There is entirely too much information out there about the costs of raising pork that doesn’t quite tell the whole story or is simply presented in a rather misleading way. Since we picked up a pig from the processor yesterday, now is the best time to share the price tag with you. My goal here is to be as accurate as possible and give you real numbers, without approximations, without fluff, without any of the nonsense of wishful thinking.

Spoiler alert! It costs less (and also more) than you think. This is a long post so buckle up. I’m not leaving anything out.

Full Disclosure – I am writing this on March 7th, 2023. This is our third year raising pigs, and we have raised pure Berkshire and Berkshire x Duroc crosses only at this time. I am not adding any taxes to any price listed.

So how much does it cost?

I’m going to give you the short answer, but short answers are the misleading bits you see all over the internet. In a nutshell, it cost us, in this exact situation, $3.71 per pound of pork we put in the freezer yesterday afternoon.

So let’s get into the long answer. Let’s assume that you are adding the costs of raising pork to your life without offsetting it anywhere else. Here is the breakdown of our costs this year:

• Feeder Pig Purchase Price: $75
• Gas to Pick Her Up: $73.85
• Vehicle Maintenance: $25.32
• Feed: $329.56
• Gas to Take to Butcher: $67.16
• Vehicle Maintenance Again: $11.04
• Trailer Maintenance: $3.68
• Butcher Fees: $286.15
• Gas to Pick Up from Butcher: $24.17
• Vehicle Maintenance a Third Time: $11.04
• Total: $906.97

Feeder Pig Purchase and Travel

We bought two 6-week-old feeder gilts (female piglets) for $75 each and a young breeder boar from a producer in Northern Virginia in April 2022. We only took one of the feeders to the butcher this winter, so I am giving you the numbers to raise the single gilt. However, pigs are social creatures, so if possible, raise at least 2 at a time.

If you are interested in the costs involved with keeping adult pigs for breeding, that post is in the works. Keep an eye out!

Gas to drive the almost 4 hours (and the mileage put on our pick-up, a Nissan Titan) would not have changed if we only bought the one piglet, so I did not divide the costs between the three. It is 211 miles from our farm to the breeder’s. Gas was floating around $3.15 at the time, and our truck got 18 mpg. So after checking receipts, it cost $73.85 in gas for the round trip.

We added 422 miles to the Titan’s odometer. According to AAA, average maintenance should be $0.09 per mile driven. However, Will does virtually all of our regular maintenance, so we only add $0.06 per mile which comes out to $25.32.

How to decrease purchase costs:

The obvious answer would be to buy feeder piglets from closer to home. 4 hours is a long way to drive to get feeders in some areas but completely reasonable in others. In our current situation in Suffolk, Virginia, we could have found some cross-bred piglets closer, but our breed of choice (Berkshire) isn’t as readily available.

Driving a vehicle with better gas mileage would also help, but let’s face it: no one wants to put screaming pigs in the back seat of their Camry let alone clean up the nuclear wasteland they would create back there. A dog crate in the bed of a truck is infinitely more appealing — and can be cleaned with a water hose.

Feeding the Feeder Pig

If you’re anything like me, you’ve done the google search for how much it costs to feed a pig and how long to feed them before they’re ready for butcher. You’ve seen the articles written by Extension Offices and grad students. They all say it takes 6 months to raise a piglet to a butcher weight of 250 lbs and each pig eats about 5lbs of feed per day.

I’m going to go straight out and call that absolute bullshit for the purpose of this post.

We raise our pigs on silvopasture, the fancy word for pens set up in the forest. I would love to say that we move them every week like we originally wanted to, but we’re just regular people. Will has a full time job, and I have two tornadoes–I mean toddlers. Realistically, we move the adults when we start to feel guilty about the state of their current pen, but the piglets this year were fully grown out on one patch of dirt.

Here’s a realistic expectation:

It took 8 months for her to hit 250 lbs. Then we had to wait an extra three weeks before the processor could get her in their schedule. So she was just over 10 months old when we dropped her off at the butcher.

