How Much????

We did some calculations on how much each pig will cost us to rear last night. The figures we last did were back in November 2007 when we first decided all this was what we wanted. They were based on the excellent book by Tony York, whose course we attended back in October 2007 when pig feed was under £7 a bag.
Now it's over £10 and pigs are hungry chaps, meaning to raise one pig to pork weight from weaning we're looking at around £250. That means a break even of £125 per half pig. Tony's advice was never to sell pork at less than half a pig a time, but who's going to pay us enough even to break even when a freezer full of pork is that expensive?
So it looks like we'll be selling pork from the freezer, jointed and packaged, doing as much as we can to 'add value' since with a recession biting, not many people will be queueing up for pork from a couple of unknown chancers from 'down south' (even if one of us is a local).
It's not all doom and gloom though, we reckon that with a bit of lateral thinking and word of mouth we'll break even pretty quickly. The prices we charge per joint will be broadly competitive with the mass produced pork from the butchers in town and we'll never compete on price with cheap EU pork from the supermarket but we never intended to.
We'd like to try air-drying and curing too, which can be a very good way of adding value. Or a very good way to allow a good leg of prime pork to rot slowly in a shed.

The upshot is we're undaunted but cautious, it will definitely mean more work for us, selling half a pig at a time is a relatively quick and profitable process, selling it by the joint means we're likely to be left with the less popular bits of the pig as people only want what they know. But sausages can take care of the less glamourous (but equally tasty) parts, and people are getting more adventurous with what they will try.
So we still have our minds set on what we're here to do. We want to offer people the best pork they ever tasted, and if nothing else, we'll have a freezer full of delicious meat that cost us less than anything we'd care to eat bought commecially.

Anybody want to pre-order a chop?