The Business of Pigs

People come to pigs because pigs multiply fast. A cow gives you one calf a year. A well managed sow gives you two litters a year, and smallholder litters in this region commonly run 10 to 14 born alive. That is a very different rate of capital growth, and it is the honest reason pigs attract farmers with small land and small savings.

The biological advantages

• High output per female. Gestation is 114 days, remembered as three months, three weeks and three days. Add a lactation of about four to six weeks and a wean-to-service interval of 4 to 7 days in a sow in good body condition, and one sow can complete roughly two litters per year.
• Fast growth. A pig with good genetics, clean water and a properly balanced ration can reach market weight of around 90 kg in roughly six to seven months. Under poor feeding the same pig may take nine to twelve months, which is where most smallholder profit disappears.
• Efficient feed conversion. Pigs convert grain to meat better than cattle or goats. A well fed grower may use in the region of 2.5 to 3.5 kg of feed per kilogram of gain. Poorly fed and poorly housed pigs commonly run at 4 kg or worse.
• Small land requirement. Pigs are housed, not grazed. A serious unit can sit on a fraction of a hectare.
• No wasted carcass. Dressing percentage is high, typically in the range of 70 to 80 percent, so a large share of the live weight you feed is saleable.

The three demands that break people

Every advantage above has a price, and you need to see the price clearly before you spend money.

Pigs eat every day, in cash. Feed is normally the largest single cost in a pig enterprise, commonly around 60 to 75 percent of the variable cost of producing a pig. Cattle can survive a bad month on grazing. A pig cannot. If you cannot fund feed for the whole growing period, do not start with the number of pigs you were planning to start with. Start with fewer.

Pigs are unforgiving of dirty management. They are housed at density, which means disease moves quickly. African Swine Fever, which is present across much of East and Southern Africa, has no vaccine in general commercial use in this region and no cure, and in naive herds it commonly kills nearly every infected animal. Your whole herd is one careless visitor away from being lost. Biosecurity is not an add-on. It is part of the business plan.

Pork is a discretionary purchase. Demand swings with holidays, salaries and season. If your only plan is to sell live pigs to whoever knocks at the gate, you will accept whatever price the trader offers on the day.

Is now your moment?

Answer these honestly. Can you buy feed for the next four months without borrowing? Is there clean water within carrying distance, every day, in the dry season? Can you name at least two buyers who paid cash for a pig in the last three months? Can you lock a gate and stop neighbours walking through your pens? If you answer no to two or more of these, spend the next month fixing that instead of buying pigs. The pigs will still be available. Your capital may not be.

Nothing in this course assumes you have a lot of money. It assumes you will not waste the money you have.

The most common and most expensive mistake in pig farming is buying animals first and looking for buyers later. Pigs reach a weight where they stop being profitable to keep. Feed keeps going in, gain slows, and every extra week eats your margin. You need to know who buys, at what weight, and at what time of year, before you have a single pig on the place.

The four buyers

• Other farmers, buying weaners. They want healthy weaned piglets, usually around 8 to 12 weeks old. They pay per head, not per kilogram. They buy when they have money and when they believe pork prices are rising. This is the fastest cash cycle available to a pig farmer.
• Live pig traders and middlemen. They buy finished pigs at the farm gate and take the transport risk. They pay less than the butcher, sometimes by eyeball estimate of weight rather than by scale. They are convenient and they are expensive.
• Butchers, abattoirs and processors. They usually pay per kilogram of live or dead weight, and often have a preferred weight band. Pigs above or below the band get discounted. They pay better than traders but they want consistency, and they want animals delivered when they say.
• Direct consumers. Households, small restaurants, roadside pork grills, church and funeral gatherings. Highest price per kilogram, smallest volume, most work. Very good for a farmer with a small number of pigs and a phone.

The two week survey

This costs you transport and time, nothing else. Do it before you commit.

