# How much bacon from a 440 pound pig?



## Murby (May 24, 2016)

How much bacon should a 440 pound pig produce?

Or a better question, how much did your pigs weigh live when slaughtered and how much bacon did you get?


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## Empire (Jan 7, 2016)

Depends
Some breeds are longer, and produce more bacon. Example...
I sent a Tamworth and a blue butt to slaughter. The blue butt was 225 and the Tamworth 245. The bluebutt produced 2 pounds more bacon than the Tamworth. The Tamworth produced 5 pounds of meat more overall.


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## Murby (May 24, 2016)

So what was the total weight of bacon you got from each pig?


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## Gravytrain (Mar 2, 2013)

My pigs would yield between 30-40 lbs of bacon for a 440 lb live weight pig.


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## Murby (May 24, 2016)

Gravytrain said:


> My pigs would yield between 30-40 lbs of bacon for a 440 lb live weight pig.


Is that 30-40 lbs a "cut and trimmed" slab with square ends or do you leave it all ragged and uneven like it comes out? 

My buddy said he got about the same as you but he didn't know what his pigs weighed and he said the slabs were not trimmed at all.


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## Gravytrain (Mar 2, 2013)

Murby said:


> Is that 30-40 lbs a "cut and trimmed" slab with square ends or do you leave it all ragged and uneven like it comes out?
> 
> My buddy said he got about the same as you but he didn't know what his pigs weighed and he said the slabs were not trimmed at all.


That's trimmed and sliced.


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## Empire (Jan 7, 2016)

My pigs that I sent were 16 and 14 pounds, trimmed and nicely packaged


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## TnAndy (Sep 15, 2005)

Our last pig, done about a month ago, weighed right at 400 live, and 280 dressed out hanging in the cooler, and yielded 25lb of bacon trimmed up ready to cure. Mixed breed. solid black colored pig....I get whatever is for sale when buying spring feeders.

That is pretty typical for us....20-30lbs. I don't trim mine as close to the ribs as some, liking my 'spare ribs' a bit less spare (more meat on them)....yet another advantage to doing your own....you get it cut the way you like to eat it.

Next pig I'm doing tomorrow, I'm gonna guess will run about 25lb heavier live weight (out of the same litter, now month older), white Yorkshire looking model. I'll tell you by Saturday what his yield is.


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## Murby (May 24, 2016)

You all might be wondering why I'm asking.. 
In 2014, I took three pigs to a butcher.. the largest weighed in at around 338 lbs (tape measure technique) and the two others weighed in at around 320.

The large pig produced 14 lbs of bacon, the smaller pigs produced 11 lbs. 

I just sold a pig to a customer who took the pig to a different local butcher house.. When I called the butcher house a few days after it left, he said it had a hanging weight of 364 lbs. 
The customer got 12 lbs of bacon back. 

What is going on? Is every butcher a scammer?


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## Empire (Jan 7, 2016)

You aren't getting the bacon back that you should. Are they doing a heavy trim and adding that back to sausage? I even get back bacon ends, basically the left overs that are around after they trim and slice the bacon to make it fit the square packages. I'd find out exactly what's going on, maybe they are heavy trimming it and making sausage, maybe you need to find a new butcher


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## TnAndy (Sep 15, 2005)

Murby said:


> You all might be wondering why I'm asking..
> In 2014, I took three pigs to a butcher.. the largest weighed in at around 338 lbs (tape measure technique) and the two others weighed in at around 320.
> 
> The large pig produced 14 lbs of bacon, the smaller pigs produced 11 lbs.
> ...


That was a BIG pig.....live weight had to be in the 500lb range. Should have yielded 25lb easy. How much sausage came off it ? We got 60lb off that last one, fairly typical....50lb or more.

Can't answer for 'every' butcher.....but I sure suspect none of 'em actually buy the meat they eat....  Which is yet another reason I do my own.


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## Murby (May 24, 2016)

Empire said:


> You aren't getting the bacon back that you should. Are they doing a heavy trim and adding that back to sausage? I even get back bacon ends, basically the left overs that are around after they trim and slice the bacon to make it fit the square packages. I'd find out exactly what's going on, maybe they are heavy trimming it and making sausage, maybe you need to find a new butcher


Well, I don't have any real say in where a customer takes their pig to have it butchered.. And even if I did have say in it, I haven't found an honest butcher yet. 

In light of the 2014 incident of "meat theft by butcher", I decided this round of pigs, at least the one I'm keeping for my own family, will be processed right here by myself. 
To that end, I went out and purchased a Hobart 5216 meat band saw and rebuilt the entire thing and converted it to single phase power... Cleaned and polished every part, new bearings, blade, guides, etc.. 
Also built a 7ft tall x 5ft x 3ft gas fired insulated smoker.. 

