Our pigs are raised indoors. This is the best environment for them for a number of reasons.
- Our Minnesota winters are brutal. We have temperatures in the winter that go well below zero, windy, snow and blizzards. With them inside, they don’t know when we have a wind chill warning or a blizzard. They are warm and content.
- We control their environment better. With winter cold extremes, we get the opposite in the summer. We can have hot and humid weather. Pigs will sunburn. Inside, they avoid the sun, we can provide them fans and water drippers to help them keep cool. Pigs don’t sweat, so heat bothers them.
- We don’t have to worry about predators when they are housed indoors.
- Disease prevention. Pigs are susceptible to disease and it is easily transmitted. Disease can be transmitted by air, birds and rodents. Pigs housed indoors are better protected against disease transmission because barns don’t have birds, and rodents can be controlled. Some of the barns have an air filtering system, which would help prevent disease transmission by air.
- The pig genetics that we use are not designed to be housed in a free-range system. They are a very lean hog and would not thrive in a free-range system. It’s also the type of hog our meat packer requires us to raise for them. We have a contract with them and can’t change the genetics if we are selling the hogs to them. Selling locally is really not an option for us either. We raise about 4400 pigs per year and we are considered a small farmer.
We take many steps to keep our hogs as healthy as possible. We work closely with a veterinarian, who develops a health care plan for us. This health care plan includes a comprehensive vaccination program. We also work with an animal nutritionist who develops the hogs feed plan. The hogs are on 8 different rations (our name for recipe) all dependent on the nutritional needs of each stage of pig growth. The pigs eat better than I or my family does.
We take care of them every day. Doesn’t matter if we are sick or if it is a holiday. We strive every day to keep them as healthy as possible. As a hog farmer, we cannot sell pigs that are not healthy. We sell to Hormel, and they will NOT take any sick or injured hogs. If we do have a sick or injured animal, we have to sell them at a secondary market where we receive significantly less money. We also cannot sell any animals with antibiotic residue. We only give pigs antibiotics when they need them. Our veterinarian gives us a prescription for an antibiotic once he determines what bacteria we have. Again, there is no advantage to us giving pigs more antibiotics than they need. It costs money, which we have to pay for. We don’t set our selling prices – we can’t add an additional price for any extra expenses we incur (such as antibiotics). The bottom line is we raise pigs to be as healthy as possible for the least amount of cost.
It is illegal to give pigs hormones. And my family eats the same pork we sell.
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