Your Practical Guide To Self Reliant Living
Connecting to the power grid was one of the worst decisions we’ve made on our homestead. This is the story of how we connected to the grid only to voluntarily choose to live with it off, and still operate our homestead independently. After nearly 5 years living completely off the grid, here’s how we came to find ourselves living off the grid, even with a grid connection.
…
Wasps can be difficult to trap, especially in the early summer when they’re just building their nests. That small spring population will quickly get out of control, one a nest becomes established and dozens of wasps hatch out.
Without wasp traps, out backyard becomes uninhabitable during the summer time. There are so many wasps hovering around the porch, door and garden that you cant take a step without walking into one.
One summer, the wasps built over 100 nests under our second story eves, well out of reach and impossible to knock down. With small children in the house, we’ve had trouble finding a natural wasp trap without harsh chemical pesticides. Wasp spray may be effective, but it’s not something you want all over your house, yard and porch. Besides that, it kills far more than wasps and lingers in the environment long after the wasps are gone.
Over the years we’ve tried many non-toxic wasp traps, and we’ve learned a lot about what makes an effective wasp trap.
…
A bachelor friend of mine wanted to help cook dinner, so I put him in charge of biscuits. He’d never baked in his life, and pasta is one of his most complicated meals. While I stirred and prepped other things, I walked him through the process. He’s pouring things into the bowl at my direction, and it became clear that he’d never actually encountered flour before.
At one point, he looks into the bowl and stares in amazement. “It’s just powders….you put these powders in the bowl and it makes biscuits…that’s amazing!” I thought about it, and that’s almost true. These were traditional scratch-made biscuits, with butter and milk, but it got me thinking.
You could make tasty real food biscuits with a just add water mix, except for the butter. That’s the tricky part…now made easy with powdered butter.
…
We’ve all heard the old adage about building a better mousetrap. “If you build a better mousetrap, the world will beat a path to your door.” It turns out several people have built a better mousetrap, and there are plenty of great options on the market.
Spring on our homestead is mouse season. Most days we put out 5 mouse traps and catch 5 mice within hours. Somedays we manage to catch 6 mice in 5 traps, as two mice fight over the same bait. Needless to say, we’ve had plenty of opportunities to try out traps and find the most effective mousetrap.
…
When your own small row of backyard raspberries is bursting with fruit, you wonder why anyone would be willing to pay $5 per half-pint at the grocery store. If you’re anything like me, you might begin to think backyard PYO raspberries are a good way to make a little extra cash. With careful planning and a bit of luck, you might just be right.
…
When I started blogging, it seemed like nothing more than a creative outlet. I had no idea that it would one day allow me to quit my day job and spend my days frolicking in the garden and holding my children.
When my husband and I met, we both had soul-sucking jobs that left us exhausted and dreading the next day’s alarm. We dreamed of moving to land and finding a way to make money from our homestead. We could quit our day jobs and start living the life we’d always wanted.
I started my blog as a way to condense my thoughts. There were things I wanted to learn, and there’s no better way to learn something than teaching others. It turns out, lots of people wanted to learn the very same things that I did.
…
We’ve all seen them. Those huge listicles with ideas for making money on your homestead. A laundry list of things that could potentially bring in income, but mostly just a few dollars here or there. But what about real income?
I’m talking income that actually pays the bills and helps you live the life you want without taking up a lot of time.
How can you meaningfully contribute to your home economy while still living the life you love?
…
There’s a lot of nostalgia around maple syrup production, especially in Vermont. Much of the maple available these days is produced by large-scale farmers, with vacuum tubing systems and oil-fired boilers. Is there still a way to make a profit as a small scale maple producer?
In the next few years, we plan to add maple syrup to our farm products, so this topic is near and dear to our hearts.
Vermont, in particular, is well suited to this, boasting the highest per tap syrup yield in the US, an average of roughly 25% higher than other states in New England in 2014. Vermont produced a gallon of syrup for every 3.24 taps.
The downside to high production is a lower price. Vermont taps more than twice as many trees as any other state but has one of the lowest average per gallon prices (second only to Maine) at roughly $35/gal for bulk wholesale in the past few years. Retail, however, is much more lucrative. We’ve seen local prices consistently in the $50-$60/gal range.
…
A pig on the hoof is a far cry from cooked pork on your plate. Live weight transitions to hanging weight, then cut weight and finally to cooked yield. At each stage in the process, a little bit comes out, leaving you with only a small portion of the pig’s original size.
Calculating your yield before you harvest a pig is a bit like counting your eggs before they’re hatched. But unlike eggs, which will either hatch or not when their time comes, the time to harvest a pig is up to the farmer. How do you determine when to process a pig?
Determining when to process a pig has a lot to do with age, feed conversion, and your personal preference. How big an animal do you really want to handle? How much ham do you really need? I cant answer those questions, but I can help you figure out how much pork you have in your pasture on the hoof (no scale required).
The first step is to figure out how much your pig weights now. A local Vermont farmer the next town over figured out a remarkably accurate way to weigh a pig with a string. The string method uses the length of the pig from the head (just between the ears) to the base of the tail and the girth of the pig right (behind the front legs) to estimate the total live weight.
For measurements taken in inches, the equation is as follows:
Live Weight = (Length x Girth^2) / 400
We’ve used this method with several of our pigs and found it to be remarkably accurate.
Let us imagine we used that method, and the result was a 250 lb live pig.
How does live weight compare to hanging weight of a freshly processed pig?
Once the blood and viscera are removed, our 250 lb pig would lose about 70 lbs of viscera and blood in the transition from live weight to 180 lbs hot hanging weight (freshly processed). That’s an initial loss of 28% of the initial weight.
The pig carcass loses another 3% during chilling due to additional moisture loss, taking us down to roughly 175 lbs chilled hanging weight.
