While we were feeding bread to the herd and weaner piglets to tame and train them this afternoon in the bright sun I snapped this most incredible picture of the clouds. I love photos of clouds. My father has a beautiful poster that shows many different cloud types and explains about them which I think he got from my grandfather. Someday I’ll learn the names and what they mean. On my to-do list.
That is about two thirds of a van load of bread which represents four ‘stacks’, 40 trays or about 920 lbs of bread in the back of our mini-van a.k.a. pickup truck. That will last a long time across hundreds of pigs, maybe three or four weeks, since we don’t get it very often and use it as a treat for leading and training. Since the pigs get almost no grain in their diet, they’ll eagerly follow you anywhere for a slice of bread or English muffin.
Update 2014-08-28:I have often gotten the question of how much bread do we feed to our pigs. It isn’t much and it comes in spurts but when we get some it gets stretched out over time. Based on the past twelve years of records I see that the pigs get an average of about 2.7 oz of bread a day which comes to 1% or less of their total diet. What really happens is on sorting days such as when we’re picking pigs to load for market they get more of a treat and on other days they get less or none. In the summer they tend to get less and in the winter they tend to get more when the bread is more available because other people don’t tend to raise pigs during the cold season. Since the pigs normally get little to none the bread makes a great treat.
I’ve mentioned before that we get goats milk whey, excess milk, cottage cheese, cheese trim. All of these are what are termed pre-consumer wastes that are excellent foods for the pigs. Together with pasture and hay they make up a varied and balanced diet for the pigs and chickens. Even the sheep partake. Recycling these food items into pork reduces the flow into the waste stream, helps the creamery and bakery and saves us money on feed. The pigs love it all.
Update 2016-02-24:Some people worry that bread will produce soft fat, overly fat or off flavor meat. I have not found that to be the case however it may depend on the bread you feed, how much and what else the pigs eat. Bread is a fine supplemental food. I have experimented with a few pigs free feeding them as much as they want to eat of bread with also having access to free pasture/hay and whey. Rather than gorging on the bread they only eat about 25% dry matter intake (DMI) of their total diet. The meat came out fine in every case. Typically we get a little dated bread every few weeks from a local bakery and it makes up about 0.5% to 1% DMI of their diet. I tend to use it for training – it is a very appetitive treat. It is very good during the weaning period too.
Feeding only one type of feed would not be ideal but the variety does them well. I’ve run the numbers for nutrition analysis as well as having several years of being able to watch the animals grow in real life. All of these are excellent feeds and the dairy makes the pork taste deliciously sweet.
But everything in moderation. I have read and spoken with several people who just fed bread and had problems with the pigs getting to fat. I can imagine that is true if bread is all they eat but with it being mixed in as a portion of the overall diet the bread should be a good food. Not only that but the bakery outlet where we get dated bread it is almost totally wholesome fancy breads, whole wheat and rarely any of the fluffy white bread. Good stuff.
I have also read that some people have had problems with feeding just milk producing softer fat in the bacon. In the last three years of feeding milk, cheese and now whey we have not seen that. Again, that may be because the dairy makes up a portion of the pig’s diet rather than the whole she-bang. Our pigs get pasture and hay which nutritionally balance dairy very nicely. Variety is the spice of life.
Another difference I’ve noted is that all of the people I’ve spoke with who have had the above problems pen raised their pigs. The lack of exercise making for couch potato pigs may have contributed significantly to the excess lard. One solution in a pen situation would be to put the feed, water and bed all in different areas in the pen so the pigs have to get up and get at least a bit of exercise. With our pasture layout this is not a problem at all as the pigs are free to roam about two or more acres at any time. In fact, they have to walk about as their food, beds and water are widely spaced.
One irony in all of this is that our pigs regularly eat excellent quality cheeses and breads that I skip over in the store because they are just too expensive to buy. The pigs eat better than I!
So what are the economics of all this good bread? What if we were to use that as the only feed?
920 lbs of bread, 4 stacks, $20
1 hour time to go and get it
1 gallon gasoline at $2.50/gallon (~20 miles)
$1 wear and tear on the car
Actually, the time to go and get it and the petro, car wear, etc should be spread over other errands too but the bread was the primary reason for going in town so for the purposes of this math we’ll dedicate it all to the bread.
