We butchered our two pigs on Monday. It was a great day, with multiple friends coming over to help.
One pig weighed in at 350lbs:
And the second one was 332lbs.
My friend Erick brought his tractor so we could raise the carcasses and move them.
Once hung, we skinned and gutted each pig, then cut the carcass in half and brought it into the dining room to be butchered.
Erick is using a sawzall with stainless steel blades. This makes short work of tough cuts through bone!
These pigs had lots of fat, including the beautiful fat used to make leaf lard:
We should be able to render about five gallons or so of lard total from the fat we saved.
The pigs were apparently a Red Wattle/Guinea Hog cross, and had lots and lots of good fat inside. We also got some good pork loin, roasts, Boston butt, pork belly for bacon, and some beautiful pork chops.
The big chest freezer is full now!
Last night I made about 10lbs of loose sausage, which we’re about to eat with breakfast.
We’ve got many pounds of bacon to smoke and cure, plus lots of lard to render. We ground the fat up to make lard, plus ground lots of scrap pieces into ground pork, using our Kitchenaid stand mixer with the meat grinder attachment.
We used freezer bags to package most everything:
As a side note, why are all the vacuum sealers we’ve ever used such temperamental and unreliable machines?
Overall, pigs may have been the easiest and most productive homestead animal we’ve ever raised. They were mostly fed on scraps and expired bread and needed little care to grow to an enormous size.
We raised them from about January 10th to December 11th of this year and they went from little piglets to big old beasts in that time period.
They were so cute, before they got huge.
In 2024 we’ll definitely do it again. I am sold on pigs. It was well-worth trying, and now I see why our ancestors raised them as a survival staple.
A big thanks to Erick, James, Holly, David, Helen, Eva, Collette, Colina and Stella for helping out, along with the help from our own kids who jumped in and got things done.
The butchering took from 8:30AM to about 9:30PM. What a day, and what a yield!
UPDATE:
Our final total yield was 449 3/4lbs, from two pigs which weighed a combined weight of 682lbs at slaughter. Read more here.
7 comments
Well done!! We were gifted a LEM grinder and food sealer, for our first deer season, wow, they worked great! I also got the attachments for sealing jars, which I had previously done with a vacuum chamber and a brake bleeder, very arduous! Our sausage is great, and we tried our hand at jerky too, yum!! Glad for your sharing, thank you. betty
I just got the Cabella Pro Series vacuum sealer for some deer and it worked great.
We process anywhere between 2 and 7 elk every January. The key is having multiple food savers so they don’t get overheated. Butchering is hard, good work. Enjoy the fruits of your labor!
Elk! That’s a nice heavy animal!
Looks like some tasty meals coming up! A buddy of mine shoots me a few wild hogs each year. Then I gotta go drag them out of the woods and do the butchering. He generally gives us tons of deer each year too since he’s an avid hunter. Hopefully I’ll be bagging my own here soon. Just did the hunters coarse to get licensed. Hate having to get a government permission slip to do what I should be able to do rightfully but guess they got us under their thumb already. Plus I’ve gotten into trouble with FWC before selling snakes without a license so next time I’ll be in bigger trouble…better safe than sorry. Anyways enjoy that bacon!
We use a Weston Pro Vacuum Sealer and it works great.
I have my eye on one of these. They’re pricey, but amazing, and the chamber makes a notably better vacuum and seal than the straw-sucker ones.
https://a.co/d/hJ4lptI