Can't trust anyone anymore.. I already do my own deer, how hard can a pig be right?


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## sang (Aug 23, 2013)

I do not have or feel the need for much equipment in my situation. I like my pigs scalded instead of skinned for the purposes of curing hams and shoulders. I would like to have a scalding tank but do not have one, there is an Amish man nearby that I take my hogs to that scalds and scrapes and saws them down the middle for me for $40-$50 each. I help him also, then bring them home and block them out with a knife and large hand meat saw. 
Other than the hams and shoulders salt cured, I cure my own bacon, cut the ribs down the middle into two slabs, cut out the loin and tenderloin and wind up with 3-4 roasts and sausage (also have electric grinder). Use a large wood fired grill for smoking the bacon and make the lard in a crock pot.


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## Murby (May 24, 2016)

sang said:


> I do not have or feel the need for much equipment in my situation. I like my pigs scalded instead of skinned for the purposes of curing hams and shoulders. I would like to have a scalding tank but do not have one, there is an Amish man nearby that I take my hogs to that scalds and scrapes and saws them down the middle for me for $40-$50 each. I help him also, then bring them home and block them out with a knife and large hand meat saw.
> Other than the hams and shoulders salt cured, I cure my own bacon, cut the ribs down the middle into two slabs, cut out the loin and tenderloin and wind up with 3-4 roasts and sausage (also have electric grinder). Use a large wood fired grill for smoking the bacon and make the lard in a crock pot.


You should make a video! I need all the help I can get! 

When I sold the first pig, the customer had a butcher come out on sight.. shoot it, bleed it, and gut it.. I watched the process closely and it didn't seem that complicated at all.. 

I can't imagine skinning it is much different than a deer.. although I do understand the skin doesn't come off as easily and you have to cut every inch.. 

From there I'm a bit lost and am watching as many youtube videos as I can..


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## TnAndy (Sep 15, 2005)

It can certainly be done with a minimum of equipment or place to work, but having them makes the job a whole lot easier. We used to take our critters to custom slaughter with varying degrees of success and satisfaction, and finally decided if we were going to take the time and effort to raise quality food, then the processing was an important final step that ought to be done on the farm.

To that end, I added a 12'x22' room on the back of the garage as an 'auxiliary' kitchen. I'm a builder, have my own sawmill, it was a natural fit to do something like this. The room includes a 6x6 walk-in cooler, central work space for cutting, counter tops with deep commercial sink, space for our vac sealer, dedicated under counter water heater, and so on. Most of the furnishing including the cooler door were Craig's List finds, or some other used/salvage building material stuff to save bucks.

My tools were like Sang's....hand meat saw, knives, etc. We did spring for a Weston vac sealer (which gets a lot of other use besides meat), and a good Weston grinder for the sausage. Later I added a small bandsaw from Northern tool.....nothing like a good Hobart by any means, but good enough to use a few days per year so I can have bone-in chops easily, or saw T-bone steaks out of a cow when we do one. It's light weight, on wheels and I roll it in the walk-in for storage between uses of both (in fact, the walk-in doubles as storage for an extra upright freezer, big Rubbermaid trash can on casters, and other stuff we only pull out for processing).

I skin, simply because to this point I'm not smoking hams/bacon/sausages...but getting close to all that as time/other projects permit. I got an old 500gal propane tank we used for hot water storage for many years (house heating project/experiment), cut it off about 1/3 of the way from the top and looks like it would make a dandy scalding tank....plan is one day to build a brick firebox under it for direct wood heating, set up a steel beam trolley with chain hoist over head....just haven't pulled the trigger on that project yet, as it would take a separate, dedicated space for it, and I haven't decided it's worth the effort yet.

So, I shoot, stick, get on a gambrel, hang from my tractor front end loader, hose it down good to start, and skin....will be doing our last one for this year in a few hours, which is why I'm up at 4am. Neighbor and I will start about 7:30, and two halves will be in the cooler by 10am at the latest. (first time I've worked with this guy, so don't know his level of skill). The skin, guts/etc go in the loader bucket, and dumped up on the mountain....the natural critters clean it up in short order.....hey, they gotta eat too.

It will chill tonight, and wife/I will cut up/package/grind sausage over the next couple days.

One tip for ya'll if you decide to build a small walk-in. I don't have a beam/trolley system like the commercial places..just too much expense to set up for the use of the cooler......so when we bring the halves up to the house, wife rolls a large Rubbermaid cart out to the front of the garage, we lay a half on it, or in the case of a beef, I cut the front quarter off at that point....then roll thru the garage to the room/cooler in the back. 

