will pack on the muscle and grow. But if you do that with lard breeds, they will put on a lot of fat, and it is expensive fat. You'll also get an idea of how easy pigs can be. When you pick the right feeder pigs for meat breeds, you get good personable meat pigs that are easy to keep, and they should be ready for the processor in five to seven months. It's a short-term commitment compared to a year or two with lard pigs. With lard pigs, there'll be a lot more time. You'll have at least one group of feeder pigs year-round, and maybe two or three groups to keep the same meat supply that you would with meat pigs. Also with meat pigs, you can choose which six months out of the year you want to raise your pigs. Maybe you have more feed available in the spring, and you want to have your pigs be 100 to 150 pounds in March when you have a lot of clovers and brassicas growing really well to save you some money on feed costs. Or maybe you want to finish them out on acorns in the fall, and so you plan to have them ready at about 200 pounds in October, so they'll put on a lot of fat. There's a lot more flexibility with standard meat pigs than with lard pigs. Next, if you're selling pigs for meat, your customers are going to expect more standard meat pigs and the cuts you get from those. Most meat pigs finish out to about 320 pounds or so, and will have a meat to fat ratio of 70 to 30. With lard pigs, it's often going to be 30% meat and 70% fat, and you're paying more for it. And if you're selling based on your true cost of inputs, your customers are going to be paying more money for that lard. Now, if you're doing it just for yourself, you're still inputting a lot more money for lard, and you may prefer having more of a meat pig. Now, let me be clear. I'm not saying that there's no place for lard pigs. You may decide to try raising some after a batch or two of meat pigs. We've done that over the years and still have some now, and that's okay. But at least at that point, you'll have a place of comparison. Now, the second most important issue is to focus on feeder pigs first, not breeding pigs. I often see people jumping into pigs, and they want to breed them immediately. They love the idea of being sustainable with their own breeding pigs. Or maybe like me, you've had a difficult time acquiring feeder pig genetics and think maybe you should start breeding them yourself. You may be like a lot of other people, though, and the thought of seeing all these little piglets running around on pasture and following their mother and playing is just so joyous. Or maybe you see a price tag for pigs and think that you can save 50, 75, or even $100 per piglet by raising them cheaper. You can't. Not if you've never raised pigs before. There's a huge learning curve when raising pigs, especially if you've never been around a lot of livestock. Now, the YouTube videos about raising pigs make it look easy, and feeder pigs are easy. Breeding them is a whole other story. Let me explain. Like I mentioned earlier, you can get a good pig grower ration and feed your feeder pigs free choice of that grain. They may waste a little bit of a feed, and it may cost you a little bit more, but for the most part, it works out quite well. They'll eat good quality forages with their free choice pig because pigs like variety. And you can try limiting their feed in alternative feeds like acorns or pastures and clovers and many other things. Feeder pigs are pretty easy. To save money on cost, however, you need to learn a lot about the nuances of swine matrician before you can get a good start with feeder pigs and learn how to grow them on primarily forages. Now, if you feed breeder pigs the way you feed feeders, you have a good chance of killing the mother and the piglets all during birth. They need feed to be rationed so their piglets don't get too big in utero. Further, to increase fertility, they need more nutrition when they're breeding, but they need limited nutrition during gestation. Once they have farrowed, they need basically unlimited feed to provide milk for all those piglets. Then you need to sort out how to wean, castrate, and manage the piglets safely. And let me be clear, this is not all as difficult as I'm making it out to be, but breeding pigs is very, very different from raising feeder pigs as well. Now, there are also health issues and more costs. Let's take a look at the health issues associating with breeding pigs compared to feeder pigs. If you get good quality meat breed feeder pigs that are healthy and wormed, you should not experience any significant health problems if you rotate them around on pasture as I suggest in this series, especially if you've not raised pigs before. Now, that's not to say you may never need to worm your pigs, but there are far fewer issues with parasites in feeder pigs because they're on the farm for a short period of time. But when you bring breeders on your farm, the same pigs will continue to move around on the same paddocks year-round. Parasite loads can dramatically increase without a whole lot of rest on those paddocks. And with feeder pigs, your paddocks may get rest for six months or maybe even a year, decreasing the likelihood of heavy parasite loads. Then you need to figure out how to worm 400-pound pigs, which can be difficult. The management is just a little trickier. It's not that hard, but it's just a little trickier. Further, people make farrowing pigs on pasture look easy. My pigs farrow on pasture unassisted for me. I just give them some dry hay or straw to farrow in, and my pigs prefer, in my climate, farrowing like that without huts. But I've also developed good breeding genetics with good mothering instincts that don't squash piglets. They don't need help farrowing. If I were to overfeed my sows, they would need help farrowing, and it's just smarter for most people to get a good idea of raising pigs on pasture and then get used to the pigs and go from there. Additionally, people sell breeder pigs anywhere from $200 to $1,000 or more. A lot of people sell breeding stock for a lot of money, and that breed quality is not right by anyone's standards. Less than 5% of males should be breeding quality, and about 10%, maybe 20% of females should be breeders. Most importantly, however, I value very different things in my breeding program than other people do in their breeding programs. I don't want pigs that have been babied, ferret in barns, and et cetera, if I'm raising them on pasture. Finally, you may jump into breeding pigs and think you like Cooney Cooney, or Berkshires, or Durox, or any other breeds, only to find out that that breed just does