The (Hidden) Costs of Raising Your Own Pigs

I know that a big part of the appeal of raising livestock for homesteaders is saving and making money on the products our animals can provide. That was certainly the case when I got started with pigs. Imagine my shock when, after months of work and hundreds of pounds of feed, I found, at the bottom of the ledger, that I was deeply in the red.

I did everything right. Gave my pigs the best possible life and paid attention to every facet of their care. I bought good feed cheaply, and made sure my herd was always gaining weight.

How did I lose hundreds of dollars before it was all said and done?

It turns out there are hidden costs to account for when raising pigs, costs that you desperately need to know about if you are a beginner. Sharpen your pencil, and we’ll get into it.

Are You Raising Pigs for Fun or Profit?

Before we go any further, we need to get really clear about why you are raising your pigs. Are you raising them for fun or for profit?

Even if you aren’t raising your pigs as a business, per se, but just want to provide an affordable and ongoing source of meat for yourself and your family, that is still a for-profit venture: it is saving you money compared to just buying pork chops and bacon at the store.

If you are raising pigs as a business venture to bring in money, I hope you already know that watching every single nickel that goes into getting them to their final destination at the butcher: the money really is in the margins, and no detail is too small to be worth consideration.

If you’re raising your pigs for fun because you enjoy having them around, that’s just fine, but like any pet, all they are going to do is cost you money in return for the fun of owning and interacting with them.

If that describes your relationship with your herd, more power to you, but you still need to hear what I’m going to tell you so you don’t get hit with sticker shock when it comes to the cost of ownership.

Pig Feed Costs Can Sink You

The biggest cost likely to sneak up on you when raising pigs is the cost of food.

Pigs eat like, well, they eat like pigs, and that is to say they eat a lot…

Although pigs eat different amounts of food at different stages of their life, if you are just raising them for a maximally efficient slaughter at around 5 months old and around 250 lbs, they will consume anywhere from 5 to 6 lbs of food a day, averaged out.

Over the course of 5 months, let’s just call it 150 days to make the math easy, that will be anywhere from 750 to 900 pounds of food to get them ready for slaughter.

That’s per pig!

And I’ve got news for you, feed costs have gone up, averaging anywhere from .30 to .35 cents a pound. Using our figures above, the feed cost alone per pig will run between $225 and $315 – that’s if you are paying the average for pig feed!

Feed Costs are Highly Variable

The cost of your pigs’ feed might be more, or if you are lucky it will be less, depending on several factors. Consider the following and how it will affect the cost of feed for your herd:

Location

Believe it or not, location makes a huge difference when it comes to the cost of pig feed.

If you don’t live very near to where the ingredients of pig feed are produced, typically throughout the Midwest and parts of the South, the feed is going to cost more, and it will cost more in direct proportion to how far away from the center of production you are.

If you live in New England, deep in the Southwest, or along the West Coast, expect to pay more.

Type

The type of pig feed is also a factor. Do you want to give your pigs the basic stuff made with the cheapest genetically modified ingredients and a marginal nutritional profile?

You’ll probably pay around the lower end of the average or maybe even below that. If you want good stuff that is high quality, organic, or has added nutritious ingredients, you’ll pay more.

Economic Issues

Don’t forget all the other economic factors currently plaguing the nation: fuel costs, labor shortages, taxes, regulations, and a lot of other BS can and will drive up the cost of feed literally overnight.

Right now, I know a couple of folks raising hogs living in the South that are paying $0.42 a pound for mid-quality pig feed.

It’s not out of the question that you could be shelling out 50 cents or more a pound depending on where you live, how the agricultural industry is doing, and how much oil is going for a barrel.

All of this must be considered and factored into the bottom line, which we will do in just a little bit. But for now, consider that there are many more costs we have yet to factor…

Your Labor Has an Associated Opportunity Cost

One of the biggest hidden, or I should say unsaid, costs associated with raising pigs is your labor. I know most of us homesteaders are tough, self-starting go-getters who’d rather do things ourselves to save money, but sometimes this can be false economy.

For starters, your labor, meaning when you yourself are doing something, has an opportunity cost attached to it. If you’re doing one thing, you can’t be doing something else, including things that might desperately need doing or just known and profitable money-making activities.

Pigs require a fair bit of care in warm weather: feeding them, keeping food and water sources clean, cleaning up soiled bedding and manure, putting down fresh bedding, health checkups, maintaining their shelter and fencing, etc.

But hogs require tons of extra effort in the winter time, something that all too many bright-eyed beginning pig keepers fail to account for.

We’ll talk more about the winter keeping considerations in just a little bit, but think about this for now: how much is your time actually worth?

Do you have a profession or some other profitable activity underway on your homestead that is a better use of your time? Would it be cheaper to save all the time needed to raise your hogs and just buy pork products instead?

Think about it another way: let’s say you work from a home office and make about $60 an hour when actually engaged in work.

Let’s also say taking care of your pigs every day, and all of the associated tasks needed for their keeping and housing, usually takes about 2 hours.

Whether you like caring for the pigs or not, that same two and a half hours spent actually making money would have made you $120.

See where I’m going with this? Actually perform an assessment of your life and what your time is worth before you arbitrarily decide that raising your own pigs is worth it.

The Numbers

As an exercise, let’s go through the cost of nominally raising hogs to the ideal slaughter weight under ideal conditions using the figures we established above.

