Pig Feed

Pigs eat anything.  Roots, worms, grubs, corn, wheat, barley, grass, chickens, humans, dirt, and on and on and on.

So I never in my wildest imagination thought that finding pig food was going to be the hardest part of the pig-raising process!!!

Decades ago, pigs were common on numerous farmsteads.  They even acquired the aptly-named term "mortgage lifters" in farm families.  Pigs were the one animal you could count on to turn a profit on a small family farm, often helping to pay for land, machinery, and, yes, as the name says, even the house.

Well, this is America, and corporations constantly seek out other peoples' ways of making money, and the pig business was no exception.  As the story goes, the big corporations took over the incredibly profitable hog business from the small-scale farmer, and the family farms were almost-nearly wiped out in terms of pig-raising.

A perhaps biased yet still interesting article on the subject can be found here:  https://www.thedodo.com/how-the-brutal-hog-industry-wa-479241574.html

So all of those feed stores across Illinois were also decimated as the small-scale farmer no longer had a need to feed his/her pigs.

Insert my story.

I have been trying to find pig feed at a reasonable cost with very little luck.  The local grain elevators are now just that...grain elevators.  Middle men who sell to the "big boys."  Walking in to the elevator to pick up a bag of hog feed is really a time gone by.  Farmers buy and sell on contracts with thousands and even millions of bushels.  Little ol' me just wanted some bags of pig feed!

But seeing as how I travel the Interstate quite a bit, I figured I would just find a small "farm town" and seek out their pig feed.  Surely farm towns sell pig food, right?  What a lesson that has been!  Feed stores listed on the internet are out of business.  Or they are again simply grain elevators, buying and selling corn and soybeans.  Most are co-ops with large firms over the top of them, owning several elevators at once.

And the term "farm town"?  It's basically a term I use to describe small towns surrounded by massive farmland.  I would actually imagine the percentage of farmers in a "farm town" is less than 3%.  And driving through many of these towns recently has forced me to look at a stark reality in much of our Midwest:  poverty.  Listen, I LOVE these small towns.  I do.  But many are dead.  The down towns are empty of long-term stores.  And the houses look like maintenance hasn't been done on them in 50 years.

It's a sobering reality.  The small-scale farmer is dead.

But back to this pig feed!  And back to my dream of a small-scale farm!

A 50-pound bag of feed costs $12.99 at Farm and Home Supply.  To put the "Farm" term into perspective, they don't even sell pig feeders at the store (Dad checked by driving in).  Farms today are pet horses, dogs, cats, and chickens.  Across town at Tractor Supply Company, a 50-pound bag costs $13.99.

A pig will typically eat around 650 pounds of feed before being butchered.  So EACH pig will consume 13 bags of feed if that is the only food consumed.  Or another way of putting it, each pig will eat $168.87 worth of feed from Farm and Home and $181.87 of feed from Tractor Supply Company.  Oh, don't forget to add in the 8.75% sales tax!!!  So in six months, I could drop over $1800 on pig feed alone!

Ouch.

This bag is $13.99 from Tractor Supply Company.

This bag is $12.99 from Farm and Home Supply.

Needless to say, the feed cost is going to be the biggest part I can somewhat control in pig-raising.  And these types of prices just aren't feasible.  So I kept looking!  Dad kept looking!  Lots of phone calls.

I called our "local" feed store about 35 minutes away from the new property.  They do their own bulk pig food mixed on-site.  If I buy it bulk (they auger it into my truck), it would cost $140 for 1000 pounds.  Or $155 if I have them put it in 50-pound bags of the same 1000 pounds.  Or to keep it simple, my cost would now be down to $7.75/bag.  Wow!  That is so much lower...and doable.

It's a bit of a drive, but if I take a trailer, I could grab a ton of feed (literally) for $310 plus tax.  A ton of feed would last just over two months for 10 hungry pigs.

And for my mental mind, a pig would now eat $100.75 worth of feed in its lifetime.  The profit margins are already slim, but this new feed knocks off 40.3% of the Farm and Home cost and 44.6% of the Tractor Supply cost.  With margins so narrow as it is, it's a no-brainer to make the drive.  With 10 pigs, my $1800 feed cost would now be just over $1000 in one small, simple decision.  When it comes down to it, farming is a life-long class in math.  I really believe that.

(It also makes you wonder how much they jack up the price at these box stores!  But it's not surprising.  Today a bushel of corn...56 pounds...sells for $3.40 at the elevator, and less than a bushel of corn at the box store...40 pounds...is $7.29 a bag.  Gotta make money somehow, right?).

So it looks like I will be buying 1000 pounds at a time, filling up the big pig feeder about halfway, and making a couple of trips over the life of the pigs.  It's doable.  Or I could do 2000 pounds if I took a trailer.

So it was a journey trying to find pig food since no one raises small-scale pigs anymore!  I searched 90 miles and am happy to have found one fairly close.  I did find a couple of other places that did the food.  I found one in Hamel, Illinois, that charges $166 for 1000 pounds, and I found a place in Carlinville that charges $144 for 1000 pounds.  So thankfully, I do have SOME options.

But for now, it's Bradfordton on the west side of town.

Ok, so I have a pig feeder.  I will have feed.  I made contact this morning about plastic 55-gallon drums for waterers. I am to pick three of those up on Thursday.  The waterer nipples came in on Friday.  So I need to attach the nipples, and the water issue is done.

So I need fence, shelter, and pigs!

And two days from now I should have two of those three!  I close on the property in two days!

And I am receiving emails from people selling their feeder pigs.  I have someone 1 hour, 40 minutes away asking $80 per pig (nope).  I have one about 45 minutes away asking $40 per pig (yes if he can wait until I am ready!).  And I just had another guy contact me today.

So the good news is the pigs are out there.  I just need to get ready!!!

UPDATE:  After writing this, but on the same day, Dad contacted me and said he had found pig feed for $145 even closer!  I will now be buying 50-pound bags from a feed store in Taylorville, Illinois, just a 29-minute drive from the property.  I hope to buy 2000 pounds at a time and store them in a trailer that my sister wants stored at my property.

The plan is coming together after all!