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Storey's Guide to Raising Pigs: Care, Facilities, Management, Breed Selection

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Learn how to successfully raise your own pigs. Providing all the information a small-scale pig farmer needs, this comprehensive guide covers breed selection, housing, humane handling, butchering, disease management, and more. Stressing the importance of sustainable and environmentally friendly farming practices, Kelly Klober provides expert tips on making your hog operation more efficient and profitable. Storey’s Guide to Raising Pigs will give beginners the confidence they need to succeed, while inspiring experienced farmers to try new techniques and experiment with new breeds. 

320 pages, Paperback

Published January 6, 1997

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Kelly Klober

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Displaying 1 - 19 of 19 reviews
Profile Image for Wayne.
39 reviews15 followers
December 21, 2011
Interesting stuff I'd never heard about breeds, especially the Mulefoot. It's also opening my eyes a bit to some management/marketing problems I may have. I presently raise free-range laying hens and broilers (chickens). I sell the eggs and meat at farmers' markets. Since purchasing more acreage, I've been considering raising hogs and selling the meat along with my chicken and eggs. I'm aware of my customers' concerns and what I need to provide in order to charge a premium price without being certified organic. I also like to let animals live a lifestyle that is natural to them as much as possible. For these reasons, I had planned to let my hogs free-range on pasture.

Reading this book, though, I'm no longer certain that would be the best thing to do. Hogs' feet are split into two pointy toes that tear into soil, and they like to root just under the surface of the soil with their snouts. (This is why some permaculturists recommend using them for tilling, which I may do sometime next year.) This damages plants and contributes to soil erosion. In short, unlike ruminants like sheep and cattle who can improve pasture over time (if properly rotated), hogs actually destroy pasture.

We only have about five acres, mostly wooded, and I plan to have other operations on there besides just the hogs, so I have to be frugal with my land usage. I can't just put these pigs on a new half-acre every day for them to destroy. It sounds as if the better option for our property is what are called "drylots." This is basically a fenced-in paddock, usually in a sloping or wooded area, or other area unsuitable for growing crops. A strip of sod is planted just downhill from it to filter runoffs during rain. I'm thinking I could build multiple drylots and rotate the hogs--basically the same as I'll be doing with the broilers.

My plan there is to have a house for each flock with five paddocks around it like a wheel (with one slice out so I can get to the door). The chicks will stay inside for the first two or three weeks, then I'll let them out to a paddock, moving them to a new one each week. It looks like I could do something similar with my hogs. This would also allow me to build an elevated house with a solid floor, as the book recommends. It seems all animals prefer to be up off the damp ground if they can be and are healthier for it.

The book said you can keep pastured hogs from rooting up the ground by putting "humane rings" through their noses--a misnomer if ever I've seen one. The purpose of this ring is to cause the pig pain if it tries to root. These can come out, requiring the farmer to put in a new one. I know from my experience trying to use peepers on hens that there's noting pleasant about this experience for either the animal or the farmer. I've quit using peepers, and I don't intend to start doing something like that to an intelligent, sensitive mammal just to keep it from doing what it has naturally evolved to do, not if there's another way around it.

I'm also seeing lots of unpleasant stuff that's done to piglets--tooth clipping, tail docking, castration. Tail docking is controversial, but there's a lot more to it than just industrial feedlots docking them to keep other hogs from chewing on them out of boredom. There are certain markets where an un-docked hog cannot be sold, and others where an un-docked tail is preferred (breeding boars, I think). It's partly a cosmetic thing, and partly to prevent other hogs from biting them. At feeding time, as they're all bustling to get at the feeder, it's not uncommon for them to bite each others' tails to move each other out of the way. Docking tails prevents bite wounds that can lead to infections at a very dirty part of the body. I'll have to think about this one.

Tooth clipping just sounds barbaric at first blush, but little pigs are born with something called "wolf teeth," long canine-like teeth that will tear up a nursing momma sow and cause little piglets to injure each other.

There's all kinds of basic how-to information out there on raising chickens, but it's a little harder to find this kind of instruction for raising pigs. I'm happy to have gotten this book and would recommend it to others. The only way I can think to improve it would perhaps be to have detailed plans for how to build shelters, feeders, etc. and install fences and watering systems, and maybe have some better illustrations (or simply more of them) about how to actually handle hogs. They show a little sketch of a loading chute and a sketch of a hurdle...and that's it. Also, if they were going to bother including a chapter on processing pigs with recipes and so forth, I think it should have been much more extensive than it was. For example, they offer a couple recipes that feature cracklins without ever defining what a cracklin is or telling how to make them. This part deserves its own book, really. Chopping it down just to include it here cheats the reader.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
Profile Image for Heather.
90 reviews1 follower
November 9, 2019
As first-time homesteaders planning to raise two feeder pigs in the spring, Storey's GtRP is immensely helpful. Skipped the chapters geared toward larger productions and marketing, which are not relevant to us, but otherwise loaded with tips, hints and encouragement for the process. Will likely return to this again and again.
Profile Image for Jo.
649 reviews4 followers
August 31, 2018
#Storey'sGuideToRaisingPigs,4thEdition #NetGalley #Sustainable