Obviously, I’ll be using some placeholder figures for a few things based on my experience and my neck of the woods; you’ll need to get actual, hard numbers for the region where you live to perform this analysis yourself, but this will get you started.

Obviously, the pigs themselves have a cost, assuming you didn’t breed them yourself. More on that later. With the state of the economy, I’ve been paying about $125 dollars for a spring pig here in the lowlands of Greater Appalachia.

Currently, pig feed in my part of the country is fairly affordable, just .30 cents a pound. That means that a single pig needs $225 of feed alone to reach the nominal weight of 250 pounds.

If you don’t slaughter and butcher your pigs yourself, there will be an associated fee with both of those processes. Right now, slaughter usually runs about $85 and skilled butchering at least $125.

$125, Cost of Pig

$225, Feed Cost

$85, Slaughter

$125, Butchering

——–

$560 Total

If you add all of that up, we are at $560 material cost to get the finished pork, including the cost of the animal, its feed, and actually processing the meat.

So, now we just divide the weight of the pig into the total cost to figure out how much that pork actually costs us. But not so fast: the live weight is not the actual yield of meat. The actual carcass weight is about 70% of that on average, plus or minus a few percentage points.

That means our 250 lb pig will only provide around 175 lbs of meat at the end. Dividing our total cost, $560, by the carcass weight of 175 lbs gives us a figure of $3.20 on average per pound.

That pork cost you $3.20 per pound, and that does not factor your time and other things like medicine and healthcare. That’s an average, of course, and does not account for different cuts.

This is the cost if everything goes exactly right and you don’t care about your time. Looking at the cost of pork chops in my area, they’re going anywhere from $3.70 to $4 a pound, and cheaper for bone-in chops. However, my local major grocery store routinely sells good, boneless pork chops for just $2.50 a pound…

Was all of this worth it? I still say yes, because self-sufficiency and being only one link removed from your food on the food chain is a great thing, but if you are concerned with cost alone, think twice about raising pigs.

Raising Spring Pigs Will Usually Net You Modest Savings Compared to Store-Bought Meat

The bottom line is this: if you can minimize your feed costs and keep your pigs gaining weight at a good rate, raising summer pigs for slaughter in the fall or very early winter will usually save you money over buying pork yourself, and the pork you get is very, very good.

But looking at our margins above, that isn’t a guarantee if you’re competing with large grocery store chains.

More importantly, if you are trying to sell that pork to family, friends, neighbors, and other customers for a profit, it might be a very hard sell even at just $2 profit-per-pound.

Bigger Pigs Need More Feed for Less Overall Gain

After reading all that, you might be thinking that you will just keep your pigs alive longer so they will get even bigger before you slaughter them, giving them more time to grow so you will net a harvest of more meat.

Good thinking, but often misguided: the larger your pigs get, the more feed they need just to sustain themselves, and they’ll need even more feed to keep putting on weight. Plus, pigs only grow to a point, meaning actually put on muscle and grow larger.

After about a year or so, pigs are just going to be packing on fat if you keep feeding them, and chances are you aren’t going into the lard business.

The bigger your pigs get and the more feed they need to make ever smaller gains, the lower and lower the feed conversion rate becomes, and that means profitability starts to plummet.

Said another way, you’re going to be spending more money on feed for a shrinking return of meat compared to what you spend on food.

Timely Slaughtering is Essential

Because larger pigs are costlier and less efficient in terms of production, timely slaughtering is essential to stop the financial drain.

I know it seems like a brutal calculus, and it is, but every single day that your herd is alive past the ideal time and weight for slaughter, the less money you’re going to make or the more you’re going to pay for that pork headed into your freezer…

This is why professional pig farmers are fanatically dedicated to their timetables and getting their pigs to a target weight by a certain calendar date.

This should be giving you more ideas about where things can go wrong: a backup or mishap when it comes to transport, slaughter, or processing means you’ll be on the hook to keep feeding those porkers.

And you can’t just not feed them: not only is it cruel, but they’ll start losing weight and stress might taint the meat, hurting its quality.

Overwintering Pigs Doubles or Triples Feed Costs

If all this is giving you a grim view of raising pigs for profit, you haven’t heard the half of it.

One of the worst things you can do, and take it from me, is to keep your pigs alive through the winter. Pigs do great in cold weather, that isn’t the issue.

The issue is that they do great in the winter because they turn into little furnaces to keep themselves warm, little furnaces that must be stoked with even more feed.

The rule of thumb is that you should expect every adult pig’s food consumption to at least double when it is cold outside, and it might triple in some situations.

You know those feed costs I quoted up above? If you live in an area with a long and brutal winter, you might be facing five to six months of doubled or tripled costs! Paying the average for feed, that will be between $450 and an eye-watering $945 per pig!

Obviously, you’ll never recoup your cash under these circumstances. Not with the rarest heritage pig breed producing the most sublime pork do you have a prayer of making your money back.

Winter Care Greatly Increases Labor Demands

As if winter wasn’t going to be devastating enough for the profitability of your pigs, you’ll also have to account for greatly increased labor requirements…

You’ll need to bring pigs food more often, change out bedding more often, and keep their water liquid one way or another. In my experience, heated containers have iffy reliability, so chances are pretty good you’ll be hauling warm buckets of water out to them several times a day.

If you think back to the opportunity cost of your time we talked about above, now those costs are increasing right alongside feed costs.

The only time I would even consider keeping pigs alive through the wintertime is if they are actual pets, a hobby herd, meaning I don’t care so much about their productivity and profitability.