1. Visit three butcheries or pork outlets in your nearest town. Ask what they pay per kilogram, whether it is live or carcass weight, and what weight of pig they prefer. Write the answers down with the date.
2. Ask each of them how many pigs they take per week, and whether they currently have enough supply. A butcher who says he can never get enough is a real opportunity. A butcher who says he already has three suppliers is telling you something too.
3. Ask two traders what they are paying at the farm gate this month, and what they paid at Christmas or Easter.
4. Ask three pig farmers near you what they last sold a weaner for, and how long it took them to find the buyer.
5. Write down what is being asked for that nobody is supplying. Small carcasses for grilling? Consistent weekly supply? Weaners in the planting season?

Reading the price signals

Pork prices in the region are seasonal and predictable enough to plan around. Demand usually lifts around the December holidays and other major festive periods, and around month end when salaries land. It usually falls in the lean season when household cash is short and when maize prices are high. Feed prices move on the opposite rhythm: feed is usually cheapest just after the main harvest and most expensive just before the next one.

Put those two together and the plan writes itself. Aim to have pigs ready for the high demand period, and aim to buy your bulk feed just after harvest when grain is cheapest. Do not do the reverse, which is what happens by accident to farmers who do not keep a calendar.

Never accept a price by eyeball. If a trader will not let you weigh the pig, or will not use a weigh band, that is a negotiating position, not a fact. A cheap scale or a chest measuring band pays for itself on the first pig.

There are only three sensible ways to structure a pig enterprise, and they differ enormously in how much money you need up front and how quickly you get it back. Choose deliberately. Most failures come from farmers accidentally doing the hardest model first.

Model A: Weaner production

You keep sows and sell piglets at weaning or shortly after, usually at 8 to 12 weeks. Your money comes back roughly every three months per sow once the system is running.

Strengths: the piglets leave before they start eating expensive grower feed, so your feed bill per animal is small. Less housing needed. Fast turnover of cash.

Weaknesses: this is the most skill dependent model in pig farming. Farrowing and the first three weeks of life are where pigs die. Pre-weaning mortality commonly runs 10 to 20 percent, and can reach 25 percent or more in poorly managed systems. Roughly half of liveborn piglet deaths are caused by the sow lying on them. You also depend entirely on other farmers having cash to buy weaners, which is unreliable.

Model B: Finishing (buying weaners and growing them out)

You buy weaners from someone else and feed them to market weight, roughly four to five months of feeding.

Strengths: no farrowing, no breeding decisions, no sows to over-winter. It is the simplest way to learn feeding, housing and marketing. You can start with three pigs and stop after one cycle if you decide pigs are not for you.

Weaknesses: your margin is squeezed between two prices you do not control, the weaner price and the pork price. Feed is nearly your whole cost. If pork prices fall during your growing period, you carry the loss. You also import whatever disease the seller's farm has, which makes this the model where biosecurity discipline matters most.

Model C: Farrow to finish

You breed your own piglets and grow them all the way to market. This is the model most farmers imagine when they say pig farming.

Strengths: you capture the full margin from conception to sale. You control genetics and health from birth. You buy in very few animals, which is a large biosecurity advantage.

Weaknesses: the highest capital requirement and the longest wait for money. From serving a gilt to selling her first finished offspring is roughly 114 days of gestation, plus about a month of lactation, plus five to six months of growing. That is close to a year of feeding before the first pig is sold. You need farrowing housing, grower housing and finisher housing at once, and you must be competent at all stages.

The staged path

Unless you already have breeding experience, the sensible route is:

1. Cycle one: buy three to five weaners, finish them, sell them. Learn feed, water, weight gain, and your real buyers. Count your money honestly at the end.
2. Cycle two: repeat with a slightly larger batch, and use the profit to build proper housing rather than to buy more pigs. Housing built badly now is paid for twice.
3. Cycle three: keep back or buy one or two good gilts from a reputable source and move into farrow to finish, while continuing to finish bought weaners for cash flow.

This path lets you fail cheaply. Failing cheaply is the whole skill in the first two years.

Most pig farmers cannot answer one question: what does it cost you to produce one kilogram of live pig? Without that number you cannot tell a good price from a bad one, and you will accept whatever the trader offers. This lesson teaches the method. You must supply the prices, because prices differ by country, district and season, and any figure printed in a course would be wrong for you.