An excellent blend between theory and practice. The descriptions are well illustrated and the content is very useful to start raising pigs. A very good references book for people looking to start farming naturally without antibiotics.
Profile Image for Olatomiwa Bifarin.
171 reviews4 followers
August 1, 2019
This is the first text I am reading on the subject, so I lack some comparative abilities here. However, this contains virtually every thing I wanted to learn about raising pigs, and that's good enough for me.
Profile Image for Valerie.
2,031 reviews183 followers
January 15, 2023
I am on my way today to get 2 mangaletsa piglets. Since I would like to not feel guilty all the time, I am reading all the books on pigs I can find. This one is helping a lot with practical, useful information.
Profile Image for Rich Thorne.
8 reviews
January 10, 2020
Good book overall. It covered many different topics of hog ownership. There is something for everyone in this book. I will be adding this to the permanent book shelf at home.
Profile Image for Dartharagorn .
192 reviews3 followers
August 22, 2023
If you're looking for good info on pigs this has it! Was a fun read and had a lot of information packed into it!
358 reviews9 followers
November 2, 2014
Full of good information, but kind of one-sided. The author raises pretty traditional breeds on drylots (not pastures) and sells more pigs to other farmers than he does raise his own pork (though there's plenty of information on that as well.) He advocates for cleanliness and prevention to control disease, but does seem to support a liberal use of antibiotics, including antibiotic feed (though he talks about other options). He's very big on feeding pigs pretty much all shelled corn + protein supplement, so those looking for information about raising pigs on more sustainable feedstuffs (like I am) will disappointed in that area. This book does a better job of introducing the pork industry in general than a lot of other stuff I read, which is a plus, and the author makes an encouraging argument for the continued strength of small pork producers.
Profile Image for Anna.
Author 53 books110 followers
March 22, 2013
Storey's Guide to Raising Pigs is an excellent, middle-of-the-road, beginner book. Granted, I really wanted a lot more information on pasturing, but Walter Jeffries' excellent blog http://sugarmtnfarm.com/ will stand in until he finishes up his book.

In the meantime, Storey's Guide to Raising Pigs should get us started on our first set of finishing hogs (the pig equivalent of broilers) and would be a good place to start as well for those interested in showing pigs, or starting a hog business. I did skim through a lot of pages that weren't very relevant to me, but that's what I expect when I pick up a general overview.
Profile Image for Deighve.
2 reviews
August 15, 2014
Great book! Kelly may be an odd sort of man but he sure knows his hogs! My wife and I have raised hogs twice now and this book has been indispensable.
I will say that I feel the author leans a bit to the extreme side of what it takes to raise pigs (it isn't as complicated as it seemed in the book) but I'd rather be over informed then under informed when it comes to an investment like raising meat for the family.
I'd say that small or large ambitions, this book is a must read for anyone interested in the hog business.
Profile Image for Loren.
37 reviews2 followers
September 17, 2012
We wanted to learn what it took to raise pigs on an open lot to see if it would be doable with the land we had. This edition of "Storey's Guide To Raising Pigs" provided us with enough information to make some plans for the future.

If you're already raising pigs, I'm not too sure that this book would be of great help to you, but for those who are thinking about getting started raising pigs, this book will probably be useful.
Profile Image for Mike.
80 reviews1 follower
January 16, 2015
I can't imagine there are many better guidebooks for raising hogs at a small scale. Kelly Klober keeps his advice straightforward and full of anecdotes and practical country wisdom. I've dogeared plenty of pages; this guide will prove useful for years to come.

Storey's Guide should be helpful for most any small scale pig raiser -- from 4H kids to commercial operations with 10 sows.

Klober's dedication to swine and knowledge of breeding shine through every page of this excellent book.
Profile Image for ScholasticPerturbation.
336 reviews1 follower
January 31, 2023
A nicely comprehensive guide to raising pigs. It covers many aspects of the lifestyle/career without getting into over-complicated details (building pig pens with illustrations, listing diseases/medicines and administration tools but nothing too technical/medical for laymen's understanding) at just the right pace to educate without becoming tedious. I greatly appreciated a lot of the information provided, and will also be looking into some of the referenced materials for further reading.
Profile Image for Michael De Paola.
58 reviews1 follower
October 8, 2011
It may be a long while before I have hogs but this book was great. I like the Storey's guides but this one offered tons of good old fashioned country wisdom so as to be fantastic. If you are interested in producing food of any kind I recommend this book. You will learn something.
Profile Image for Ami.
1,703 reviews46 followers
January 25, 2011
This book was a disappointment after reading "Storey's Guide to Raising Chickens." I found it to be too technical and geared more toward breeding and showing pigs, rather than raising pigs for food.
Displaying 1 - 19 of 19 reviews

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