6 hours time to process
The time is four people about 1.25 hours to unpackage all the bread, put it into barrels and pails and then cleanup plus the time to feed out the bread over the next three days. This tends to happen in a distributed manner.
$3.50 trash bill to dispose of bread wrappers
Total cash outlay $26 plus 7 hours of time (6 processing & feeding + 1 go and get). How do you value the time? You must feed the pigs anyways and that takes some time so really it shouldn’t all be counted but let’s compare it to automated grain delivery and self-feeder so we’ll include all the time. Pick a number, any number, say: $10/hr -> $70 for the time -> $97 total cost for the bread.
That comes to 10¢/lb which is half the cost of bagged commercial feed (19¢/lb) and less expensive than the three ton bulk rate (17¢/lb) from the local grain mill. Organic feed is about 24¢/lb last time I checked. Those feeds can be fed as the only feed.
I wouldn’t do that with the bread – in fact the pigs get very little bread which is what makes it so appetative. I want the pigs primarily eating hay (in the winter or pasture in the warm seasons) as well as dairy to get a complete balanced diet. Still, it is interesting to compare if one did just feed the bread.
Speaking of expensive, today I saw the above item for the first time. It is a pre-packaged single slice of bread. How bizarre! I could not believe my eyes. What is our society coming to when individual slices of bread are being packaged and sold? “Care for a sip of water or a breath of fresh air with that slice of bread, sir? Just an additional $1.99 each.” Of course, there are individually packaged pads of butter. Maybe I just need to get out more… Scratch that.
Outdoors: 31°F/14°F Sunny, Scattered Clouds
Farm House: 67°F/52°F five logs
Tiny Cottage: 55°F/48°F no work
Walter Jeffries Tinker, Tailor… A bit eclectic & a tad eccentric, polymath, quantum mechanic & Farmer. Also lucky at cards.
Walter, thanks for all the great info on feed and cost-analysis. My 2 tams get bread, milk, grain and hay. They’re in an enclosure right now and maybe getting too fat, but they’re soon to enjoy some larger areas and I’m hoping they’ll trim up. So far all my bread and milk has been free. That’s cheaper than the grain, certainly. :)
Lindsay
we clabber our older raw milk for everyone. the dog, the layers, the broilers, father-in-law’s pigs, and even the cat. unused whey gets soaked in grain and makes for a morning farina for the chickens.
historically pigs have been the garbage disposal of the family. it seems that you have taken that to a more refined level.
i still consider us wasteful but we try to consciously get better everyday.
kudos to your farm for picking up the slack and making a better product from local waste.
hmm… packaged donuts, packaged “whole” wheat bread with a shelf life of months, if not years… “good stuff”? I disagree. Fit for no man or beast.
Still, I do agree with your thoughts on a varied diet. This year, we did our pigs on pasture, waste milk, and a wee bit of corn. They excelled and the cost was minimal.
Ben,
It is excess rather than waste. In the case of bread it is usually just a day out of the sell by date. I buy bread and keep it on my shelf for our consumption for weeks. In the case of cheese it is usually the trim, the edges of the blocks that they cut when packaging. We catch it before it becomes waste. The volume of such excess is amazing. We’ve talked about this a lot as we un-package loaves and such. It seems like there is such an amazing volume of food but when I calculate it comes out to be a fraction of a percentage point of production. The volume simply comes from the fact that they, the creamery, the bakery, etc, do so much volume. Even 0.5% excess comes to be a surprisingly large amount. it is worth checking around you for sources of such quality low cost feeds, especially for the winter when pasture is unavailable.
There are very few donuts and pastries in a load. I explained that. Frankly, I’m amazed at your snobbishness. As to the shelf life, these breads are wholesome whole grain breads with very short shelf lives. They’re made at area bakeries. That is the whole point. They don’t have a very long shelf life so they end up having to be withdrawn by the sell-by-date. They are still excellent quality and by catching them before they go to the land fill we get good feed for the pigs while keeping good organics out of the landfills. That is a win-win situation for everyone.
Cheers,
-Walter
Well I would certainly love to have some of that bread raised pork it is excellent. Sounds yummy like! The pasturing raising is just so much bonus to!
Ya no Walter 1 of the the things I like about you is you dont minse words!!!!!!
