Why raise a pig?
There are lots of reasons to raise a pig or two in your backyard. It seems like every day we hear stories in the news media about the potential health risks posed by the routine use of antibiotics in animal feeds. Diseases like “mad cow” and foot-and-mouth outbreaks raise further concerns about the safety of commercially-raised meat, and prompt questions about the wisdom of large-scale livestock farm practices. By raising your own pig, you can decide how it is fed, what kind of drugs it is given (if any), and how the animal is slaughtered and butchered. When we decided to raise a pig on our New Hampshire homestead, we had never raised any kind of animals for food before. Inspired by a neighbor who purchased two piglets, I furiously read and researched all the information I could find on small-scale swine farming. It was a steep learning curve, but within a couple of weeks, we were raising a pig of our own. We were fortunate that our local public library had a copy of COUNTRYSIDE’S own
