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Deposits for feeders

1231 Views 15 Replies 8 Participants Last post by  AmericanStand
So some friends have expressed interest in purchasing feeder hogs from me next year. I would raise and feed out, take to butcher. They pay butcher fees. My question is if any of you guys take deposits, and how much you usually take. Also, how do you determine the final price of the hog. Obviously it based on weight, but do you go off current market prices? Do you set the price per pound at the time you take the deposits? I will only be doing one or two extra hogs besides my one. I don't want to rip anyone off or get stuck with a hog I cant eat/sell. Thanks for your advice.
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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.
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I think that should cover all financial costs (no labor). Any thoughts?
So your buyer will be paying $275. for a hog and a ride to the butcher? I can buy 250 pound hogs for .45 cents a pound, (http://www.napoleontack.com/marketrpt.htm) less than half what you'd be charging. $112 is a lot different than $275. So remember you'll be selling $112 pork and $163 worth of salesmanship.
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.
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I think the purpose is knowing that the pig on the table wasn’t fed dead chickens and out of date Oreos.
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.
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