Walter,
Thanks for the frank reply. Snobbish. Hell, I’ve been called worse. I’ll take it.
Perhaps I was led astray by the photo, which seemed rather rich in sugary breadstuffs. In any case, I do not mean to belittle or demean your hog-feeding techniques. We should all be so confident as to live by our beliefs and values, as you obviously do.
My belief is to not feed my animals processed food, just as I choose not to eat processed food. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t. I merely want to offer a differing perspective to your many and passionate readers. More than one way to skin a cat (or pig, as the case may be).
Ben, I see two packages of donuts in that photo and one package of eclairs. There were another couple of packages in the whole 920 lbs of bread making the pastries about half of one percent of the total. That isn’t very much. The vast majority (80%?) of the load was bagels and whole wheat english muffins in addition to some other breads like dark german, 9 grain, 12 grain, etc. All whole some good breads.
I agree; that isn’t very much. I think it comes down to differing perceptions regarding the nutritional value of your stash as a whole. I consider it junk; you consider it wholesome. Depending on one’s beliefs, these are both defendable positions. Hell, if you talked to two different nutritionists, you’d probably get two different answers.
I know from reading your blog that you care deeply for your animals and about the end quality of your product. If there were more farmers like you around, the world would be a better place. Enough said.
Sounds like excellent food to me. To bad theres so much packaging but glad you are diverting all that good food. I second Walters comment on snobbery.
Speaking as a livestock nutritionist what Walter is doing makes good sense. Bread is not junk in any sense of the term. From a recent study they said: “The researchers identified stale bread (509 metric tons/year), feed-grade potatoes (11,100 t/yr), and whey (12,900 t/yr) as the three primary underutilized sources of organic pig feed in Austria.” See this http://www.newfarm.org/research/jan05/pig_food.shtml link. Recapturing good quality feeds before it is wasted in the dump makes a lot of sense. Pigs sheep chickens and cows are all able to convert these into high quality meat for people to eat and that is a good thing. There is nothing junk about it. I must admit that I am quite curious about your blunt statement about the bread being junk because it is processed food. Do you eat no processed foods? Do you eat all your plant matter raw? What about meat? Don’t you cook that? That is processing? Exactly what is the processing that you object to so much? Chopping-Dicing-Grinding-Cooking-Mixing?BTW – Note that the corn you are feeding your pigs is probably GMO corn. That is to say it is genetically engineered. And, the milk you feed them is probably been produced using another GMO = rBGH.
D. L.
Actually, in our case the dairy is rBGH free. See the Organic Page and in the comments there too.
Ben YOU are VERY insulting!!!!! You sound so hoititoiti. Get of your high horse.
Add Maple Syrup, Sugar, Flour, Corn Meal, Salt, Pepper and other spices to the list of things that are processed. If you are not doing any processed foods for aniamls I take it your not eating any processed foods your-self. That does not leave much.
i just wish i could get free bread and milk for me and my animals both. heck of a deal.
Ben one thing your not taking into account is that in the winter in a cold climate like Walters it makes a lot of sense to get extra callories. What your considering junk is good because the animals need the extra energy to keep warm outdoors. If you just raise pigs in the summer time then you don’t have to deal with the issue of cold temps. Consider that. Bread with its carbs and calories help the pigs.
I have been feeding bread to our pigs for 21 years now. They love . We also feed other stuff and are now trying hay like Walt talks about. We sell our pigs into the gourmet restaurant market and they get excellent prices and chefs rave about how wonderful and good quality the meat is. Your off base Ben. Plus it is good to recycle and keep the good food stuff from being trashed. Thats good for the enviroment to.
I wouldnt worry about the occasional sweet in the bread. Walters got 40 big pigs and a little suger wont do them any harm. Afterall theyre eating all that good pasture. People sometimes miss the point that it is the quantity that matters. You can be on a diet but still have the occasional treat without any ill effect
Thanks for this great post. I have the opportuniti to get bread from a local backery for our pigs and chickens. I had wanted to make sure it would be okay. Frankly that whole thing about thing about bread being junk is rubbish. Like anything I just dont want to be eating to much or feeding too much.
We feed bread to our pigs as well, and the last racks of bread had those individual wrapped slices. I couldn’t believe it! There was more in money in the packaging then in the bread!
I am glad I am not the only one who thought that!
