spuds for pigs??

[shane]

hi all, been off line for ages but been mad bus.
re-stocked chickens and ducks after fox attack new batch safe for the last few months. got turkeys for our christmas dinner, and got 2 old spot piggies a while back, cute little beggers, escaping a bit and rotavated our garden for us. but heres the question, it says in every book ive read that spuds should be cooked before given to pigs why is this, mine are getting them raw for the last while and no probs yet, also in Ireland illegal to give pigs any food that has been in a kitchen. all help appreciated!!

[camillitech]

boil em up outside on an open fire or buy an old burco boiler. raw spuds are ok but cooked ones are much better they release more starch or sugar or something, can't remember as i'm halfway down a bottle of red

regards, paul

[Thurston Garden]

My 2 Berkshires are being moved this coming Sunday onto my tattie patch. I had 1000 tatties which were drowned by the long weeks of rain in June. My heavy clay soil just did not cope.

Apart from being bitterly disappointed about losing all the spuds, I had the horrible sight of marble sized new tatties on each shaw. Now these are going to germinate next year if I don't get them out of the soil. I have neither the time or the inclination at the moment to dig them out, so the pigs get the job.

They will also clear the weeds off the surface and muck the soil into the bargain. Perfect job, just before the ground is ploughed before the frosts in my opinion!

That's a good point about kitchen waste - when is a kitchen not a kitchen? A barrel over an outside fire in army parlance would probably be a field kitchen!

[shane]

id sy not even pigs wold eat army food, if my experience is to go by!!!
pitty about your spuds, hope it wont be a hungry winter.
i thought alright the spuds would have more feed value cooked, but time wise its unfortunatly unrealistic to boil them up otside, good sugestion though . piggys are also getting spare beetroot from our patch, carrots we bought from a local farmer, pig nuts and rolled barley, so they are getting plenty and should be plenty big for christmas ham!!!

[frozenthunderbolt]

Not that i advocate law breaking, but who stands there to look over your shoulder and make sure the kitchen scraps dont go to piggies?
Maybe your compost heap could be in the pig pen, just incidentaly of course hmmmm?

[shane]

already had inspector from the dept of agriculture out twice, the fact that i bought the pigs in the noth of Ireland means I technically imported them, so they took a keen interst in me. they mentioned feeding them scraps twice, once to my wife and then to me, trying to catch us out maybe. he also took a good look at our birds and told us they werent meant to get sraps either, but if we did give them scraps to keep quiet about it. would hate to loose my herd number over a few boiled spuds. but i like the idea of the composter!!!

[fenwoman]

hi all, been off line for ages but been mad bus.
re-stocked chickens and ducks after fox attack new batch safe for the last few months. got turkeys for our christmas dinner, and got 2 old spot piggies a while back, cute little beggers, escaping a bit and rotavated our garden for us. but heres the question, it says in every book ive read that spuds should be cooked before given to pigs why is this, mine are getting them raw for the last while and no probs yet, also in Ireland illegal to give pigs any food that has been in a kitchen. all help appreciated!!

Spuds are of the deadly nightshade family. If you have already read that they should not be given raw, why are you giving them raw?
Not being funny but just because they are all still alive does it mean it only becomes a problem when they die or you get a big vet bill?
When I kept pigs, I used 2 metal dustbins up on breeze blocks.Filled each half full of spuds and topped up with water. I lit a fire underneath, got it burning real fierce with scrap wood, kept it lit for half an hour then left it to itself. The hot embers kept it simmering all night and in the morning the spuds were warm and cooked. I them mixed them with some barley, soaked beet pulp, grass nuts, chopped apples, rolled oats and whatever I had to hand. They loved the warm mash and people said my pork was the best they had ever tasted.
You could look around for some kind of electric boiler or a single tub or twin tub washing machine and use that to boil them but the metal dustbins and scrap wood are cheapest and easily got.

[Jack]

Gidday

Seriously now, and that's not very often for me, but there is a very good reason for not feeding kitchen scraps and it has been in your news a lot lately. Foot and Mouth Disease is often spread by cloven hoofed animals, like pigs getting access to kitchen scraps whick have meat in them. Be very very careful to make sure there is no meat in those scraps, and that means any meat at all, especially processed stuff cos that is more likely to have been imported which raises the risk.

It's O.K. to feed those scraps to chooks but no not never to pigs.

