Can pigs eat potatoes?

[and202]

Ok so we are raising 2 feeder pigs right now. We feed them all our fruit and veggie scraps and bread and all that good stuff plus their swine feed. I've just heard so many different things about feeding pigs potatoes. I've had a few friends who also raise pigs tell me to never feed them potatoes. I;ve also read a lot online already but I haven't really found a solid answer. We live right down the road from a preschool and they have been giving us their food scraps which has been awesome, but recently they have been giving us potato skins for the pigs. So can pigs eat potatoes, and what is the reason they can't? What would happen if they did eat potatoes?

 

[Latestarter]

Wow... good question... @misfitmorgan @Mini Horses @mysunwolf @OneFineAcre

 

[mysunwolf]

They can eat potatoes. The flesh is fine raw or cooked, though raw has more anti-nutrients, cooked is more nutritious. The skins contain a toxin that can be deadly in extremely large quantities, supposedly. We have never had a problem, and have fed them buckets and buckets of raw potato skin peelings. You can either boil the scraps before feeding them (cooking is supposed to help with the toxin), or just take your chances by mixing in enough other feeds that they might leave out the peels. I'm not sure what kind of reaction you would see if they were ingesting too much of that toxin, though.

 

[Mini Horses]

Mine did. They preferred them cooked and the raw ones were not their favorite part of the toss in. They never showed any ill effects, picked thru and ate a few here & there, lived to farrow healthy piglets, tasted fine from the freezer. Fruit was always a favorite.

I find that MOST (always an exception) animals will not eat things that cause problems SO LONG AS they are not in a food deprived situation. Generally they will leave it for other foods.

Pigs cannot always digest well with certain foods. For instance soybeans -- steamed & ground works, whole & raw not so much. Their digestive and absorption systems are different from, same ruminants. Some animals cannot throw up, so if ingested foods not for them, stomach issues cause problems. I did NOT research raw potatoes and pigs.

Tomatoes are in the night shade family and often poisonous to many...the fruit is fine. If you ever have animals in your garden, you will notice the fruits are eaten not the plant. Partly as the taste is BAD...of course, those hornworms are immune.

 

[and202]

Thanks everyone! This is all great information. Basicly I just wanted to know if I threw in potato peels by accident with the rest of the scraps that pigs wouldn't get super sick. We have enough food scraps and pig feed that we don't need to be spending time boiling a bunch of potatoes for them but I guess if we ever had a bunch that we needed to get rid of we could do that. So that's good to know!

 

[greybeard]

http://cropwatch.unl.edu/potato/livestock_feeding

I used to feed potatoes and potato scraps to a FFA project pig I raised. Hardly touched the peelings.
I know they'll flat tear up a tater field if they get into it.