Deposits for feeders

It depends...….

I would never raise a pig for anyone other than my best buddy or family at market value...…..just not worth it.

They can find market priced pork on their own.....…. most cheap butcher weight hogs in the non commercial market are approx. 200 to 250 bucks. Lots of butcher shops which is closer to retail will sell half hogs for 175 and whole hogs for 250-300 before butcher costs.

Last time I ran the number for a random person raising a pig for hard costs its about 125-150 bucks per hog.

Approx 40 bucks for a piglet is market costs....you might find one or 2 at 30 bucks and you might pay 80 bucks.

Approx 160-200 for a ton of feed, approx. 800 pounds to raise a piglet to butcher weight.

So the cheapest hard costs a random person could do it for is 120 bucks, but add in any fencing/feeders/water etc etc etc and it goes way up for a first timer or even if they have a fenced area. More than likely the weekend farmer will be in the 150 to 200 buck per hog costs or more if they go all out.

Even if you are a full time farmer who has breeding stock and field full of grain and your own grinder making feed......you still need to get paid as those things are what seperates the weekend farmer and what they pay.


There is plenty of market value pork at cosco for 99 cents a pound on sale...….


Not sure your set up, but people usually want a person to raise a pig for them because it is cheaper or it tastes better or both.…...and they will be butchering it.

In the end only you can set the price and know if it is worth it for you.....hard costs vary wildly.

While I do know of rare cases where commercial hogs were fed odd ball human food, Keebler cookie crumbs and Hersey chocolate bars, home raised hogs are far more likely to ingest odd stuff. A popular advocate of pastured pork often fed old bakery waste, cheese plant waste, whey, digested brewer's grains and cooked eggs. Reasonable to believe any area with pigs and chickens will include a few hens getting gobbled up, live or post mortem.
Clearly, raising your own pork puts you somewhat in control of what and how they are fed.
A deposit should cover the cost or value of a 40 pound feeder pig. The cost at butcher should cover the cost of your pig's feed and the feed of your friend/customer. Add the cost of killing, gutting and skinning. Customer pays the butcher to smoke hams, bacon, cut, wrap and freeze their hog.
Since the hanging weight will vary, the cost should be geared to price per pound. Charging market prices is likely going to cost you money. I cannot imagine being able to sell at auction prices and cover my costs.
In some cases friends want your pork because they want to know where it came from, value humane treatment and are not concerned about cost. In reality, most just think that by cutting out the middlemen and buying in bulk, they will get a bargain. They will be sad when they find out you can't provide that price break.
But collecting $40 to $80 up front, protects you from a customer that backs out at slaughter time. If they don't have the deposit now, they sure won't have the money later. Continuing to feed pigs while you wait for them to come up with the money is a waste both ways. But you should be able to sell cut and wrapped pork by using that deposit as a discount.
Also, figure out what you'll do if the pig dies. This is where economy of scale helps. If you are raising your own pig, plus one for a friend, a death means you don't get your pork. But if you are raising a dozen pigs, ten for friends, one for you and a spare that you can market at butcher or protection if one dies.

Personally i could care less what 'common market price' is. Its irrelevant to me. Market price is what YOU can get.
I tell up front its $2.00 live weight.
I use the butchers live scales because they're state certified.
We are pushing for 300# roughly.

My pigs never drink swill, muddy nasty water. They have plenty of clean drinking water, clean pasture, rotated on fresh grass regularly, they're happy healthy, they get supplemental veggies and fruufr regularly. We feed a good balanced ration twice daily, all they will clean up in 15-30 minutes or so..
They handle easy. Will load freely, the haul to the butcher is as stress free as we can make it.

My customers seem to like the idea of heritage breeds raised clean, healthy, happy, mostly stress free.... good pigs raised well.....we figure my customers must like what we're doing.....they come back.
If 2$ aint fair for what we put into them then i don't want to mess with it...i got into it to feed my family better pork.
And
We've not claimed to be organic, or any such thing as we do use wormer, and i would certainly use some antibiotics if its absolutely called for. Not properly taking care of health issues is inhumane in my opinion.
And we do lime and fertilize our pasture, and spray for pests ect.

I seem to have touched a nerve. My intent was to show what anyone can buy a butcher hog for and that anything beyond that requires salesmanship.
Great that grocery store pork in your area is awful and your pork is wonderful. That makes the $163 of salesmanship easy. If you can get folks with deep pockets to pay a premium based upon what breed they are (were), that's salesmanship, too.
Perhaps salesmanship to some folks is falsely running down their competition. To infer that commercial hogs are fed swill or drink muddy water is a falsehood that anyone that knows the business would know better. Backyard hobbyists are far more likely to feed a bucket of table scraps and garden waste and pastured pork do drink manure saturated water. It does them no harm.
Some people buy locally grown pork and are willing to accept an entire pig and pay double what they could pay in a store, for the privilege of knowing where their food comes from. Some people will seek you out under the belief that by cutting out the middle men, plus buying in bulk, they can save on their grocery bill. Be sure you know what your buyer wants.

Alice In TX/MO said:

I think the purpose is knowing that the pig on the table wasn’t fed dead chickens and out of date Oreos.

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There are times when out of date foods are added to a commercial hog's ration. Nutritionists are able to blend those ingredients with supplements and standard hog feed. Never dead chickens. However, backyard operations, that operate multi-species farmsteads, feed chickens to hogs. Either intentionally or as the result of a slow hen getting too close to a hungry hog. For years, this site's greatest proponent of pastured pork openly admitted to feeding spent brewers mash, cheese plant waste, bakery waste, unsold chicken eggs and all sorts of garden and table waste. 99% of commercial hogs are fed ground corn, ground soybeans, vitamins and minerals. That's it, nothing else. So, in reality, you can't really use "commercial pork fed inferior feed" as a salesmanship took. Well, not if you are honest.
A good salesman can turn this diet of garden waste, dead chickens, spent brewers waste, old bakery rolls, cheese waste to "humanely raised, fed a wide variety of natural farm raised products". You could say commercial pork is fed GMO corn and GMO soybeans and make that sound like a bad thing. But then you'd have to source non-GMO corn and non-GMO soybeans for your hog feed.