Step 1: List the costs

Variable costs change with the number of pigs:

• Feed, from weaner stage to sale. This will dominate everything else.
• The weaner itself, if you bought it in.
• Veterinary items: deworming, iron injection for piglets, any vaccines used in your area, treatment of sick animals.
• Transport to market, and any market levy or slaughter fee.
• Bedding, disinfectant, water if you pay for it.
• Mortality. If one pig in ten dies, the nine survivors must carry the cost of the tenth.

Fixed costs stay roughly the same whether you keep five pigs or fifty: housing depreciation, tools, labour you pay for, licences. Spread these across the pigs you sell in a year.

Step 2: Work out feed used per pig

This is where the calculation lives or dies. Feed used equals weight gained multiplied by feed conversion ratio. Suppose you buy a weaner at 20 kg and sell at 90 kg. That is 70 kg of gain. At a realistic smallholder feed conversion ratio of 3.5 to 1, that pig eats about 245 kg of feed. At a well managed 3.0 to 1, it eats about 210 kg. At a poor 4.5 to 1, it eats 315 kg. The difference between the best and worst case here is over 100 kg of feed per pig, which is usually more than your entire profit.

Step 3: Price it with local numbers

Phone three feed suppliers today and ask the price of a 50 kg bag of grower and of finisher feed. Suppose the average is a price we will call X per 50 kg bag. Then feed cost per pig equals 245 divided by 50, which is 4.9 bags, multiplied by X. Add the weaner purchase price, add roughly a small allowance per pig for vet items and transport based on what you actually paid last time, and add the fixed cost share. That total is your cost per pig.

Step 4: Convert to cost per kilogram

Divide the total cost per pig by the saleable weight. If you sell live, divide by live weight. If you sell carcass, divide by carcass weight, which will be roughly 70 to 80 percent of live weight, so your cost per kilogram of carcass is meaningfully higher than your cost per kilogram live. Farmers who mix these two numbers up believe they are profitable when they are not.

Step 5: Adjust for mortality

If you started ten pigs and sold nine, divide the total cost of all ten by the weight of the nine you sold. This is the honest number.

The two levers

Only two things move this number much. The first is feed conversion ratio, which you improve with balanced rations, clean water available at all times, deworming, comfortable temperature and no wasted feed on the floor. The second is days to market, because every extra day is maintenance feed with no gain to show for it. Everything else in this course is, in the end, about those two levers.

Profitable pig farms go under because of timing, not because of margin. The feed bill is weekly. The income is lumpy and arrives months later. If you cannot bridge that gap you will sell pigs underweight at a bad price, which is the classic way a viable farm becomes an unviable one.

The shape of the money

For a finisher batch, money goes out in a steep line: weaners bought on day one, then feed every week for four to five months, rising each month as the pigs get bigger. A finishing pig eats far more in its last month than its first. Income arrives as a single lump on sale day. So the deepest point of your cash hole is the week before you sell, which is exactly when farmers run out of feed money and sell early.

For a breeding unit the shape is worse in year one and better afterwards. From serving a gilt you wait 114 days of gestation, then about four to six weeks of lactation, then five to six months of growing before the first pig is sold. Meanwhile the sow eats every single day, roughly 2 to 2.5 kg per day when dry and pregnant and substantially more, commonly 5 to 7 kg per day, while suckling a litter. A sow is a cost centre for most of a year before she becomes an income centre.

Build the calendar

Take a sheet of paper. Twelve columns for the months. Four rows:

1. Pigs on farm: how many, at what stage, in each month.
2. Money out: feed, vet, weaners bought, repairs, transport.
3. Money in: expected sales, with the month you expect them.
4. Running balance: last month's balance plus money in minus money out.

The row that matters is the fourth. Find the most negative month. That figure is the working capital you actually need, and it is almost always larger than farmers expect. If you cannot cover it, reduce the number of pigs until you can. A farmer with six well fed pigs beats a farmer with fifteen hungry ones every time.

