Homegrown Pork: Learn to raise 'the Einsteins of the farm animal world' (2024)

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As I’m getting started with pigs, I was happy to discover Homegrown Pork: Humane, Healthful Techniques for Raising a Pig for Foodby Sue Weaver, and I can’t imagine a more comprehensive guide to raising pigs. Not only is the book very well-organized and thorough, but it will certainly endear you to these intelligent and entertaining animals if you’re not already. In fact, Weaver calls pigs “the Einsteins of the farm animal world” explaining that they are so intelligent that they have been found to learn to use mirrors, work together to open gates, and even to play video games! Here’s a snapshot of some of the topics covered in the book:

• Pig history, physiology, and behavior
• Purchasing, handling, and raising pigs
• Housing, fencing, and equipment
• Health and feeding
• Slaughtering and processing options
• Recipes for using homegrown pork includingcuring, smoking, canning, and freezing pork, making homemade sausage, and rendering lard

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How to Tame a Wary Pig

Weaver explains that it is important to spend lots of time with your pigs from the beginning so that they will be easier to handle. She shares the following tips for taming a pig which is wary of humans and teaching pigs to allow people to touch them.

• Put your pigs’ food down and sit near the pigs while they are eating so they get used to having people close by while they are eating. Sit still and make grunting noises. Do not stand up or they will run away. Move closer to your pigs each day until they do not seem bothered, and then gradually touch them.
• If the pig runs away when touched, then pull back your hand and wait until they come back for food. Keep reaching out until the pig allows you to touch them.
• Once the pig allows you to touch them, Weaver recommends teaching them to eat from your hand. She suggests that before mealtimes, you sit on a bucket and hold a handful of food near their eating trough. Once they eat from your hand then scratch their back and rub their tummy. (Editor’s note from Deborah: Many people do not recommend hand feeding pigs, especially before mealtime when it is really hungry, because it’s easy for a pig to accidentally bite you. I’ve heard too many stories of people losing fingers or needing stitches when hand feeding pigs. One reason I love my Guinea Hogs is that I don’t have to bribe them with food. It is easy to go from scratching behind their ears to their backs and ultimately giving them a belly rub. Hand-feeding is an unnecessary risk.)

Learn to Render Lard

Weaver includes many of her family recipes for using homegrown pork such as rendering lard from pork fat. Its important to know that pigs yield three different types of fat – leaf fat, fatback, and caul fat. This recipe calls for leaf fat which is found on the inside of the carcass around the kidneys, but you could use the same process to render other fat. Leaf fat is great for baking and should be rendered separately from the other types of fat, if you want to take advantage of its special properties. However, you can render all of the fat together, if you don’t want to bother with keeping it separate. This is a wet method of rendering lard. Deborah will be sharing her method of dry rendering next month.

Janie Hynson is an aspiring homesteader in North Carolina. She recentlymoved back to her hometownafter living in Boston for six years and then traveling across the U.S. working on organic farms.Janie works inpublic health and sustainable agricultureand is interested in howhealth can be improved through homesteading.