not work well for you. You may spend thousands of dollars, months trying to get those genetics right, and then only to find out that that's not really the kind of pig that you want on your farm. So what do you look for when you get your first pigs? You've decided to avoid the large breeds for the first set of pigs that you're going to raise, and you're not planning to ferro on pasture yet. Well, making those decisions weeds out the vast majority of complications. It's hard to get bad feeder pigs in this way, but let's take a look. First, the gender of the feeder pigs doesn't matter a whole lot, but make sure that if you get males that they are castrated. If you get them from a breeder that won't castrate them for you, I would not buy them. There are too many management issues for uncut boilings, from dealing with boar taint, which makes the meat inedible for a lot of people, to the mature boars breeding their pen mates, or worse yet, the gilts jumping through the fences to breed with the boars. Now, if you're comfortable castrating piglets, then go for it. I castrated my first pigs without anyone showing me how. I've castrated hundreds of bull calves over the decades now, and I was very comfortable doing it. Secondly, you want pigs that already have a worming protocol in place, preferably wormed with both fabendazole and ivermectin. Those two drugs cover many of the same parasites, but they also treat parasites that the other one doesn't. Preferably, they'll have been treated within a week or two of you picking up your piglets. You can worm them yourself. It's not that hard, but it can be a little tricky, but it's easier initially if they're already wormed. Do not trust that the pigs have been wormed with diatomaceous earth, pumpkins, garlic, or any other natural remedies. Do not trust that the breeder has never had parasite problems. Worm them if they have not been wormed already. If you want to try other methods when you're experienced with raising pigs, go for it, but if you bring pig parasites on your farm with heavy loads, you will have all kinds of problems in the future. Third, you want piglets that are growing faster than their litter mates. Now, if you see the litter mates all together, grab the ones that have been growing faster than the others. They're competing for food better, they're growing better, and typically, they're going to be a little bit healthier as well. Barrows, which are castrated males, tend to grow a little bit about five to ten percent faster than the females, though some females grow faster than the underperforming barrows. Boralings, uncut males, will grow about 20 percent faster than females, but you don't want them in your mix for the problems I mentioned above. Fourth, look for piglets that are well-formed, straight across the back, with good muscular. Occasionally, I'll get a pig with a hump in its back. I'll still raise it, but it's not ideal, and I would not sell it for someone else. They can have problems when they get bigger. Fifth, avoid hernias, particularly scrotal hernias. Now, I've seen two different types of hernias in the feeder pigs that I've purchased, and I've had none of them in the pigs that I've bred. Occasionally, you'll find piglets with umbilical hernias, and they often appear as kind of a bulbous sac around the penis area. I haven't seen any in the females. From what I understand, they're often caused from the abdominal wall not healing around the umbilical cord very well, likely from an infection after birth. I had one feeder piglet with one, and when you pressed on that sac, urine came out of its penis. It was no longer infected. If this is the case, it may just be a cosmetic issue, but I'd avoid them the first time, just to be on the safe side. Scrotal hernias appear around the scrotum, as the name suggests, and you'll notice a distinct swelling around the testicles. Usually, one is more lopsided than the other. A knowledgeable vet can fix this for you and castrate, but if you live in pig country, you may find someone else who can handle it. Chances are, if you try to castrate one of those pigs with a scrotal hernia, you're going to kill them. If you have a vet do it, it's going to cost you more to fix them than the pig is worth, even if you get the pig for free. Also, because they're not castrated, you'll likely run into boar taint issues, unless you process the pig at 150 pounds or so. Now fifth, there are a few issues related to the color of pigs. I prefer dark-skinned pigs because of sunburning issues. Though I do provide shade and wallows, dark-skinned pigs seem to have fewer issues, in my experience. Now, I have had a lot of Chester Whites over the years, and they've performed well on pasture, and honestly, I did not have any sunburn issues with them. It's not a huge issue, but it is something to think about. I just prefer all things being equal, darker-skinned pigs. Sixth, avoid cold pigs from confinement operations. Occasionally, I'll see pigs for sale that are from confinement operations. Most of the times, I suspect that they're cold piglets that aren't growing very well, usually the runts out of the litters, and if that's all you can find, maybe give it a try, but they're removed already because they are underperforming, and it's also possible that you can find pigs from confinement that aren't cold pigs. If they're stolen, you don't want to deal with them, of course, but if they're overruns or for whatever reason, the pigs will be fine on pasture. Maybe not as good as those raised on pasture, but they will be fine. Now, before I conclude, let me address an issue that I'm often asked about, and that's show pig genetics. I'm not a fan of show pig genetics because they breed for qualities that are different from what I value. However, I started off with show pig culls because that's all I could find, but my best sell right there is a show pig genetic that didn't match up color-wise. She produces wonderful piglets, consistently weans 11 pigs per litter. Her last litter, she weaned 13. If you have show pig genetics, they might work out well. It's much better than trying to breed your own the first time. Most pigs are going to just thrive on pasture. Some will perform better than others, and you can work around that and figure out what you like, but even confinement hogs perform better on pasture than the lard breeds that I've found. If you got some value out of this video, do me a favor and share it with someone you think may get some value out of it as well. It'll help me, it'll help the channel, and most importantly, it'll help get people started raising their pigs for meat. Have a great day.