Butchering Pigs

Another skill I have been learning since moving to the farm is butchering of our livestock. While we take our full size hogs to a local USDA certified butcher to process I have been culling some of our pigs as sucklings and weaners, since we have more pork out in the field than we need if we allowed them all to go to market weight.

I previously butchered two of our piglets, in both cases by bringing them in from pasture to a small pen besides the barn before dispatching them. I only needed to carry the first one a couple hundred feet, from one side of the barn to the other, and since he only weighed 32 lbs this was not much of a problem. The second was after we had already moved them out onto the back pasture, and it was a tiring and humorous (after the fact) struggle to drag that 75 lbs pig up to the barn.

Since our pigs are significantly bigger now I needed a different plan. The best way would probably have been to setup an electrified run between the pigs and the barn, sort the pig we wanted into the run then coax him up to the pen. I decided not to do this since the pigs are currently a couple hundred yards from the barn and running that much fencing just to move one pig seemed ridiculous.

I decided that I would just drop him in place when I fed the pigs their breakfast. This may sound crass but it turns out that this is how a lot of small scale farmers do things and as I will tell you below his fellow pigs did not seem to care in the least. I selected out our smallest male pig and before feeding them while they were greeting me at the hog panel marked his head with a sharpie. This way when they were going crazy running from food bowl to food bowl to make sure they weren't missing out on something better I would not mistakenly kill the wrong pig. The cull went surprisingly well. I just tossed their food bowls in as normal, grabbed my .22 rifle and walked up to the unlucky pig and with one shot between the eyes he was down. The other pigs did not get spooked by the gun shot nor seemed upset by their fallen comrade. I then grabbed the pig by his hind legs and dragged him out of the pig pen and into the small trailer behind our tractor and took him back to the house. He was hard to get into the trailer and I estimate that he weighed well over 100 lbs.

Here is the pig hanging while I scrape the hair off.

The gambrel and hoist I picked up last deer season made it easy to get the pig hung at a convenient working height. I gutted and quartered the pig that day and put it in the fridge to chill and age.

Here is a front quarter ready to go in the fridge.

Yesterday I began the actual butchering process. To date I have been pulling the tenderloin and cutting off the hams and shoulders into convenient sizes, but have not done much in the way of real butchering. By that I mean cutting the meat into "cuts" that resemble what one would see in a grocery store. I downloaded some cut sheets from a cool website on barbecuing, so that I had something to work from. I ended up using a hacksaw to cut off the baby back ribs and to make some pork chops from one of the front quarters. This is a case were having the proper tools would be a huge help. I know that real butchers have a band saw to make these cuts and to say I was envious would be an understatement. The hack saw did an adequate job, I used it on Sunday to split the carcass in two, but it was difficult to hold the carcas and cut at the same time. It probably would have been easier if I had partially frozen the carcas to stiffen it some. After cutting the chops from the one quarter I just decided to make a bone in loin roast from the other. When all was said and done we had two fresh hams, two shoulders a couple racks of ribs as well as loin roasts and a bunch of chops in the freezer. Of course two thick chops did not make it to the freezer as they were needed for quality control purposes and were grilled up last night.