If it was all roses like the online ebook sellers and bloggers tell you, everybody would be a millionaire farming pigs.

But ask a pig farmer and not many of them are millionaires.

Internet marketers want to sell their PLR ebooks or online training courses a lot of which they did not even write or develop themselves.

But pig farming has great potential.

I asked every pig farmer I know who has left the business whether they will come back to pig farming sometime later and the majority of them said yes.

What made them leave the pig farming business in the first place? Over the coming days, I would share these.

From my discussions with them and my personal experience, I can say that, the reason why many people fail at pig farming (we failed at our first try too) is that, there are a lot of hidden factors at play which you are not usually told about before you go into pig farming.

You can make it big or lose everything with pig farming.

I will be sharing my experience in our first attempt and re-entry into pig farming. If you would want me to share this practical knowledge with you. I want to know what you think. Just drop a comment. If you are also a pig farmer, then this will be a good place for us to share what we have learnt over time the mistakes we made and how we are fixing them.

In the next post, I will share my pig farming story in full and show from our experience, the many challenges we encountered (that many pig farmers also encounter but don't tell you) when we engaged into pig farming the first time.

We still face some of these challenges but we have learnt to manage them.

Let me know your thoughts

Carry go bro

MEDICPATH:
Carry go bro

Thanks for the response.

I was also into Pig farming some years back. Had to stop because my other hustles was not giving me time to monitor the business personally.
Thinking of going into it again.

From experience, the business is profitable but, if you will not be available to monitor the business yourself, then forget it.

SmartFarming

Please share your experience with us. And promise us that you won't abandon the thread like your predecessors

Continued from yesterday

In 2008, I wanted to start a pig farm to get my father busy after he retires from public service.

I needed to get everything right. We visited both new and old pig farms and asked all the questions we thought needed to be asked. We read books, online posts, joined discussions etc. It was not until 2017 that we actually started our first farm.

That was my first mistake. You cannot get everything right before you venture into pig farming. Just start once you get the necessary basic information which we will be sharing in this thread.

Sometime in 2009, I decided to rent an abandoned pigsty for our pig farming operations. We paid a fee and decided to renovate the piggery before we bring in our animals. We purchased wire mesh, iron and other stuff and conveyed them to the plot. Before the worker arrived the next day, all the materials had been stolen even though we were told that the place was secure.

Our second error was that we trusted blindly. Always trust but verify.

I caught cold feet because I had invested a lot of my savings into the building materials.

We decided to start small at our backyard. This was perhaps our biggest blessing in disguise concerning the pig farm.

We constructed a pen with four cubicles with a concrete floor and thatch roofing. This was in 2017. It was an inexpensive setup.

We could hear the pigs oink from grandma’s bedroom. Any stress to the pigs could be detected easily and someone would go and check what the problem was. The biggest advantage of siting our pig pen where we built it is that, it is very close to water source.
Nobody tells you this, but you will need a lot of water especially for washing the concrete floors of your pig pen if you build a pen with a concrete floor.

Pigs DO NOT LIKE DIRT and once their faeces are left overtime, they refuse to eat and become lean and sick. We have not experienced this on our farm but have done everything to guard against it because an experienced farmer gave us this tip.
We purchased our first set of piglets from an agricultural institute.

We bought 2 piglets and named them Spotty and Sissy. They were 2 months old when we brought them to our farm in April 2017. Spotty had a spot on her back but Sissy was without any spots. The two pigs were pure large white pig breeds.
We started off with high hopes. We still have these high hopes.

We try to at least look at the bright side of things. The two weaners cost us GHC200.00 (US$45) each at the time from a nearby farm to begin our experiment.

We disinfected our pens, 7days and 3days prior to stocking the pens with the piglets we acquired, they were attacked by mites about two weeks after we brought them.

Their skin showed red spots of underlying wounds. We noticed crusts and scabs. We suspected mange. The scales on their skin were removed with a hard scrubbing brush.

The vet recommended washing the pigs with wood ash and Dettol. We also rubbed coconut oil on the piglets.

We dewormed them because they were not putting on much weight.

NB. Even after following the book, your pig farm can still receive external shocks that will make you lose money. Don’t give up however; look for creative solutions for your challenges and always adopt the best management practices.

The pigs were free of these pests not long after we scrubbed their skin with the scrubbing brush and washed them with the wood ash and Dettol.

After the pigs were free of these pests, they gained weight quickly. Within 4 months the two gilts weighed 95kg on average.
I just noticed that I am almost hitting a 1,000 words. I do not want this to be too long so as to discourage people from following this thread.
I will continue with our story tomorrow. Once the story is done, we will delve more of into the hidden facts.

Tomorrow, I will share with you why starting small was the best decision we took as against stocking may pigs in the pen we were about to rent.

I have a vast space in my area, I a new developing area, I will like to start up a pig farm there.

I have a vast space in my area, a new developing area, I will like to start up a pig farm there.

DEBJOCH1:
I have a vast space in my area, a new developing area, I will like to start up a pig farm there.

It is a good idea to want to start up a pig farm however, you will need to answer a few questions.

Is the area easily accessible by road especially the farm itself?

