Bought more than I wanted :)

You're BOTH better than me... I do none of it... when the food runs low, I go buy more. When they need food, I feed them.

That's how I am with my goats. Perhaps I don't want to know how much they're costing me! I keep track of hay just so I know how much to buy in the summer though.

Worse than that - I DONT wanna know! It scares me when I think how much I spend on critter food...

About to go buy my normal 18 - 20 bags every other week. UGH!

Holy cow what are you feeding with that amount?

Calculated it out... it will cost me $129.03 per pig to grow out to 283 lbs. So I will have about $150 invested into each pig at 283 lbs so if I go to sell any of them, I need to get at least $53/cwt liveweight to break even on feed costs and purchase price. Plus my labor--but who really counts that? And then gas to buy feed, vehicle wear, bedding, new housing (for when they move from my parent's house to my new house my fiance and I are purchasing).... lol the costs keep adding up but you can only charge so much for a pig to add onto the income! haha Unless of course I direct market the hog or sell the gilts for breeding or as bred gilts.

You will be shocked to finally know how much it COSTS you to sell your livestock to others without knowing how MUCH money you have REALY spent in all of the TRUE and PROPORTIANAL HOLDING COSTS to raise them.

This is a picture from a month ago. I haven't seen them since Thanksgiving, but they're a lot bigger than what they are in this photo. They were supposed to be at my new house already, we just don't have the pen set up yet. But my dad is taking care of them for me. He is one level below a store manager at a grocery store so he gets all of the produce that they throw away--apples, pumpkins, squash, lettuce, you name it. He throws most of it for the pigs but he also treats the sheep. He also gives them corn and some pig feed. When I was still at my house I was feeding them my mix...but it's too complicated for my dad to mix he says so he just throws whatever at them haha. When they come home I'm gonna get them back on my feed mix. And because my dad has taken care of them, we are going to give him half a hog when he's butchered (or maybe the whole hog, but it would just be him and my brother and grandparents eating it lol, my mom wouldn't even touch it haha).

Nice pigs!

Wow, I need some updated photos...they're so little here!

We moved them to our new house back in March or April. We didn't have a livestock trailer, so we put them in the back of an open U-HAUL. In loading them, the Duroc boar got his foot caught in the gate of the trailer and his hoof came off! We hauled them to my house and we called my mom's cousin who came over and butchered him for us. We had to rush to Lowe's before they closed to buy a chest freezer to put him in since there was no space in our freezer. We ate him the following weekend Bolivian style, it's called chicharron -- basically my fiance's family (we had like 25 people over) started a fire and put a big metal pot over it, filled it with water and spices and pork and cooked it for a few hours. It was pretty tasty, my first time having it.

Then, last month, the pigs went missing! Turns out they had dug their mud hole so close to the fence they were able to crawl underneath. They were missing for a day and a half, and apparently the neighbor's pigs across the street were out also. We asked our neighbors if they damaged their property, they said no. But one morning, the neighbor three doors down (quite a ways) said his pool filter was knocked over and drained all of the water out of his above-ground pool. Now, I'm not sure how he can blame us when 1) he wasn't home to witness anything--in fact, he was away in Myrtle Beach for a week; 2) our pigs would've needed to pass by another above-ground pool to get to his, and they didn't do any damage to that pool; and 3) this guy lives across the street from the other neighbor whose pigs were out and according to our next door neighbor, those pigs are a lot larger than ours. My fiance was sleeping at the time he knocked on our door, so we went to stop by later and he wasn't home and he hasn't tried contacting us again about the damage, so I'm not sure where we stand at this point.

Otherwise, the pigs are happy, healthy, and BIG! And now that they are eating pig feed instead of cracked corn and fruits and veggies, they are starting to get some muscle tone and size to them. I haven't been feeding my mix because between work and the baby, there is no time and it's just a lot easier to take a bag of feed out and dump it. I buy it at the co-op, it's $9.48 for a 50 lb bag of 16% pig and hog pellets. A really good deal, actually.

The barrow we will be eating for my baby's 1st birthday party. I'm not sure if we're doing a whole hog roast or how we will be cooking him, but he will be expecting to feed around 55-65 people, of those, about 25 are neices/nephews/cousin's children/etc. I hope he's big enough

We need more and new pictures!!