Don't do anything that may mean you could have caused another outbreak.

[Thurston Garden]

Not that i advocate law breaking, but who stands there to look over your shoulder and make sure the kitchen scraps dont go to piggies?

As Jack rightly says, it's imperative no meat or processed foods go in th pigs feed, but I tend to agree. Whilst technically we don't feed scraps to the pigs, they devour all waste veg from either the polytunnel or the field. We have fed raw tatties to th pigs for three years now with no ill effect to either them, their meat, or us. They are folded, or strip fed on th tatties so they only have access to a small amount of tattie ground at a time. I don't think I would like to allow them to hoover them up wholesale - that would not be good for them. As my Mother says (and she has yet to proved wrong, on anything ) "All things in moderation"

I would also agree that if you had a store of spuds, and the time, it would be great to boil them up. I like fenwomans dustbin set up - the spuds etc must be easier to digest when soft, so if nothing else, it would increase the feed/meat conversion

[shane]

i agree, disease very easily spread with contaminated meat, it would make me very unpopular with my farmer neighbours!!! a lot lf people have told me they have fed pigs raw spuds and none could tell me why all the books say to boil them. its only a part of their diet, but an important one as i get the ones the supermarkets wont buy, odd shaped, ugly ones for dirt cheap. also get weird shaped carrots the shops wont buy. thanks for all the help!!!!
this site is really a great resource when facing a probem or just when a niggley question in the back of your mind!!!

[frozenthunderbolt]

While i have no book to bak me up here, i would suspect that the idea of cooking potatoes for pigs probably comes from people being adverse to cooking GREEN spuds which would be deadly poisionus due to their solanine content. raw spuds are eddible to humans, provided they havent been exposed to the light and greened up at all. I dont see why pigs would be any different, but im not an expert though.
That said, the pigs we have had over the last 15 years or so never seem to hav suffered for having been given the odd wild potatoe or 7

[yugogypsy]

Yes and Jerusalem artichokes too, the chokes they can eat raw, but do boil your spuds.

Lois

[Stonehead]

Sigh, yet more urban myths.

Potatoes can be fed raw to pigs, sheep and cattle, but pigs have difficulty digesting potato starch in moderate to large quantities. Cooking overcomes this and the potatoes then become a good energy source for pigs.

What that means is that pigs rooting up a few left-over potatoes in a field will be fine, but you shouldn't feed them raw potatoes as part of their morning and evening rations.

Cattle and sheep being ruminants, on the other hand, can more effectively digest raw potato starch. But even for sheep and cattle, too large an amount of potatoes result in starch bypassing the rumen and reaching the lower intestinal tract where it results in stomach upsets and scours.

It must also be remembered that potatoes are a high-energy, high-water, low-fibre, low protein feed. Feed that's too high in water content lowers animal feed intake and reduces daily weight gain, while additional roughage may be needed to counter the low fibre content. The high water content means 4.5kg of potatoes is the broad equivalent of one kilogram of barley.

We supplement our pig rations with cooked potatoes, but never more than 20% of the daily ration. (The UN Food and Agriculture Organisation gives 6kg of cooked potatoes per day as the upper limit for adult pigs.)

As far as poisoning is concerned, it's only green potatoes plus any sprouts, stems and haulms that are the problem. If you ensure there are none of these in the ration, then there is no danger of alkaloid poisoning. (Having said that, if your pigs do root up and eat one or two green potatoes in a field they will be okay - it's when they have them in large numbers in one go or eat a small amount regularly over a long period that poisoning will result.)

There are plenty of scientific papers and government guidelines for feeding potatoes to livestock, so use Google or get a few books before taking any of this as gospel. Those guidelines have details as to how much you should feed the different species in any given day.

Oh, and chickens can be fed cooked potatoes too - up to 40% according to some sources.

[shane]

so cook the spuds is what it boils down to (pun intended)!!

[Stonehead]

so cook the spuds is what it boils down to (pun intended)!!

That's an over-simplification.

Boil tatties if they're going to make up a noticeable proportion of the feed ration for your pigs. I haven't been able to find any guidelines on this, but would suggest that if your pigs are regularly being fed a ration that is more than 5% potatoes then they should be cooked.

But don't worry about grazing your pigs on a former potato field, don't worry about throwing them a raw potato or two as you lift your potatoes, and don't worry about throwing a few cull potatoes into the ration now and again.