Do you have access to clean water?

Who are you targeting as your market?

What farming system are you adopting?

Will you breed pigs or you will buy piglets, raise them and sell off?

What is your plan to ensure that you can supply pigs on a consistent basis?

Are you running the farm yourself or you will be employing a farmhand?

If you have answers to these questions, you can start.

There are mistakes you will make on the way. You can not have everything before you start.

Continued From Friday

Circumstances beyond my control made it impossible for me to post until now. Please forgive me for not posting on the thread as promised.

Now to the substance.

When our pigs came on heat the first time, we decided not to cross them. Based on what we read, they were to come on heat again between 18 and 23 days. They came on heat about that time. What we didn't know was that, it took a long time to arrange for a boar to our farm since we didn't have one.

By the time we brought the boar to our farm, the gilts heat period was past. They could no longer be served. This cost us money. Money to rent the boar and transport it to our farm.

By the third heat period, we knew how long it would take to arrange for the boar. We got it in time and had our gilts served.

One gilt took in. The other did not.

We pregnant gilt delivered in the early hours of 3rd March 2018. It gave birth to 15 live piglets. However, the sow rejected every piglet it littered.

Later, we found out that, the sow needed to have been allowed to eat the after-birth it pushes out to accept that it had finished giving. birth. Generally, you will not be told this. We were raising against time to get the piglets to take in colostrum from the mum in order to build a strong immune system.

We called the vet and the extension officer. We followed their advice to the letter but all the piglets died by daybreak.

Please know this, you are not usually told that a pig can reject it's piglets. This situation can lead to a great loss to farmers.

The next problem was that the second gilt did not come on heat anymore. So we decided to sell it.

In our next post, we will discuss how we were able to get buyers for our pigs and the challenges we faced. Once we are done with the story, we will tell you the things you need to know before you venture into pig farming and why starting small was the best decision for us to make

SmartFarming:


In our next post, we will discuss how we were able to get buyers for our pigs and the challenges we faced. Once we are done with the story, we will tell you the things you need to know before you venture into pig farming and why starting small was the best decision for us to make

Remember I said I will discuss how we were able to get buyers for our pigs and the challenges we faced? Here we go.

We fattened the pigs and decided to sell them off. When we decided to sell the pigs off, we started talking to potential buyers.

We spoke to people who ran restaurants and some market women. We were also introduced to some middle men who deal in pig brokerage.

Some interested buyers visited our farms. They offered to pay cash but we felt they wanted to take advantage of us for the prices they were offering for the weight. We knew the general price range for the live kilo weight of a pig as pertains in the but they were offering us considerably less.

Other buyers who visited our farms wanted a minimum of 10 pigs before they could move their trucks to our farms. We had only two and we didn't envisage selling them until after the bad experience we had.

These bulk buyers asked that we help them source pigs from other farms, and then invite them over. We declined because that was not our focus. Besides, we were not willing to assume that risk.

It took us 21 days of extra feeding of our pigs. Each extra day meant an eroding of our profit because at a certain stage, pigs don't add up much weight if they eat.

Feeding the pigs for more days would affect would have led to an operational loss.

We decided to take our losses and sell off our pigs. We got a buyer and disposed off the two pigs. It was lower than the prevailing market price. Calculating all the expenditure incurred in raising the pigs, we broke even for the price at which we sold the pigs. Our hard work was not paid for. But the experience we had acquired was well worth it. We saw the potential and increased our risk by staking every money we realized into the business.

Next week, we will share with you the non-negotiable facts about pig farming in a straight shooting way.

That was a great thread

SmartFarming:
Continued From Friday

Circumstances beyond my control made it impossible for me to post until now. Please forgive me for not posting on the thread as promised.

Now to the substance.

When our pigs came on heat the first time, we decided not to cross them. Based on what we read, they were to come on heat again between 18 and 23 days. They came on heat about that time. What we didn't know was that, it took a long time to arrange for a boar to our farm since we didn't have one.

By the time we brought the boar to our farm, the gilts heat period was past. They could no longer be served. This cost us money. Money to rent the boar and transport it to our farm.

By the third heat period, we knew how long it would take to arrange for the boar. We got it in time and had our gilts served.

One gilt took in. The other did not.

We pregnant gilt delivered in the early hours of 3rd March 2018. It gave birth to 15 live piglets. However, the sow rejected every piglet it littered.

Later, we found out that, the sow needed to have been allowed to eat the after-birth it pushes out to accept that it had finished giving. birth. Generally, you will not be told this. We were raising against time to get the piglets to take in colostrum from the mum in order to build a strong immune system.

We called the vet and the extension officer. We followed their advice to the letter but all the piglets died by daybreak.

Please know this, you are not usually told that a pig can reject it's piglets. This situation can lead to a great loss to farmers.

The next problem was that the second gilt did not come on heat anymore. So we decided to sell it.

In our next post, we will discuss how we were able to get buyers for our pigs and the challenges we faced. Once we are done with the story, we will tell you the things you need to know before you venture into pig farming and why starting small was the best decision for us to make

What an experience
Kind of unique. Life is about challenges though