Stagger your batches

The simplest cash flow fix available to a smallholder is batching. Instead of buying twelve weaners at once and selling twelve at once, buy four every six to eight weeks. You then sell four every six to eight weeks, which turns one lump of income per cycle into regular income. Regular income pays the feed bill for the next batch. It also spreads your price risk across several market days instead of betting everything on one.

The same logic applies to sows. Do not serve all your sows in the same week. Spread farrowings so that weaner sales and pork sales come in steadily.

Buy feed against the harvest

Grain and feed prices in the region follow the harvest. Feed is usually at its cheapest in the weeks after the main harvest, and at its most expensive in the months before the next one. If you have any storage and any cash, buying maize bran, maize or complete feed just after harvest is one of the highest return decisions in the whole business.

Store it properly or you will lose the saving. Keep bags off the floor on pallets, away from walls, in a dry room, and use the oldest first. Mouldy feed is not just wasted money. Some moulds produce toxins that suppress growth and damage reproduction in pigs, so never feed visibly mouldy or musty smelling grain to breeding stock.

Never fund weekly feed on monthly credit

Informal credit at high effective rates on a four to five month growing cycle can quietly consume the entire margin on the batch. If you must borrow, borrow against a specific batch with a specific sale date, and write the repayment into the calendar before you take the money.

Records are not paperwork for its own sake. They are how you find the animal or the habit that is losing you money, while there is still time to fix it. Four simple sheets, kept in a plastic sleeve on a nail in the feed room, are enough. You do not need a computer.

Sheet 1: The sow card

One card per sow, with her identity number. On it: date served, boar or semen used, expected farrowing date (service date plus 114 days, write it down the day you serve her), date farrowed, total born, born alive, stillborn, mummified, number weaned, date weaned, date returned to heat.

This card answers the questions that decide whether a sow stays. A sow producing consistently small litters, or repeatedly failing to conceive, or losing many piglets litter after litter, is being fed by the profitable sows. Written across three or four litters, the card makes that obvious. Without the card you will keep her out of sentiment for years.

Sheet 2: The feed sheet

Date, feed type, quantity received, which pens it went to. That is all. From this you can see how many bags a batch consumed, which lets you calculate feed conversion ratio when you sell. It also shows theft and waste, which are real and are usually invisible without a record.

Sheet 3: The growth and weight sheet

Weigh a sample. You do not need to weigh every pig. Pick five pigs per pen, mark them, and weigh or measure them with a weigh band every two to four weeks. Record the date and the average. If average daily gain is falling, you know before the money is lost, and you can go looking for the cause: water not flowing, feed under specification, worms, a cough in the pen, or a night that is too cold.

Sheet 4: The money sheet

Two columns. Money out, with date and what for. Money in, with date, number of pigs, weight and price. Nothing else. Add it up monthly. Farmers who keep this sheet almost always discover their real cost structure is different from what they believed.

The numbers to calculate

• Pigs weaned per sow per year. Litters per sow per year multiplied by piglets weaned per litter. Well managed smallholder units commonly achieve around 1.8 to 2.2 litters per sow per year. This single number summarises your whole breeding operation.
• Pre-weaning mortality. Piglets that died before weaning divided by piglets born alive. If yours is above 20 percent, your farrowing management is the most valuable thing you can fix.
• Feed conversion ratio. Total feed fed to a batch divided by total weight gained by that batch.
• Days to market. Age or days on feed at sale. Watch the trend, not the single number.
• Margin over feed. Sale income minus feed cost. Crude, but it can be worked out in your head and it tells you quickly whether a batch was worth doing.

Make it a habit, not a project

Records fail because farmers try to record too much. Write only what you will use. Fill the sheets at a fixed time, for example every morning after feeding, so it becomes automatic. Use a pencil, keep the sheets dry, and total them on the same day each month.

One warning: a record you never read is worse than no record, because it gives you false confidence. Sit down once a month, for twenty minutes, with all four sheets, and ask one question: which animal or which habit cost me the most this month?