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I'd like to keep a few chickens and a couple of pigs but although I've found plenty of information on care of the animals, etc I've no idea of the economics of it.

Can anyone tell me how much I need to spend on food, vet fees, etc if I get a couple of weaners and have them butchered when full grown? Do I break even compared to buying the meat from an organic supplier?

Similarly with chickens. Generally do they pay their own way in eggs?

I know these are pretty basic questions but I can't find the answers anywhere!

Thanks!

It costs us £50.10 to produce a 9-10 weeks, birth-notified weaner for sale to someone to finish (and we sell for £50).

They're then advised to feed each pig 1.2kg of "hard" feed a day to 12 weeks, then 1.6kg to 18 weeks and no more than 1.8kg from then to 24-26 weeks (slaughter at porker weight). Assuming the animals are kept on grass and are foraging.

With feed prices at £432 per kg (organic sow rolls), it works out at £68.95 per pig to 24 weeks. (But feed prices are rising.)

Slaughter costs vary from abattoir to abattoir, but ours is £30.97 per pig.

Our butcher charges £10 to butcher a porker.

And then there's the fuel costs for collecting the animal from the buyer, then taking it to slaughter. These vary a lot, but say £15.

Veterinary costs should be neglible with porkers, but I'd allow for one emergency call-out a year to be on the safe side. With us, that starts at £50. (Our costs are actually much higher due to keeping a herd.)

Bedding costs us £2.50 a bale for small bale straw. In wet weather, they can use a bale a week. In dry, a bale a month. Say five bales, but split between two pigs, which is £6.25.

Then there are the capital costs, but if you keep pigs year in, year out these become less expensive the more you do it. This covers housing, fencing, slap boards, tools, etc.

You should also allow for the costs of tagging/slapping, particularly if the person selling the weaners doesn't mark them themselves. A complete slapping set-up will cost around £70-80 (slapper with numbers, inkpad and tattoo ink). Similarly with metal tags (plastic are not accepted as ID for pigs going to slaughter).

So we have:

Price of pig: £50
Price of feed: £68.75
Bedding: £6.25
Slaughter: £30.97
Butcher: £10
Fuel: £15
Vet contingency: £25 (assuming you keep two pigs, and split the cost between them)

Total per pig: £180.97 (ex vet contingency and capital costs)

At 24 weeks, you should get at least 30kg of useable meat from a 60kg liveweight boar. A gilt will take a week or two longer to hit the same weight. The amount of useable meat is less from a traditional breed than from the modern breeds. Novice pig keepers tend to overfeed their animals so there's more fat and less useable meat.

With care and attention it should be possible to get more useable meat and less fat (but not too little) from a pig. Our best was a killing out ratio of 76.9 per cent (commercial farmers aim for 75) from an 80kg liveweight pig. That translated to 61.4kg deadweight and 45kg of useable meat.

Back to our porker at 24 weeks.

Amount of useable meat after butchering: 30kg
Price per kg: £6.03 (but ex labour, capital and veterinary contingency).

Personally, I think £6 per kg is excellent value for pork that will be a lot tastier, juicier and better textured than anything you'll get from the supermarket. Add in the fun of keeping your own pigs, and there's no argument—if you have the space, keep a couple of pigs.

But I'm biased!

(Oh, and please pay your pig breeders a fair price for their animals. We get far too many people trying to pay well below the cost of production for weaners and it's insulting to say the least. Also, if you do tell a pig breeder that you're going to take their animals, actually follow through and take them. We get at least one time-wasting fantasist per litter.)


As for hens, feed prices are rising too fast for eggs to pay reliably. We put our prices up four weeks ago to reflect feed prices, only to have feed go up again on Saturday. We'll have to absorb that increase until at least September.

But, we don't do this for economic reasons anyway. We're preserving rare breeds (Berkshire pigs and Scots Grey hens), we're feeding ourselves top quality food, we enjoy having livestock, we get oodles of muck for our vegetables and fruit, and we can supply friends plus work colleagues of the Other Half with our surpluses.

If you're looking at doing it for economic reasons (ie to make it pay) then all I can say is that few farmers, apart from the very largest, are coming out ahead at the moment_especially in pork, poultry and dairying.

Brilliant reply, Stonehead!

