How Normal People Butcher Pigs (at Home)

Nothing holds a pig's head more still than milk. I would like to use skim milk, but we are out. We haven't been able to cream separate. We haven't had enough milk. But we'll kind of make some. Really, I guess it's not CMO, it's water mixed with milk, but they'll still enjoy it. It'll go a little further, buy us a little more time. The pig, when— if you get its food, it'll be like— you want it to be still so you can get the shot off nicely. Nothing does that like liquid, and nothing does that better than milk. I went ahead and leased Phyllis. Well, let's see how we doing. We bagging up maybe a little more. Thank you, Rune. Oh, she missed her shot. There you go. Good job. Good girl. Good girl. She's really picky today. I like these glasses. What's wrong, Freddy? What's wrong? Let's give her a big bunch of alfalfa. Maybe give her all the 5 scoops. Maybe she just feels threatened because so much at the bottom. She's kicking me. I don't know, she just didn't like getting cleaned, I guess. She's gonna let me milk her. Careful, good girl. She might kick. I want to stay close because if you get kicked, you want to be— you want to be close to the legs and not far away. Good news, she's giving more and more colostrum every day. That means at least she's not drying up. It's one thing to lose our 2023 beef, it's another to lose milk. She lost her calf, it was dead. Her placenta came first. But that did induce— well, colostrum comes first and then milk. We could have another game changer here. Yeah, she's milking out in the open with just a leash. The trick is going to keep her in alfalfa until we get a cooler system going. I've got to take this colostrum back, get it cooled off, and then I'll come back. Actually, we won't even need a cooler system if we start milking at the same time. Which means we could be bringing our milk home at the same time. That's not too bad. I think that's twice as much as we got yesterday. That's 3 cups, 3 cups of colostrum. This is a superfood. I'm super encouraged by that increasing. Why am I doing that? It's already been filtered. I just need to consolidate the jars to a smaller jar. Look, whoa, we got a quart, bro! Quarter gallon. It's probably all that caffeine. I'm happy with that. That means colostrum custard is in my near future. Hey, look who's standing for y'all stoically. She's even done eating. Are you gonna finish, Lily? I want you to do it too. All right. All right, it's that time. It's 9 o'clock. My friend Nate's here. Uh, Ben from Holler Homestead is on his way. We still got a few things to do, like check this water, hook up the Gambrel to the tractor. Incidentally, see, Papa? Yes, you're gonna warm up your salami. Incidentally, we cannot show this on YouTube, so we're gonna respect our community guidelines. Ow! Whoa! If you guys actually want to see this, I've got a free training in the description where you get to see it all. Okay, we're at 1— 200 and something. All right, let that fire die. And it's at 200, it only needs to be to 150. All right, I think you got it. All right guys, I've got some stem. She has really filled in here nicely. I'm just, I'm just kind of warming up, bringing myself to it, thinking about where I want to hit. I want to get right above the eyes, about an inch or two. So there is one thing I've changed up from in the past. I'm an advocate for a.410 shotgun with a slug because you just can't mess up. You're gonna knock them out, so powerful. You cannot buy slug ammo right now. I do have— so I— that's why I got the.22 Magnum, thanks to Rebecca and that creative birthday present she got me. All right, well, that's where I'm gonna leave you guys over here with the kids. Everybody's safe, everybody's far away. Actually, let's get you even further away. All right, we got the kids a safe distance. Jonah, you're gonna have to come up the hill, honey. I'm gonna shoot down. Yeah, okay, you're gonna turn the Energizer off and then come up. Okay, so I'm gonna— I guess I'll leave you guys with the kids. Like I said, we can't show this, so, uh, link down in the description. Okay, everyone here. He's loaded, he's cocked, he got it. Gonna start the cleaning process now before we even dump. What do you got it down to, Arun? 170. Okay, that's not terrible. Be good to have it 150, go a little longer, but at 170 we could go maybe shorter. It's at 167, so let's try it at— we'll test it at 2 minutes, but I'm thinking it's going to take 3 or 4. Ben's here. Uh, we're gonna get it done now. Jonah's gonna stoke our fire. We went like 6 minutes and, uh, what do we do? Scrape? Do too much? No, this is scraping real good. Okay, I saw some pink. I thought maybe we cooked it. No, looks