Now when you get INTO the cooler, lifting even a half of still warm, greasy pig/1/4 cow UP to the ceiling to hook it on the ceiling hooks can be a real trick, even for two men and a wife....so I bought a little ratchet chain hoist deal ($49, Harbor Freight, 1/2 ton rated) I hook on the ceiling hook, other end to the stainless steel S hook in the pig's hind leg (hole where the gambrel hook was), and simply crank it up off the cart to the point I can put the S hook in a piece of chain coming from the ceiling hook. Beef, we have to quarter....just too big, and too long to handle by hand, but a pig clears the floor of the cooler by about a foot doing this, and without breaking your back.


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## Murby (May 24, 2016)

Nice!!
Thanks! That was a very interesting read...


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## TnAndy (Sep 15, 2005)

OK, we got the bulk of cutting/grinding done today. Live weight 440, hanging 310. Bacon is 31lbs, untrimmed so far....probably lose 3-5lb squaring it up and trimming.

Sausage was 75lb, plus whatever trims off the belly slabs.


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## Murby (May 24, 2016)

All the video's I see of them "home curing" bacon are being done with a plastic zip lock bag.. But these bacon slabs are small. 

Any suggestions for the kind of slab that comes from a 500 lb pig?


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## TnAndy (Sep 15, 2005)

I go ahead and cut mine into managable pieces before I cure, something like 12"x12", so that fits in a 2gal ziplock easy. My slicer won't handle more than 12" anyway, and wife likes it paper thin.


But I have a dozen 'meat lugs'....Rubbermaid dish busing trays...that are something like 14x20" x 5-6" deep....they would hold a whole side (in fact, they are right now....I left them in the lugs in the cooler tonight....to tired to set about curing tonight). I could leave them in there, but they don't fit the fridge easy.

Pic of the lugs, we use them for all kinds of stuff besides meat.











You could also put your cure on, roll it up and stick it in a 5gal food grade bucket too.....


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## Gravytrain (Mar 2, 2013)

I agree with Andy...either cut them in manageable pieces or brine them in a large covered container. I have full and half sized cambros and lids to cure/store/process meats.


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## Murby (May 24, 2016)

Wow! I love the corn! If you need to get rid of it for some cosmically odd reason, I have four pigs left that can hide it for you.. 

What's up with using the zip lock bag? They say to squeeze all the air out... Is this important for some reason? Or is this just a way to make sure the hunk of meat is always in contact with the solution or at least not being dried out by being exposed to air??


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## barnbilder (Jul 1, 2005)

First, bacon, unless you are in Canada, is technically a term for a cured product. The piece of meat that bacon comes from is more properly called "side meat", which is a small piece of the big slab that comes off that also contains the "belly meat". The belly is an inferior cut of meat for making bacon compared to the side meat. With this particular butcher, you might have to ask him to please slice as much belly into bacon like strips as possible. 

Breeding and diet has a lot to do with how much "bacon" you are getting. It is possible to have an incredibly large hog that has little usable bacon. Especially if it is poorly bred or has had some sort of ad lib feed scheme. It isn't a mathematical situation, in which, if pig X weighs y and yielded Z bacon, then pig J will yield K bacon. _It absolutely does not work that way. It is possible to feed the usable cut of bacon right off a hog. Not that it isn't there, not that there isn't more, but if a butcher were to slice it and package it, the customer would be irate. In some cases, the only thing that gets bigger is the veins of fat in the bacon slice, after a certain point. A bag of bacon from certain hogs could look like a tub of lard with a red spot here and there, and that is exactly what it would be, and it wouldn't cook very nicely or make customers very happy.

There is an optimal weight for the hogs you are raising under your management. That is, if the hogs you are raising have any degree of consistency, or, if you have the experience to look at a hog and tell what he looks like on the inside. Commercial hogs have a target weight that they shoot for. It is pretty light compared to the weights that the backyard producers seem to shoot for. The backyard people want a bunch of sausage, so I guess they figure pounds of sausage wins the game. If they asked for their fat trim to be bagged up, or did it themselves, some would realize that the last few loads of feed they dumped, just went to the lard bucket. Lard is good, but one can only use so much, unless you just like handling feed, there is an optimal weight for your hogs.
_


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## Gravytrain (Mar 2, 2013)

barnbilder said:


> Breeding and diet has a lot to do with how much "bacon" you are getting. It is possible to have an incredibly large hog that has little usable bacon. Especially if it is poorly bred or has had some sort of ad lib feed scheme. It isn't a mathematical situation, in which, if pig X weighs y and yielded Z bacon, then pig J will yield K bacon. It absolutely does not work that way. It is possible to feed the usable cut of bacon right off a hog. Not that it isn't there, not that there isn't more, but if a butcher were to slice it and package it, the customer would be irate. In some cases, the only thing that gets bigger is the veins of fat in the bacon slice, after a certain point. A bag of bacon from certain hogs could look like a tub of lard with a red spot here and there, and that is exactly what it would be, and it wouldn't cook very nicely or make customers very happy.