-Nicki
Hi Walter, I get all the food I need plus alot more for free. Organic multi grain breed, organic nonfat yogert, and veggies. What I don’t use I pass on to other pig farmers. Spread the wealth ya know. I do find that the pigs get pretty fat. The meat however is to die for. I get nothing but the highest complaments of the taste, and juiciness of the meat. The delemma I have is the cost of processing a heavier pig and throwing away all the trimmings. smoking, cutting and packaging are buy the lb. I fear that if I try and moderate there food more, the meat wont be so tasty and juicy. The first year that I raised a few pigs, they were lean and in shape. When I got the meat back it looked great, no fat, pink, just great. When we ate it though, the meat was dry and not that flaverful. The kids wouldn’t even eat the bacon, a sight I thought I would never see. 2 lbs cooked and no grease. So we are going with old faithfull, nice fat pigs. dan
What I would do is feed hay, pasture and other vegetable matter in the morning and then bread in the evening. This way the pigs will lower their caloric intake reducing the fat build up yet still have enough to produce the marbling that makes for the succulent meat. Bread is very high in calories. Great winter feed for when the energy is needed to fight the cold.
Use condition scoring to judge how to adjust the ratio of feeds rather than feed formulas.
Cheers,
-Walter
Thanks for your post. Very helpful.
We have just started on our second batch of pigs. Our first 2 we feed only bread and they turn out way to fat!! This time we are feeding them less and more greens. But i have also read that pigs should be allowed to eat as much as they what to grow faster? That they should be kill at 5 months our they just add on fat layers? I am thinking of feeding them heaps now. Then 1 month before killing putting them on a diet of just greens? What do you think about all this?
A diet of just bread would almost certainly be very high in calories resulting in overly fat pigs. For optimal muscle growth you want more protein that you'll likely get with just bred for the amount of starch calories in the bread. Pasture helps balance but then you've still got a limiting protein factor from low lysine levels. Dairy is high in lysine bringing this up. We generally slaughter at about six months but the age of slaughter for your pigs will vary with their breed, diet and weather conditions – e.g., pigs grow a little more slowly in the winter due to the cool weather.
how do you feed the pigs the bread is it dry because mine turned they nose up at it
You might want to bake the bread fresh daily, slather with garlic butter and serve with fried or boiled eggs for the maximum nutritional value. Seriously though, it takes some time for animals to get used to new feeds and if they’re getting all the food they want they may well turn their noses up at new stuff. We just get a little that we use for training. It is fresh and they love it since they get so little. It’s a treat.
Thanks for your response.
After reading all the posts I still need a bit of clarification please………
I have 2 Gloucester Old Spots and 1 Saddleback all 3 months old. I have managed to source a limitless supply of free organic bread (lucky me) and obviously am keen to utilise as much of this as possible. Usually they eat dry pig food bought from the farm. Would it be ok (as suggested here) to feed them pig food at one meal and bread for the other without sacrificing their nutritional needs? If I feed them pig food at breakfast will they be so hungry by tea time that they will eat it? – as previously posted they are indifferent at the moment!
You might instead take a tact of giving some bread and some other feed mixed at each meal rather than segregating. Let them clean up between meals before feeding again. Even with unlimited and organic bread I would not want to over feed the bread – watch those calories or you’ll have fat pigs on your hands. In either case, I would have pasture/hay freely available to them. Old Spots are rumored to be good pasture grazers. I don’t know Saddlebacks at all.
An excellent way of keeping good food out of the waste stream. It is only waste if it is wasted!
I was reading your blog about the pigs. We just started raising a few pigs a year for meat and discovered the option of obtaining outdated bread from the bread outlet store. However, I have been having a problem with trying to dry the bread out fast enough before it becomes moldy. And, since it comes in such large quantities, it is difficult to find areas to lay the slices all out individually. So, I thought to contact you in hopes to get some ideas of how to better dry the bread out. Once it is dried, we usually keep our feed in 50 gallon metal barrels so the bread would go in the barrel once it became bread crumbs.
Ideas:
-I wondered if drilling holes in the container would work and just putting the bread in the barrels with the air holes in tact but then I thought that would attract bugs (if this were going to be chicken food I guess that would be okay but I am not sure about pigs).
