If you are raising the animals right then you don’t need them unless the animal is truly sick. I encourage you to choose to not feed medicated pig feeds. If you have a cooperative in your area, you can likely get a discount for buying beef feed a ton at a time which can be nice if you are raising a lot of pigs. To get a good deal on beef cattle feed we have to go to Southern States Cooperative or to the Farmers Co-Op. It cost about half what medicated pig feed does and seems to grow a pig off well and be high quality.

We feed our pigs beef cattle grower, corn, or sweet feed. It can be incredibly hard to find nonmedicated feed for pigs. On our farm, we do not use antibiotics unless an animal is actually sick enough to need them. I sometimes spray a spot they have rooted up so they can enjoy a good wallow but you don’t want them to turn their space into a flood zone. I love to watch my pigs when they get a chance to make a wallow but you have to control the situation a bit. On the small farm the pig will splash so much water out to make a wallow that you could very well have a catastrophic water bill or wear out your well pump. The only time I have seen this work out is when the pigs are raised on concrete and the water is sent to a holding pond. Having an auto waterer or nipple waterer is not recommended for the small-scale farmer. I find that this is unavoidable and just something you have to deal with if you want to raise pigs. Pigs are also notorious for getting in their water and splashing it out to make a wallow as you can see from the photo below.

After that, we use a 40-gallon stock tank so we don’t have to water constantly. We water in a large Fortex tub when the pigs are small. They fight a bit but each pig does get its turn because a pig cannot guard both eating stations all the time. After the pigs get a bit of size on them we start to feed them in a creep feeder that two pigs can eat out of at a time. About three pounds of grain for every 100 pounds of pig is what we try to feed for the first month or so. Initially, we feed our pigs in a trough once per day. This is a bit small to pasture four pigs in but we just wanted the lot to hold them in while they were small until we fixed the fence so that they could graze in the upper pasture which is about an acre. We built a woven wire lot that measures about 60′ x 60′. This year we decided to raise four pigs but we did not want to put them in the same spot as last year. They are less likely to try to escape as well. Pigs are just happier and easier to deal with when they have a buddy. I think that it is better to raise two pigs together than trying to raise one. A single pig can be raised in a lot as small as 34′ x 34′. This means that you can put 8-9 pigs on a quarter acre. I use the lower figure of 25 per acre just to be safe and give them a lot of room to root. In The Homestead Hog it states that 25-35 pigs per acre is a good rule of thumb. If you want to pasture pigs you first need to realize how much space you need per pig. It takes a lot of feed to keep a brood pig.

If you just want to raise a few pigs a year for pork, you are much better off buying weaned piglets than raising your own out of a sow pig. For that price, they are castrated if necessary and have had their needle teeth or milk teeth trimmed. The pigs cost us $50 each at weaning and weigh about 35-40 lbs. The college only has so many piglets a year, so we have to get on a list each January to reserve our pigs. We get our pigs from Warren Wilson College Farm. Unfortunately, it was a very wet year and there was a bit more erosion than we anticipated. We did not put rings in their noses so they rooted a lot but we wanted to clear the area anyway. Last year we raised our first two pigs on a quarter-acre lot. Learn how raising pigs for meat can be highly rewarding as long as you make sure you are prepared for the task.

Pasture pig feeder