The 6-month figure is only realistic for commercially bred pigs. If you’re here, I’m going to assume your goal is to raise some sort of heritage or mixed heritage breed in a natural, ethical sort of way. Sure, the CAFO farms can produce 250lbs of subpar pork in 6 months. We homesteaders don’t.

In that 8 months, she ate approximately 1,338lbs of feed. This is the only figure in this post that isn’t exact. We don’t weigh the feed bucket every day. I keep track of how many bags of feed a pen goes through and divide accordingly. The two feeder pigs, together, went through 8 bags of soybean meal and 37.5 bags of 15% hog feed. I divided that number by two, since there were two pigs in the pen of the same age, and 1,337.5 is the result.

At the granary where we buy our feed, soybean meal is $32 per 100lb bag and 15% Hog Ration is $10.75 for a 50lb bag. 4 bags of soy comes out to $128; 18.75 bags of 15% Hog is $201.56. Add it all together and it cost $329.56 to feed this pig.

How to decrease feed costs:

I’ve heard of people feeding their excess garden harvest to the pigs to cut down on feed costs, but my garden isn’t large enough to have that much extra produce (yet). It’s also worth noting that we get the best results on our Berkshire pigs by mixing extra soybean into a 15% protein feed to raise the protein to 20-24%. Without that protein content, it takes even longer to grow a pig out. If you choose to supplement from your garden, keep protein in mind.

Fermenting the mash in water or milk (better) overnight has also shown to stretch the dollar spent on feed a bit. To see it in action, check out Tokota Coen on YouTube.

Processing and More Travel

Our processor is 92 miles from the farm. Gas for this trip was down to $2.92 per gallon, but the truck managed a whopping 8 mpg hauling the trailer. So that trip was $67.16 in gas plus the same $0.06 per mile in truck maintenance and $0.02 per mile for trailer maintenance for a total of $81.88.

Three weeks later, we made the same trip to pick her up. Since she now fits in boxes, we didn’t need to take the trailer. We switched to the Suburban, which gets 22 mpg, got gas for $2.89, and made the trip for $35.21.

To keep track, that’s $117.09 in travel costs.

So let’s talk processing.

This is a place where your experience could vary wildly. We use a USDA facility who we fully trust to give us only the meat we brought in.

Grand total, we gave $286.15 to the butcher. According to the Order Report (basically a line-item manifest of what’s in the boxes you get back), she was 248lbs live and 190lbs hanging weight. Our processor charges by hanging weight for the kill fee ($0.28/lb) and processing ($1.09/lb), then by the cut weights for smoking ($3.39/lb). We did have them smoke the side and jowl bacon.

Our return on investment will be about 90 meals for our family of 5-6. I don’t mean 90 servings, I mean 90 breakfasts or dinners for everyone. We do ask for all of the organs, tails, ears, feet, etc. back but it almost always gets turned into dog food or treats, so I will give figures for both including the extra weight and for only the meats usable for our table.

Total weight of the boxes we loaded into the back of the SUV was 143.12lbs. After subtracting the weight for all the “extras” as well call them, it comes out to 136.16lbs from the one gilt. If you want to know what cuts we ordered and get a more in-depth view of the process, check out How Many Meals You Actually Get from a Pig.

How to decrease processing costs:

Again, use a vehicle with better gas mileage. However, hauling a trailer is going to trash your truck’s gas consumption even if you can somehow haul a pig behind that Camry we talked about earlier.

Another option would be to use a cheaper processor. The one we use has the second best prices within 2 hours of our farm. We don’t use the cheapest (and closer) option because they aren’t USDA inspected, and they are almost always booked up with wild game from the local hunters.

The truly cheapest place to go to process a pig is going to be your own farm. It’s a lot of work, but there are quite a few videos on YouTube (we like The Bearded Butchers) that will walk you through the process (hehe see what I did there?).

