Either you’re thinking about raising your own pork, or you’re in the middle of doing so and that processing appointment is leering at you from the calendar. It might even be taunting you every time you walk by. Ask me how I know… If you’re like me, that’s the time to start googling. I saw “Here’s the cuts from each part of the pork!” Wasn’t helpful. We’ve had a few pigs processed at this point, so here’s a real expectation for how many meals your pig will give you.

If you haven’t already, Will strongly suggests that you check out How to Take Your Pig to the Processor and How to Fill Out a Cut Sheet before you load your pig on a trailer.

Necessary Context Information

We dropped a 10-month-old, 248lb pure Berkshire gilt off at the processor on February 6th, 2023. She was ready to pick up in boxed format on February 21st, 2023, and we drove down to get her on March 6th, 2023. It is March 8th, 2023 as I write this, and all weights and figures used here come straight from the Order Report sitting next to my keyboard.

Full Disclosure – As always, my intent is to be as transparent as possible. We raised this pig on a 20-25% protein feed we mix ourselves from bags of soybean meal and our granary’s 15% Hog Feed. This is our third year raising pigs, and this gilt was not born on our farm. She was 6 weeks old when we purchased her as a feeder piglet. The gilt pictured above is T’Raya, not the one we had butchered.

If you want to know the complete cost analysis for raising this specific pig, I went into a thorough explanation with real numbers from my receipts in Actual Costs of Raising Your Own Pork.

What We Actually Put In the Freezer

I’m going to give you the overall weights of the items we received because it’s good information to have. However, the more important part would be the description of how many packages of each thing went in the freezer and how big those packages are, because that’s what we actually care about when it comes to feeding our family. I can tell you till my fingers cramp that we got 143.12lbs of pork, but it doesn’t mean much of anything until I can show that it’s about 90 meals from one pig for my family of 5-6.

Order Report

What does that mean in regards to meals per pig?

Well, it’ll feed us about twice per week for the next year. Let me explain.

The Boston butts are on the larger end of what we used to find at the grocery store. They’ll likely be smoked and have a great deal of leftovers. Realistically, we can get 3 full dinners out of each butt.

Similarly, the picnics are rather large. However, we like to smoke those for pulled pork and invite friends over. They would account for 2-3 dinners each, but we always have help eating them.

Will dry cures the tenderloins to be sliced and eaten as a midnight snack with cheese and a glass of mead. So again, not used as a meal.

That brings us to all the things that are basically one meal per pack: porkchops, ground pork, sausage, bacon, and ribs. As for the jowl bacon, we just treat it like regular bacon. Will and I know there is a difference because we are the ones who pull it out of the freezer and put the slices in a skillet, but the kids have no idea. Bacon is bacon and since it’s all cured the same way, the taste is identical.

What We Don’t Eat

We do not eat the feet, tail, ears, liver, heart, kidneys, or melts. I know there are plenty of homesteaders out there that do all sorts of creative things with the organ meat to make them beneficial to their family, but we don’t. The only person in the house who is willing to eat chicken liver is yours truly, and even I draw the line somewhere. I’m not knocking the people who grind up their pork hearts and add it to other dishes throughout the year; so if you want to do that sort of thing, go for it. I’m just not about that life.

Instead, the offal goes to the dogs. I slice and dehydrate a fair bit of it for treats and the rest gets chopped up and added to our home-canned dog food.

That leaves the neckbones, hocks, and fatback.

Neckbones and hocks are for soup. They stay in the freezer until the weather turns cold again in December. One hock makes a full 20qt stock pot worth of soup. While we aren’t fans of organ meat, we do like our broth to be made from bone.

The fatback is added to our venison so it doesn’t qualify for a meal in and of itself. This gilt was the leanest pig we have sent to freezer camp so far, which was mostly due to finishing her in the biting cold of winter.

Pro tip: if you can send a pig to processing before the weather starts to freeze, do it.

Where are the hams?

We had them turned into ground meat. We wanted breakfast sausage and ground pork, and that meat had to come from somewhere. Most butchers won’t do a sausage unless you want at least 25lbs. You’ll still get some ground pork, but it will only be the trimmings.

From this pig, we would have received a little over 6lbs of ground pork (and no breakfast sausage) if we also got the hams. Hams are a large cut of meat that take up way too much freezer space, cost extra to have the butcher cure them, are only eaten once or twice a year, and are cumbersome to cook. We still have a ham in the freezer from a pig we had processed last year.

I should note that you can usually ask for just one ham and have the other one ground.

You get a lot more mileage out of grinding a cut that large than you do keeping it whole. Check out how far we can stretch a single turkey, too.

Where is the leaf lard?

Short answer: our butcher does not offer leaf lard.

Slightly less short answer: she was too lean to make getting the leaf lard worth the effort.

While I absolutely love rendered leaf lard for baking, I haven’t had any for a few years now. I just use butter, which is also delicious, so it’s not a big deal.

Your Results May Be Different

I know this goes without saying, but I wanted to add it anyway. Your mileage may vary. If it’s just you and a spouse, you don’t need a full pound or more of pork in every single meal. If you take a look at some of our recipes, you’ll see that when it comes to a garden salad, we can feed 6 people on half a pound of bacon.

When it’s all said and done, this one gilt will be on my table about 90 times this year, and that does not include snacks or leftovers eaten for lunch. I have a lot of mouths to feed in my household, which is a good thing, because I struggle to cook for less than an entire Roman legion at one time. Ground meat is often the easiest protein to stretch. To see how I do it, take a look at Feeding Six People with Just 1lb of Ground Meat.

If you are wondering where the rest of our meat comes from to get an idea of how much livestock you should raise for your family, I am working on a thorough explanation and will post it at some point in the future.

As always, I am more than happy to answer any questions you have either in a comment below or through an email to [email protected]. If I can’t answer with our own experiences here at Eagle Iron Farm, I can at least point you in the right direction.