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68K views 209 replies 93 participants last post by  KFhunter 
#1 ·
I thought we could post what we use for feed.
Please no "My feed is better than your feed" posts.
This is more of an information thread for new pig owners to check out what feeds are available and what feeds work for the rest of us.


I know folks use what is available in their area.
We feed a universal feed for all of our animals, horses, pigs, chickens, guineas, cattle, and sheep. We have it mixed by the ton. Each animal gets a certain amount WITH other things.....mineral/salt for horses, alfalfa, hay, hogs get scraps, chickens free range, etc..


Universal Feed
860lb. cracked corn
840lb rolled oats
300lb soybean meal.

The order yesterday came to $278.32....which included $20. for sacking into 100lb bags.
$8. for mixing and 4.30 for rolling.

This comes to $13.91 per 100lb sack. If I did not have it sacked or rolled, the cost would be $12.30 per 100lb sack, which has gone up in the last 15 years, but it's still working for us. :)


Anyone else want to share their recipes? :) Thanks!!
 
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#2 ·
Alright - here goes:

I feed alfalfa pellets to the goats and cow. Bermuda/alfalfa blend pellets to the horses. All from the same mill, in bulk - they fill 1000lb bags, and the back of our pick up. 3600lbs came to $396 last week. Price fluctuates.

Hubby is a landscaper and all non-poisenous trees, shrubs,etc are dumped in the back pasture for the goats, and the cow nibbles too. Being in Arizona, with only bermuda pasture - this is a great source of browse.

We feed rolled barley to the pigs, and it is also the grain for the goats on the milk stand. Barley is under ten dollars a fifty pound bag.

Piggies get all surplus milk, whey, and left over people food, fridge clean-outs, etc. This adds up to quite a bit, actually, as we milk ten goats, twice day and the will be adding NINE doelings to the milking string in a couple of months!

Niki
 
#5 ·
My four sows and 1 boar get sweet potatoes for 10months of the year,during July&August they get catfish pellet feed. Been doin it this way for two years and have not had any problems. In the future will give piglets the catfish pellets year round. They have a 1acre pasture to exercise in that connects to fish pont,so they get to enjoy mud year round.And they also get plenty table scraps the house holds in the family.
 
#6 ·
Because NZ is mainly grassland farming, that's what my cattle and sheep get supplemented with hay over the winter months. The sheep won't eat hay as they have enough grass to carry them through.

Pigs - anything I can lay my hands on. I milk cows to feed the pigs but added to that are household scraps from 7 town residing families plus squash, corn etc from commercial growers when in season. This is all cooked up to a broth to which I add barley. When we kill sheep, I empty the paunch and all the guts are cooked to feed to the sows and boars. The sheep heads are skinned, cooked up with the pig food fed to the dogs. They also get kibbled maize, palm kernal and bran and molassas - the pigs that is, not the dogs!

Cheers,
Ronnie
 
#7 ·
My pigs have free access to pasture, I try to improve it a little bit every year by randomly scattering different forage crop seeds in there. I supplement that with a mixture of 2/3 cracked corn and 1/3 spent brewers grains (wheat and barley). They also get a bucket of whey from the local cheese factory whenever I can arrange it.
 
#9 ·
we have pasture available for everything, we then supplly the hogs with
2 tons of whole corn, 1000 lbs of freshly roasted whole soybeans, & after that is all ground here, we add fertrell hog mixture to provide the minerals & suppliments.
the cows, goats & poultry all get the same thing as above but we change the fertrell mix to a poultry mixture.
execpt for the poultry the other animals only get alittle of this a day
& the hogs are only allowed to eat in the feeders for 45 minutes per day.
I came up with this time frame because i took the daily alotment of feed needed for a hog & put it in a bucket & watched how long it took 1 to eat it, i then added about 10 minutes for the compitition that goes on around the feeders which insures that they all get what they need.
We don't get the greatest of gain % on younger hogs because they need abit more feed to gain good , but we aren't really into the whole commericial gotta have it done in X amount of days thing.
All our animals get water from a natural spring & stream that runs through the property.
I should also mention that all of our grains are Organic & the fertrell mixtures are also organic.
all of our grains are priced at market price for normal grain, so we are mixing our feed for about 50% less then the actual cost of organic feed purchased in bulk from any supplier in the country. our price per lb is also about 20% less then buying conventional feed by the ton from any supplier.
 