-I also wondered if I could hang the bread on the clothes line in large burlap sacks (provided I could find sacks large enough).
I anticipate your comments and suggestions about this since you are much more experienced in this category. Thank you much!
My first thought is that your climate may be a lot warmer than ours. In the middle of the summer when it gets up to 86°F here we sometimes see mold. Normally it is cold enough here that we don’t have a problem with molding of the bread. The other factor is that we only get a little occasionally, like about 200 to 300 lbs, and that gets divvied up among 400 pigs very quickly so it doesn’t have a chance to mold.
When we are saving bread for something like moving pigs around and it is hot we take the bread out of the wrappers and put it into five gallon pails which we put into an old brown van. The van heats up and dries out the bread in the pails very nicely without promoting mold probably because the humidity inside the van is very low due to the heating which reduces relative humidity.
Your idea of burlap bags is a good one to try. You might be able to get large burlap bags from a coffee company or a brewhouse. There are a synthetic variety used by the brew pubs which may work – just remove the inner plastic bag.
The times we do see mold are bread that is in sealed plastic bags it comes in and it is hot weather. I suspect that is what you’re seeing. A little mold isn’t a problem but I would avoid feeding too much mold.
Does anyone have any experience feeding pigs high protein dog food? Normally this would be quite expensive but I have a nearby source of free kibble. We feed our Duroc everything from pears, potatoes, & bread, to pig feed, and Chicken bones.
Thank you for your time.
Brandon :)
I have heard of people doing that but have never done it myself so I don’t know how they grow or taste. In some states it may be illegal if the meat is for sale. In other states it is okay to feed meat if it is cooked. There is a concern with things like chicken bones if they are post-consumer wastes regarding disease transmission to the pigs and back. I would not expect that to be an issue with the dog food but do be careful of cheap sources re: the melanine disaster of a few years back. One other issue is that very high protein in the feed can cause kidney disease for he animal. Not generally a problem for short lived animals like pigs.
Hello Brandon, I believe there is pork in dog feed and I am not sure of that but if so, feeding cows to cows made mad cow disease so just be careful :)
Walter, I have so much appreciated your knowledge on raising pigs. I’m grateful I came across this blog. Wanted to make sure I had this right. You see, my dad is on round one of raising hogs. He just started. Recently, we got our first load of bread. Wow, were we ever surprised. Not only did he order so many crates, but the man in charge there also gave extra. Definetely worth the price. But that’s a lot of bread. Right now we have it stored in plastic garbage cans…..temprarily if that’s not the greatest idea. We just didn’t know what else to do with all that bread. Now, it’s cold here, so I don’t think we’ll hafta worry about mold….or will we? We did not take the bread out of the little plastic bag. We did not dry it out. There is a variety of breads, and alot of standard white bread. What is your take on this. I mean, it could take a while to feed these 18 hogs all of this bread, but it will cut the cost of feed. What is the bestest way to store this bread if we have enough to last a week or longer? Thank you so much for your response:)
During the cold weather the bread will be well preserved right through into spring. During the heat of the summer you should remove it from any wrappers and let it dry out to help preserve it. Best of all feed it out quickly during the summer.
I suspect that bread alone is not a good diet. I would only use it as a portion of the pig’s diet. I don’t know what the upper limit is in practicality since we’ve never had enough to approach that. With just 18 pigs though you might hit that. You might use grain feeding (see the side of a commercial hog chow bag) as a guide but I have some concern that it might be lacking in something to be a complete diet. I would feed the bread in the latter part of the day, putting the pigs on pasture during most of the day. That way they graze before they fill up on the bread.
Your biggest issue with storage may be vermin.
Thank you, Walter. This bread is actually a small part of the pig’s diet as of now. There is also some type of feed….I’m not sure exactly what it’s called, but there’s corn in it. We also have a minimal supply of doughnuts. We also give them hay from time to time. We have been told that coal is a good thing to give pigs because of minerals? Have you ever heard of such a thing?
Corn is basically calories. Keeps you warm. Puts on fat. Doesn’t do much for muscle growth but some. I have heard of feeding coal and some humans eat it too. Minerals and cleansing parasites are two explanations I’ve heard. I have no experience with it though – we’re not in coal country.
One more question (sorry for being a nuisance, but there’s so much to learn). How many pieces of bread do you suppose would be too much for a two-hundred pound hog in one feeding?