We keep our chooks for the beautiful FRESH egges and almost as much for the pleasure of having them around! Because I'm daft they all have names and live out their retirement eating us out of house and home - def' not a money saving idea!

- the other thing about "doing it in a small way" is that you lose every step of the way on feed costs - it's alway cheaper to buy a 25 kilo bag of chook food than smaller quantities - then there's another dramatic price drop if you can do without it being bagged, and have it blown into a silo by the tonne (baqging costs are hefty) - do it for the love of it, not the economics!

marshlander wrote:Brilliant reply, Stonehead!

We keep our chooks for the beautiful FRESH egges and almost as much for the pleasure of having them around! Because I'm daft they all have names and live out their retirement eating us out of house and home - def' not a money saving idea!

Seconded.

The only "commercial" angle we have on what we produce is that we supply eggs to our gîte guests during the season, along with occaisonal fruit and veg. This is something we do not charge for, but it adds - I believe - considerably to the rural-France experience thing, which is after all what we are selling to make our living.

I can't put a cash value on this, but the proportion of re-bookings and recommendations we get demonstrate, to me at least, that it is worthwhile.

Economics are not always obvious, it seems.

Something I forgot to mention. When I said useable meat, I meant useable in modern terms. Actually, we get far more from a pig ourselves as we eat the trotters, heart, kidneys and liver (most buyers of our pork don't want them), the excess fat is rendered down, all the bones taken out by the butcher are brought home and used in soups (then added to the Green Cone), etc etc. The only thing we can't use at the moment is the head, due to not having a cooker and pan big enough to take a head and turn it into brawn. One day, though...

Thanks so much for such a detailed reply Stonehead. It was extremely useful.

I absolutely back what you and the other posters have said about the economics and it not being a primary motivator, maybe I didn't explain the reason for my request very well.

Thanks again

very useful info thanks Stoney. We too are working up to raising weeners.

Don't like brawn myself - hate jelly things... but had pigs ears recently and they were yum! - and things like cheeks and tongues can be used in sausage cant they?

Yes, and you can make excellent bacon from the jowls. However, cutting a pig's head up is a fiddly and time-consuming job that I'd have to do myself. Not a problem except that I have rather a lot of fiddly, time-consuming jobs for some reason, so I need to deal with a few things on an efficient basis. Pig's heads have to come into the latter category.

those fiddly time consuming jobs like ploughing a field by hand!!

quite understand that its not on the urgent list! was thinking more about me using bits of the pigs head when I dont eat brawn..if/when we ever get pigs

My mum makes brawn to die for Stoney. It looks disgusting but the Dude and I love it though mrs Cs not that keen.

Great post by the way, me I'm frightened by doing the sums as I know it's costing us plenty when you take in capital costs like trailers, fencing and arks but then we do it for the quality of our lives and theirs.

Cheers, Paul

Ploughing by hand isn't that fiddly. I was thinking more of my repairs to the plough. Using files to shape a new screw to hold the plough to its frame is fiddly and time consuming.

As for capital costs, I'll try to find time to write something in the next few days but I have more planting to do, a cockerel to dispatch, pluck and draw, the Wombats to entertain, and the all the usual stuff.


Must dash, school bus approaching!

Thanks for the detailed breakdown Stonehead. We also keep pigs and chickens (and goats, geese, ducks and so on). In Australia we can kill our own animals so long as the meat does not go off farm. Anyway, for us the costs are less because we do not have the abattoir costs, nor the butcher costs - we make our own bacon, ham, sausages etc and find that economically we are certainly ahead. As for the chickens, we grow some of the feed and they are freeranged as well.

I personally think that besides the economic points our main reason for doing what we do is that we are assured of clean food that is raised and dispatched humanely and it is difficult to put a price on that. DH is a chef working in the food industry most of his life and studying food and its effects, anyway to cut a long story short, the more you know what goes into your commercial foods the more desire you have to grow your own We love what we do so guess that is reason enough.

Cheers
Mauzi

I can legally kill a pig and eat it myself, but I can't legally provide it to anyone else to eat—including family members and visitors. People usually say "but who's going to know?" The inspectors, that's who. We've had several visits from council animal welfare officers and one from a Scottish Executive Animal Health officer. They go over the paperwork very closely indeed.

We paid 1.89 in Sainsbury's for 6 organic eggs...please tell me that our own hens (when we get them) will cost us less... eggs are being priced out of our budget.