#11 ·
First a warning. Be aware of salt. Excess salt can kill hogs! You can go well above the recommended rate, but you need to watch them and be absolutely sure they have plenty of water.

I feed Waste cheese (which I get from work for free) Waste cornstarch from a gummi bear factory (also free), and post dated bread (nearly free).

Besides this they get pasture, garden waste, kitchen scraps, and skim milk.

The only real cost for me is the price of the pigs as I buy feeders in the summer.
 
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#12 ·
well since we raise our own pigs, the piglets dont cost us anything. We feed brewery grains,pumpkins and anything I can get out of gardens and feed store has just givine me a load of pumpkins and squashes. We pick up bread from bread store at $20.00 a load we have a 1 ton truck we use for that, We have 3 restruant and 4 stores we pick up their scapr or left over food, not the left over of the plates, from the kitchens. We havent bought grain really in 3 yrs, they run on 5 acres of pasture we rotate every month, plus now I am milking 2 cows piglets get left over milk.
 
#13 ·
We stole cowgirlone's recipe years ago and use 850 oats, 850 barley, and 300 soybean meal. We feed it to everything. It used to be $180/ton, sacked, but last time the price went up to $200. That was expected.

We get the weaners in late spring and they get all garden scraps until fall and also love weeds that we pull. We give the grass clippings and some alfalfa once in a while. And all the feed they want.
 
#14 ·
For our hogs we buy whole barley from our neighbour and grind it ourselves with soybean meal and stage appropriate mineral premix. Breeding stock get dry sow ration year round, which we topdress with a lactating sow supplement during lactation. My father-in-law owns a seed cleaning plant so we get excess grain from him (barley, wheat, pea screenings, flax). My hubby is a crop researcher and brings him extra of whatever hasn't been sprayed - barley, wheat, whole corn still on the stalk. We feed veggie trimmings and meatless table scraps.

This year we are hoping to expand our pasture so they'll be on clover over the summer and supplement with alfalfa hay in winter. We plan to feed all of our extra milk from our Jerseys and Nubians this year as well.
 
#16 ·
I get mine from a local feed mill. Not the feed store, they resell at higher prices with smaller quantities. I use the same basic recipe as cowgirlone but suppliment heavily with fresh things. I grow mangels (giant red and golden) as well as turnips, cabbage, field corn, amaranth, beets that are fed to the hogs. Of course they get all scraps and I have arranged to pickup leftovers from some local chinese restaurants. (Their favorite is fried zuchini by the way). Mine are on pasture so they get to eat a lot of different things but with all I feed I try to make sure it is natural.

Jessie
 
#18 ·
These are our first pigs (2 yorkshire tamworth mixes) purchased in June; so here it goes:
100lb ground/milled feed sacks for 15 dollars mixed at a local farm (Gibsons Farm in Kinderhook, NY 518-732-7537) which contains soy, corn, barley, oats, wheat & minerals. Our family & neighbors give us all of there meatless table & kitchen scraps along with 2 local restaurants. The only pizza place in town gives us all of the old dough and dairy products. Our whole neighborhood gives us their grass clippings and weeds. Another neighbor gives us her rotten apples! Since we purchased the pigs in June, we've only spent $30 on food, $25 for a bottle of Ivomec & $100 on 4 hog panels. The solar electric fence was recycled from our dogs as well as the xl dog igloo!

I'm really proud of us!
 