like it's doing good. It's doing good. So we need to put a lot more water in there because we couldn't get it submerged. That butt is going to be a nightmare. We're getting it done, although we could have, we could have a little bit longer. It's always tricky at first. Next time we have the— we had Jonah's blower on idle. That's cooling off, isn't it? It's like, what, 1? Because we have to— because we have to take water out of that to pour on the pig, get a little assistance with the scrape. You think we got him plucked enough, Ben? I think that's good enough. Okay, we're gonna hoist him up, wash him off. We're gonna keep our reputation of the cleanest presentation at Van Dale. Oh, that's nice. Oh, thank you. Okay, we got a spot for you guys. Let's do this. Leave it to Ben to get the flame weeder out. So he's getting the little hairs that I would— like a chicken has a pin feather, sometimes the pig has some hairs that just don't want to come out with a scrape. Next step is hang it in here, weigh it, and then we'll, uh, Begin to gut it. First thing first, cut out the, the end, the vent. That's a nice way to say it. We've got the pig gutted. How's the back fat looking, Ben? Oh, it's beautiful. Look at that right here on the shoulders. That's a whole like 2 inches of fat right there. So much fat. So much fat. So just guide me as I'm cutting, uh, tell me to go one side or the other. We've got it washed off nicely. Ready? We're gonna get it in the pan. Okay, y'all just gonna grab your loins and pick them up and put them in there. Nate, it's only half a pig. We just went and harvested pig number 2. How's our scald this time been? This is beautiful. I think we always have the best of luck with our second. I would agree with that. They always go better. Nate, is this your first time? Yeah, first time. This is great though. Ben a good coach? He's an excellent coach. It's the rule, right? Fake it till you make it. Well, it's the Boy Scout thing. You learn, you immediately teach. Yep. That's how you learn the best. What do they say? The best teacher is a student. Yeah, because it's not long though. What was it, 2 years ago? We were both learning this. Yep, here. Yep, right here in this barn. Yep. Well, this round we got the brush. Does that make a big difference, Ben? Yeah, it actually works really well. Wow, this one's really clean. This one's so clean. This is the one that you show off. That's right. You're gonna have to edit out the whole first thing except this one is. All right, that's a wrap. We've got 2 porks in the cool room. They go to the butcher tomorrow to get broken down. We like to harvest on farm, low stress for the animal, which means good humane life for them, but then better meat for us. Their meat just doesn't get infected with the excitement and the stress, and so ends up being better quality meat. So we'll take that in tomorrow. Don't forget, if you want to see this whole process learn that process, I've got a free training. All you gotta do is join my email list. I'll put the link for that down in the description. Now we've actually started eating. I forgot you guys over there. Sorry, let's go check it out. How is it, Grandma? Tasty. Good. Thank you for making this. Oh yes. Okay. And Arun, and Arun, thank you so much for helping. Nate, thanks for helping today. Ben and Meg, thanks so much. And how do you like it? I hope there's room for seconds. I know, right? After working so hard, it's so tasty. Oh look, we got our shipment. You think it's it? Uh, that's it right there. This is a memory card we've been working on getting all week. I'm gonna go try it. Okay, as we go test this memory card, big thanks to Ben and Meg Holler, Holler Homestead on YouTube. Big thanks to Nate from The Kramer Life on YouTube. I'll leave links to their channels down below. You think it's gonna work? I certainly do. Oh, oh, oh, we're in business. It's recording. Okay, good deal. How do you think it looks there, Jonah? It looks amazing. It does. I think it looks good. So I think, you know, we're gonna take a break. Wait, tomorrow's Friday. Yeah, we might can do this tomorrow. Yeah, sweet. I feel like these lights need to come Closer. See how this light is coming out of the stall? I'd hope to get that effect with new light bulbs. That didn't do it. We put this, a key light in there. I think if we had lights, like make maybe Big Daddy's construction light, I think coming out of these stalls, that would look better. And it could maybe make it not so dark in here. It's a little dark. It looks like we'll get that done this weekend. More on that next weekend for this motivational a little micro master class about you can farm or you can homestead. We'll talk more next week.