Bacon Day Hooray!

I'm still trying to get used to looking out my kitchen window and not seeing my piggies running around or rooting up the ground. I'm somewhat melancholy but overall very happy with the process of butchering the pigs.

Saturday we had a professional butcher come with two other butchers to harvest our hogs. From start to finish it was about 50 min! They were SO fast and extremely skilled at cutting, skinning, and killing the pigs. The owner (Jason) took out a rifle once his mobile butchering trailer was set up in our backyard and did not waste time shooting the pigs. He's a pretty good shot too! Not surprising since he's been doing this awhile. His son was with him and he had him go and stick the pigs with a long knife to help them bleed out. After that, they wrapped chains around the pigs legs and hoisted them up over our fencing using the pulley system they have on the butchering trailer. It's strong enough to hoist up an entire cow! Talk about some power!! (Jason's also the butcher that takes care of my Mom's cows).

After the pig was hoisted up, they let it bleed out some more and then they lowered it down on a metal platform thing and started to skin and cut the legs off and Jason pulled out this ginormous electric bone cutting saw. He proceeded to cut the head off and the carcass was hoisted back up the pulley system to be skinned. Meanwhile, while all that was going on, the other butcher (Trevor) was cutting the legs off the other pig that was on the ground. So much was happening quickly, that I missed parts of the butchering process. The kids were also outside with us for the majority of it watching them harvest the pigs. My son absolutely loved it and was not sad or upset in anyway. He was excited for 'bacon day'!

After the first pig was skinned, they gutted it and were kind enough to save me every bit of fat they could for my soap making. Now, if you have been following along with our pig-ventures, you'll know that our male pig was considerably larger than our female pig. Jason said that the female pig we raised was at a perfect point for butchering and that our male was a bit bigger than you'd want but that gives me lots and lots of precious golden lard! Once the gutting was done, the carcass was sawed in half and the pulley system was turned on and they were able to rig it to where it would be sent into a cold containment area in the trailer so they could hoist up the next pig and repeat the process. That alone was very impressive to Steve and I since we've had the opportunity to butcher pigs ourselves and our process was no where near as smooth nor clean as theirs. (We had blood literally everywhere!). Steve wants to one day train alongside someone like Jason and learn the in's and out's of butchering.

One of the greatest things about hiring Jason and his team is that once they are done butchering the animals, they can take the meat to a local processor for you! So what took them close to an hour, would have easily taken us a whole entire day or more to achieve. They were worth EVERY single penny and I know we'll use them again in the future! The craziest part of this adventure was it made Steve and I feel as though we were 'cheating' the process. As if we needed to take a day or two to accomplish this and we had it done in less than an hour. We're strange, I know haha. The whole entire time we were outside, I just kept thinking they thought we were weird for wanting to watch and ask questions. The other butcher (Trevor), was curious as to what we would do with the leaf lard and fat and I told him it was to make my soaps. I was not expecting him to be so responsive to it and he liked the idea of us using all the pig that we could in a humane way. I pride myself and my soap business for being very conscientious about where we source animal fats from. To me, it's worth every penny knowing where the fat came from and what kind of life that animal lived. Any lard/tallow you buy at a commercial store is more than likely coming from feed lot cows or caged up pigs that lived miserable lives. I care immensely about that and will do everything in my power to avoid using commercial animal fats.

Okay, I'll step down from my soap box (hahaha, how ironic), and finish up this blog entry. Whether we butchered the pigs or hired someone else to do it, it was still a humbling experience for us. We raised these piggies since they were babies and always made sure they were well taken care of. It was slightly hard to have them killed but I'm not blind as to why they were put on this earth. They are proficient ground rooting animals that get plump fast; it's the perfect type of animal for eating or tilling up your pasture/lawn/ground. Depending on how much meat we sell, we may get more than two next year to sell to others. Backyard pig tastes immensely better than the crap you get in the stores. Plus, you get the sweet satisfaction that the pig had a great life doing what pigs do best.

We still love our back yard homesteading adventures and look forward to continuing the process! I hope you all have a spectacular Thanksgiving filled with delicious foods (hopefully bacon is involved), surrounded by your loved ones.

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“Every day when I wake up and head out for chores, I'm struck by the beauty we enjoy on our farm. Based on visitors' comments, that's a shared awareness. Not one of our doors has a skull and crossbones. We want visitors to be struck not by what we've done, but rather by how we've caressed this beautiful niche of God's creation into a productive and profoundly inspiring place.” ― Joel Salatin, The Marvelous Pigness of Pigs: Respecting and Caring for All God's Creation