How much is the pork carcass going to yield in marketable cuts?
The chilled hanging weight still includes the head, trotters, tongue and other oddments which are generally not sold as commercial cuts. They’re all still useful, but their market price is near zero.
Removing the oddments takes you down to roughly 125 lbs cut weight or 50% of your initial live weight.
Cooking will take your final yield down still further. Per the USDA, cooked pork yields somewhere between 74 and 96% of the cut weight, depending on the cut and cooking method. On average, cooked meat will yield 80% of the cut weight. (The big exception is bacon, which yields roughly 30%.) That takes your cut weight of 125 lbs down to 100 lbs cooked yield on your plate.
So what if you processed your pig, and you know your total yield, but you’re curious how much that pig weighed on the hoof?
Using this process, we can extrapolate backward from cut weight to find out the approximate live weight of an animal. One of our home processed pigs yielded roughly 175 lbs of cut weight, that means her other weights were as follows:
Our 350 lb home harvested pig on the hoof landed on the plate at a total of 140 lbs.
If you’re planning to raise pigs for the summer months, the most cost-effective way is to buy feeder pigs in the spring. The pigs are then raised through the summer months and harvested in the fall. Raising your own sows to provide piglets can be expensive, as I’ll discuss shortly.
Year after year there is a shortage of feeder piglets in our area, and we had a hard time finding spring piglets. In July, after demand calmed down a bit, we were able to purchase feeder piglets. Since there’s always a shortage, we went all out and got 6.
Four were to be raised for that year’s pork harvest, and two were to be overwintered as gilts and bred in the late winter for spring piglets the following year. Surely we wouldn’t have trouble selling any extras, which would hopefully cover the costs of overwintering the gilts (unbred sows).
Piglets nursing on a sow at the Tunbridge Worlds Fair in Vermont.
In the meantime, our own family demographic changed, and by spring the following year we had a one-month-old daughter to wrangle. With a new daughter in the picture, adding piglets this year just seems like too much to manage.
While we won’t be raising any piglets, this gave us a unique opportunity. Now we can compare the cost of pigs raised to 5 months old during the summer and fall months, with pigs kept to a full-year-old.
Raising pigs during the winter is less efficient due to extra feed required to keep the pigs warm, and a lack of garden waste to supplement their diet. Pig feed conversion also drops off as the pigs get older and more mature.
Pigs raised at the edge of the woods in Vermont. Even at 2 months old, they’ve already completely rooted up the grass and turned the soil in a large area.
All 6 pigs were purchased at 2 months old for $100 each ($600 total).
During the summer and fall, our pigs ate an average of 5 pounds of commercial pig feed per pig per day (plus ample kitchen/garden slop). Pig feed costs roughly 25 cents per pound.
We fed our first batch of summer pigs for 3 months and harvested them at 5 months old. Total feed costs per pig amounted to roughly $115.
The pigs were processed at home, so there was no cost for slaughter or butchering, but slaughter generally costs about $60 plus another $100 for butchering.
Cost to Raise A Pig (Summer)
Purchase Price $100
Feed Costs $115
Slaughter $60
Butchering $100
Total Cost: $375
Finished hanging weight was approximately 150 pounds per pig, which means about $2.50 per pound hanging weight.
Local farms charge $4 per pound hanging weight, and then charge the buyer for slaughtering and butchering fees on top of that. The same pig, purchased from a local farm would have cost around $600.
Assuming our labor is free, raising our own pigs saved us a total of $225 per pig.
Our overwintered ladies are another matter.
The final hanging weight of our 11-month-old pigs was around 250 lbs each. They each consumed an average of 10 pounds of feed per day all winter long. Pigs eat more in the winter to maintain body temperature, and they also eat more as they get larger. All in all the feed conversion rate drops dramatically.
Up here in the north country, winter is long and cold, and that’s 6 months of eating at around $2.50 of feed per pig per day. That’s another $450 per pig to keep them through the winter.
A 7-month-old pig on pasture in early winter. She’s already eating nearly twice as much feed as in the summer months.
Costs to Raise a Pig (in winter)
Purchase Price $100
Summer Feed Costs $115
Winter Feed Costs $450
Slaughter $60
Butchering $100
Total: $825
Keeping the pigs over the winter raised the price per pound from $2.50 to $3.30 per pound.
Though the increased cost per pound may not seem like much, it’s a lot when you factor in labor for an extra 6 months of pig raising through the winter. Hauling 5 gallons of fresh water per pig each day, plus 20 pounds of feed per day really takes a toll on the body as you’re trudging through knee and hip deep snow.
The pigs account for a minimum of half an hour of labor each day, plus about 5 hours each to process at home.
For our first 4 young summer processed pigs, that’s only a total of 80 hours for 600-800lbs of meat. For our overwintered ladies, it’s another 120 hours for 500-600lbs. Those hours, given that the water was hand hauled, were much harder on the farmer than the summer hours.
Our pair of overwintered gilts should have been inseminated in February to farrow in June, with piglets ready for new homes by August. By then they would have cost roughly $1400 each to raise. Litters on average range from as few as 3 piglets to as many as a dozen. Selling them for $100 each, we still would have taken a loss.
The only hope to recoup the costs would be harvesting the sow at some point later on in the future. Having a second litter in a year will help some, but piglets are much harder to sell in the winter. Piglet sales can help defer the cost of raising the mother, but they do not cover the costs altogether.
You do still get to harvest the sow eventually, which is where the actual payback in meat comes from.
Having done it once, I don’t think we’ll be in a hurry to overwinter lady pigs again. It’s extremely hard work in this climate, and given the payback is minimal we’re happy to stick with purchasing piglets in the spring and harvesting them in the fall.
