Raising your own meat

Good eats! 

D day tomorrow for the chickens. Hard to believe it's already been 2 months! I think we ended up with 32/45. Not great but not terrible. They are BIG this year. I'll get some weights on them tomorrow. 
Picture is 2 weeks ago, they look tiny compared to now.

Let the fun begin!

Only had 3/24 eggs hatch this go around. I never have great hatch rates, but never this bad. Thinking I just started them too early and the eggs got colder than I figured they had. Who knows, I don't really need more chickens I just like to add a few each spring. With my egg intolerance, we end up giving majority of eggs away to family, friends and co-workers. 

45 meat chickens delivered tomorrow along with 2k pounds of swine feed and 1k of 20% meat bird crumble. Local feed store delivers for free which is great. 

Things are greening up and starting to kick off this spring. Looking forward to another great year! 

Bacon seeds are warming up to me, as long as they are hungry they'll let me scratch their ears. 

Try to not get connected to them, but it makes dispatching them easier if they aren't afraid of you when the time comes.

First attempt at buckboard bacon in the works. Using a pork shoulder (still has the bone in, didn't realize it until I was already ready to start the cure so had to roll with it) and while I was originally planning to cure for 7 days, the more I read about it the more it sounds like I need to cure for 10-14 days, so I'm going to give it at least 10. I used a wet cure recipe instead of a dry cure. More of an experiment than anything. 

Chicken egg production really picked up during the warm up last week. Getting at least 6 chicken eggs and 18 quail eggs a day. I'm probably going to be selling off my quail and quail hutch this spring, it's been fun but they are messy and without being able to eat eggs myself we really don't need two streams of egg sources. 

My last pig is packing on the pounds. She's heading to my brother in law after processing next month. This one will probably be about 325 on the hoof before I can get into the butcher, a little bigger than I normally shoot for but not bad. 

Meat chickens and next round of feeder pigs on the horizon. Then gardening, then chaos right around the corner!

Fish - I missed your question about whether it's worth it to have them go longer. That's not as simple of a question as it seems, but really just comes down to personal preference. From a cost perspective, no it's not worth it. The amount of feed it would take to add on those 30# would probably increase my cost/pound by at least $.50 for the whole pig. But certain cuts of meat, especially the ham and belly, tend to stay fairly small until they start packing on those extra pounds so from a quality of end product standpoint, it can still be worth it. There's nothing worse than thin bacon with more fat than meat! Winter also factors into the ​equation, they grow slower in the cold so what might take 2 weeks in summer to put on weight could take a month in winter. I'm still learning so I don't quite know how much the cold affects growth.

I did end up processing both pigs, mainly because I had the help and just wanted to get it down. 

I think I use this forum as my personal 'gripe site'. It's nice to vent some of these frustrations.

With the tank heaters I'm using for the pigs and chickens, I was under the assumption that a smaller container would be easier to heat and didn't look into it. Turns out, smaller containers freeze easier because of the surface to volume ratio. I couldn't figure out why my 20 gallon water container was freezing when my heater is rated for up to 100 gallons, but that must be why. So anyways, I missed checking on the pig on Sunday afternoon so when I went out last night, water was frozen solid. And I mean solid. To the point that I got my ice spud to break it back open and chisel out as much ice as I could. In the midst of that, of course I punch a hole through the lower side of the plastic container so now all the water just drains out. Had to cut another barrel in half to make a new waterer. Just not what you want to be doing after a full work day in the cold and wind last night!

Anyways, keep on keeping on folks!

First half of pork belly made into bacon. ​We are set on bacon for quite awhile now!

Asking myself the same thing. Jk jk!! Eyeing up the garden patch already eating bird seed

Junkie, is it worth it to wait another month for it to put on weight vs the money spent to feed it for a month?  I always wonder about that.  Waiting vs butchering.

Weekend project, got her hanging overnight and we'll start processing tonight. Might do a second one, but they're about 30# lighter than I ​like so I might hold off another month too. 

Huntfish - i'll admit I don't follow recipes to a T, I've always struggled with that lol. I just ball park amounts of salt/sugar based on the recipe I'm looking at. I've been using a dry brine. I know there's a very specific wet brine technique that is supposed to be dummy-proof that I should probably look into learning. 

T1&O - probably right, we live in a world dependent on others to do the work for us. Sad times, our ancestors would be disappointed.

Been smoking my own bacon for a while. Are you using a cure calculator for salt, cure, brown sugar etc? Works pretty well. Other than cure, you can increase/ decrease ingredients to your liking! Never know what you'll get until you fry it!