#19 ·
I get free bread, dried black eyed peas and produce each saturday from a food bank type place. I feed the bread as grain(1lb bread=1lb grain). I soak a 5 gallon bucket of peas at a time, and cook a big crock pot full over night for their dinner. I pick up a truck load of apples each week to feed(we pick up wind fallen or just ripe apples all over the place...bunch of food wasters around here) I also feed eggs from my chickens. I usually pour sweet potato soup or chicken broth on their bread, whatever i got from the food bank that week. Lately there have been more and more families at the food bank, so i have been having to buy animal racks of bread at a bakery outlet sometimes...it's 340-360 loaves of bread for $15.00. I also picked up 2 tons of free pumpkins yesterday from a pumpkin patch that were already in bins(yay no field work). I went from completely grain fed, to grain only in emergencies if there's nothing else to eat.
 
#20 ·
All the hay they can eat (usually left over from what the goats don't eat), plenty of water, a "porkmaker" from the local feed mill (made for big pigs, but I'm using for the PBPigs), cracked corn, rolled steamed oats.

Leftovers (vegetables/fruits) and drops from the orchard.

I have yet to butcher, but the pigs are staying lean-ish currently.

I plan to train them to electric fence and then pasture them more extensively.

These PBPigs LOVE grass and such!
 
#21 ·
Okay, we just butchered our first three pigs. One pure Berkshire and two Landrace/Doric cross, all three barrows. They were on pasture the whole time they were with us. We still fed a 16% pig grower ration that we purchased from our local feed mill. They mix it there for people like us. The feed mill name is Agplus. I supplemented with 300 lbs of apples a week from an orchard just up the road. They were not too interested in grazing that much at first but after I started throwing the apples over the field they got to enjoy the snacks. I am not sure how much the apples helped on their feed intake because they seemed to eat the same amount each day whether they had apples or not. We purchased 3,350 lbs. of feed with a total cost of $627.64. Now that figure is a little high but we also were raising bred Berkshire gilt (due to farrow Jan 1st.) and another small commercial barrow that was given to us. I would say take $150.00 from the total feed and that will give you a approximate cost of $440.0 The Berkshire and one of the crosses were 245 lbs and the other cross was 260 lbs. That would be .88 cents a lb. in feed costs. Our total costs were close to $3.75 per lb. With all of this said we need to trim our feed costs. Now the questions.
1. What is a PBpig?
2. Can you use unconventional feed like restaurant scraps and still sell a pig or pork products from your farm?
3. Has anyone tried a forage crop like Johnny's seeds Laugh and grow? How has it worked out? Here is the site for pasture mix.
http://www.johnnyseeds.com/catalog/product.aspx?category=289&subcategory=717&item=236
Thanks,
Tom Rusinack
WWW.pondvuacres.com
 
#22 ·
I'm so new at this and really have been concerned about the issue of feed. We're due to pick up our first pigs this week and will be keeping them in pasture/woods. The breed we're getting is supposed to be excellent foragers, and we were told all we had to feed them was corn. But in doing some reading I'm really afraid that that is just not enough. And what about minerals? Are they really necessary? I would much rather not use any kind of commercial mix/feed if at all possible. We have plenty of hay that we put up for the cows and I will be able to give them whey/leftover milk, but that won't be much. Anything else that I really need to be feeding them?
 
#25 ·
Besides all of the other things we feed, we also plant goliath silo field corn. It really produces for us. I do not know current prices, I bought a ton (literally) about 3 years ago and just keep planting it. Pigs and all other animals seem to love it. On a side note, my friends gave me half a pickup load of a hybrid type sweet corn (plants and all) and my pigs would not eat it. I do not know if it was a GM type or not, they just grew to much so I got some. Does anyone have a source for barley seed in Missouri?

Jessie
http://www.redwattlehogs.com
 
#26 ·
we start ours out with corn chops and pig starter for the first 3-4 weeks, then they graduate to a mix of corn chops, oats and 12% creep feed as well as having green grass (late fall & winter they get fresh hay from the pasture). if they slow down in growth we replace the creep feed with small amounts of calf manna to get them back on track :)
 
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