$906.97 to raise ONE pig? Seriously?!

Well, yes. Technically speaking, that’s the totals all added together. And when you divide it by the 136.16lbs, the pork we put in the freezer was $6.66/lb. This is the part where it costs more than you think. If you raise a single pig for the first time, you’ll also need to factor in the costs of whatever style of pen you plan to build for it. Also, you may need to include the costs in gas and maintenance of going to get the feed.

But that number is not completely realistic, either.

Remember how I said you should raise at least 2 pigs at a time? Let’s do the math if we had taken both feeder pigs to the butcher instead of just one. They ate the same amount, were almost exactly the same size, and would have gone to the butcher at the same time. Only the purchase price, feed, and butcher fees double, making the new total $1,597.68. Divided by double the product makes it $5.86/lb.

Also remember that we used the same trip to acquire a breeder boar and kept the other gilt who is going to give us piglets any day now. All costs involved with travel to get them is now split three ways.

Before we started raising our own pork, we made one trip per month to the nearest Costco, 29 miles away. That’s 696 miles on the odometer in a year. At the average gas price for our area last year, that’s $159.13 in gas and maintenance, which is only $53.43 more than we spent putting a pig in our own freezer this time.

How do you cut more costs?

You can do like we do: move around some numbers. I do not, under any circumstances, mean to fudge the numbers in any capacity. I mean move where they are in your budget. For example: we do not factor in the costs of gas and maintenance when discussing raising our own pork. Those are overhead costs that are split over the whole farm and family, not placed on a single animal.

This is where “it costs less than you think” comes in. In reality, after spreading the costs out between the multiple animals we picked up and subtracting the amount of money we would have spent whether we raised this specific pig or not, it actually only comes out to $531.53 to put her in the freezer. We were going to pick up the breeder boar from that farm because we needed him. If we were just looking for a Berkshire feeder piglet, we would have found one a lot closer to home. Also, we do include the extras in our factoring because we use those pieces to cut costs in other places (i.e. dog food). That is how we get to the $3.71 per pound listed above.

Sell the second pig. Basically, get a buddy to go in on the investment with you. This is what we did the first year we raised feeder pigs. They paid for half the purchase price, half the feed, half the butcher costs, and our labor since the pigs were on our farm. Our pork was only $2.32/lb that year including set up (but keep in mind feed prices were about half of what they are now).

But is it cheaper than the grocery store?

It depends. Crappy answer, I know. Let me explain…

Do you normally buy the cheapest option at Walmart? If so, no. It’s not cheaper to grow your own. The crap they sell is that “other white meat” nonsense, raised inside a barn, and funny colored. If you’ve never seen fresh, pasture-raised pork, the meat is red…like beef. The pink pork at the grocery store is unnatural. There’s a reason it’s called the cheap stuff.

Do you buy local pasture-raised pork from a farmer’s market? Then, yeah. Absolutely. They have the same costs I described in detail above, then they have to mark up the price to make a profit.

Do you try to buy the organic “good stuff” from Whole Foods or whatever “bougie” grocery store is in your area? Then, maybe.

The average price of pork peaked last year at $5.05/lb. So the costs laid out in this post are a little higher than that, but not astronomically so.

Final Thoughts

The key takeaway here is that your mileage may vary. If we wanted to make it cheaper, we could buy some sort of pink pig cross for $30 from close to home and butcher it ourselves, and get the overall costs down to $2.69 per pound if we needed to. We prefer Berkshire pork and using a USDA inspected butcher.

Your choices all along the way will dictate the final cost of your pork. Try not to get caught up in the fear of spending a little more than you normally would.

If you’re here, and especially if you made it all the way through this batch of word soup, I figure raising pork is something you probably want to do. Feel free to leave me a comment, and if you know any like-minded people who may benefit from the information provided here, I’d appreciate it if you sent them my way.

We don’t raise pork the cheapest way, but we sure do eat well. And that is something I wish for you, too.