Pigs Grown Out And Ready For Processing

 You might remember back in January we traded three chickens for two little pigs?  It's been pretty amazing how quickly they have grown.  When they first arrived we offered them raw eggs on their feed and they looked at it as if we just ruined their food, they would push the eggs to the side and eat the dry feed.  After about a week they decided raw eggs were pretty good.  As you can imagine we have a lot of egg waste with eggs that are too dirty to incubate or eggs that just don't develop during incubation.  Well it didn't take long for these little pigs to know that eggs were like manna from heaven on the poultry farm and they began to grow very quickly.

Our plan from the beginning was to process the pigs on our own but plans can change.  The pigs would be ready to process in the spring during our busiest time of the year, so we decided to send them off to be processed by a professional, we'll save that adventure for another time.

The pigs could probably have still used a little more growth but the business that will be doing the  processing stops taking pigs at a certain time in the spring, so we're working with a deadline that we didn't want to miss.

Like I said before, when we began the growing out of the pigs we planned to butcher them ourselves so we really didn't think about where we set up their pen.  We put the pig pen way back behind our old barn where there is no access to it by truck or trailer, not very good planning.  When it was time to think about transporting them to the meat processor that's when we began to think, how are we going to get them there...
You can't really see the pig pen from this photo but it is back behind these chicken pens.  So we ran some wire up to the back of these chicken pens, opened up the chicken pens and ran them through the series of gates.

 Just a small amount of guiding them with a piece of ply wood and they went right into the stock trailer.

Into the stock trailer and away they go.  They'll be back and in the freezer in two weeks.  My bit of advise to you, if you plan on growing out your own pigs, it's not difficult at all and they grow very fast, just put your pen in an area with easy accesses for a truck and trailer.
Have a blessed day.
Angie