Let’s do that in pounds in stead of pieces. Check your feed bag – I think it is about 8 lbs of feed per finisher size pig. Weigh up eight pounds of bread and that is a rough equivalence – the only question being if it has everything they need. I would hazard a whole loaf or two, so about two to three pounds, each day would be fine along with other things to eat. Variety is the spice of life.
Walter, what is your thoughts on feeding pigs bread dough. Will they explode :-)
Regards
I doubt it in small quantities. If given a lot, perhaps… Snopes seems to assess this as false.
Thanks Walter,
I am looking for another post where I ask if the pig’s stomachs does not get upset if you change them from one paddock to another, considering the change in pasture.
This was in December last year, but alas, I cannot find it.
Regards
Johan
Hi Walter,
This is about corn rather than bread, someone gave me a 50lb. bag
of organic corn in the form of dried whole kernels. I gave a handful to
my 4 pigs who loved it, but I’m not sure if they would get anything out
of it in that form, or if it could “foul” their inner workings .
Much of the corn will pass through them and if you have chickens the birds will be delighted. If you want to feed the corn to the pigs then grinding or soaking the corn will make it more digestible. Cooking is one step further. I do not expect it to cause any problem for them. I would space it out.
Thanks Walter, corn soup it is!
I have just been able to get about 2 barrels a day of old vegtables from our local store. Do you have any idea how many pigs would that accomadate and would I need to still feed any grain? thanks
Realize that is mostly water, some sugars, a fair bit of fiber, some vitamins and minerals. It will be a diet short on protein and calories. I would suggest feeding it on a compost pile. Keep adding hay.
so vegetables and hay and I should be where I need to be. I was going to try and have at least 5 growers on it so maybe that will enough and if not im guessing your saying if they don’t eat it all I will have compost to and have the best of both worlds
No, most hay won’t provide the needed calories and protein. Pasture is a lot more than just grasses which is what most hay is. There are some types of hay like alfalfa (a legume) hay which are quite a bit better than grass hays. Composting action can improve hay. Fresh pasture is better than hay by far and should be a varied mix of forages. We plant:
soft grasses (bluegrass, rye, timothy, wheat, etc);
legumes (alfalfa, clovers, trefoil, vetch, ect);
brassicas (kale, broccoli, turnips, etc);
millets (White Proso Millet, Japanese Millet, Pearl Millet, etc);
amaranth;
chicory; and
other forages and herbs.
Exactly varieties will depend on your local climate and soils. I avoid the grasses and such that turn toxic with drought, frost or other stress as they make our management system too complex.
A varied diet is good.
Sounds good. I have one acre so far planted and fenced with clover, turnips, rape and a variety of other legumes already. I grew off 2 Berks on that this year and they did great. So they will have pasture also.
That’s good. See the article South Weaner Paddock which talks about a quarter acre sized area that we divided up into ten paddocks for a mini-rotational grazing setup. You can do this gradually, sub dividing your acre in half, then each in half again to quarters, then to eighths of a span of time as resources allow. The rotational grazing will make better use of the forages, reduce soil compaction and improve the soil and forage quality. Also be sure to click through to the other articles mentioned at the end of that article which will take you deeper into the topic. Rotational grazing is traditionally used with sheep and cattle. I learned to do managed intensive rotational grazing with sheep. The same principles with some modifications apply to pigs and pretty much any animal.
and have also been feeding bread when I can get it
oh ive read them all. you’ve helped me a lot and I thank you for that
the only thing I didn’t do with those 2 was create the paddocks but it seemed like with them that they moved around so much and ate that it didn’t hurt it. I have some durocs now and there rooting good so im going to set the divisions up now.
what about sun hemp have you ever planted that
No, I’ve never heard of it before. For those who are curious Sunn Hemp is Crotalaria juncea.
It’s suppose to be very high in protein and grow well in my climate. May plant some and give it a shot
Is there a limit to how much milk you can feed a hog
I find that pigs drink up to 3.6 gallons per hundred weight of pig per day when free fed pasture/hay and dairy. See Units of Hay and Dairy Per Pig.
Hello
I am desperately in need of help. I have a subcontract and distributing bread so i am left with damaged bread and i need someone to help me with them on a discounted price because i loose them anyway