I totally agree with this. There is a reasonably good chance that the hogs you (Murby) raised didn't have much in the way of side muscles...or those muscles were poorly developed the farther back it went. 

For example, I've raised pigs that had very light muscling behind the last rib in the posterior end of the exterior abdominal oblique. As barnbilder noted, the butcher (in this case me) could have sliced it for bacon, but with very minimal muscling...it would have been better used rendered for lard than smoked for lard. By the way, these pigs were all related and raised on pasture. However, this particular year was a very wet one and I didn't give very large paddocks for them to roam...so they devoured a new paddock up within a couple days and then loafed waiting for cheese and dough. I don't know if it was genetic, environmental or a combination of both, but these hogs yielded about half of what my pigs normally do in the way of usable side meat.



> There is an optimal weight for the hogs you are raising under your management. That is, if the hogs you are raising have any degree of consistency, or, if you have the experience to look at a hog and tell what he looks like on the inside. Commercial hogs have a target weight that they shoot for. It is pretty light compared to the weights that the backyard producers seem to shoot for. The backyard people want a bunch of sausage, so I guess they figure pounds of sausage wins the game. If they asked for their fat trim to be bagged up, or did it themselves, some would realize that the last few loads of feed they dumped, just went to the lard bucket. Lard is good, but one can only use so much, unless you just like handling feed, there is an optimal weight for your hogs.


Yes, and I tend to think that the reason commercial hogs are optimized at 250-300lbs is because with their diet and lack of exercise, that is the point at which producers have discovered their law of diminishing returns. Whereas my hogs...even very large 600lb ones are out running, rooting, wallowing, fighting, etc. and since pasture is nearly free and my supplemental feed IS free...I don't feel the need to hurry the slaughter dates. Many of my customers request large halves. The larger animals almost always seem to yield a larger percentage of usable side...which for most people is the biggest point in buying a pig in the first place. ig:


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## barnbilder (Jul 1, 2005)

Another consideration in the commercial market hog's optimal size is toughness. If you are trying to maximize money cuts from nice tender tenderloin slices, the smaller, and in most cases younger pig will have an advantage. Same holds true if you want to have fresh ham steaks or anything like that. Most people are in it for the sausage, they will suffer through some tough pork chops if it means their freezer is brimming with sausage. Ribs and roasts will likely see the crock pot, so toughness is no issue.


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## barnbilder (Jul 1, 2005)

If your butcher cuts country ribs for you, depending on how he blocks the hog, you could lose a couple pounds per side, with the most common cutting style. If you indicate that you like country style ribs, your butcher might sacrifice more bacon to fulfill your desire for country ribs. When using a commercial slicer, you can completely screw up a piece of side meat, and sacrifice several pieces of bacon to the sausage pile trying to salvage it. Sometimes a wayward knife stroke on the skinning job can lose you some sliced side meat, too.


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## Murby (May 24, 2016)

UPDATE:

We slaughtered our own pig Saturday.. What an adventure! Skinning it wasn't hard but the belly area was quite problematic.. it was slow and tiny cuts but we only left maybe a pound of fat total on the skin so I think we did pretty good for our first try. 

I had built a skinning cradle just for this job.. made a rough drawing of the pig in Autocad using actual measurements, then drew a cradle made of 2x4's to fit. 
Bragging Time! It worked perfectly! That cradle fit that 500 lb pig like a glove.. 

So after bleeding it out and gutting while it was hanging, we hoisted it onto the cradle but when I set it down, the pig was sort of tilted to one side 45 degrees. My buddy and I tried to grab its legs and rotate it so all four legs would be straight up.. HA! We couldn't even budge that 500 lb beast.. Had to tie the tractor back up and use the bucket to pick up on two legs to twist it upright.

Once it was skinned, we hoisted it back up with the tractor and used a butchers saw to slice right down through the middle of the spine.. In hindsight, we probably should have chosen a side but live and learn I guess. 

We finally got one of the pig halves up onto our butchering table.. from there, it took about 5 minutes to slice the hocks off, and separate the shoulder and butt from the ribs and bacon. (we followed directions from youtube videos)... 
Another 10 minutes and we had the bacon separated from the ribs. 

All in all, it took us about 8 hours to slaughter the pig and do most of the butchering into larger pieces. Since we're in Michigan and the temps are in the low 20's at night and high 20's during the day, we "loosely" pack the meat in cleaned rubbermade containers and set them outside in the snow over night. The 3 foot long "bars" of pork chops and the 50 lb hams went into a food grade 55 gallon plastic drum we laid on its side to act as a freezer. 

On Sunday, I started finishing up processing.. Mixed up some curing stuff and got the bacon slabs into giant ziplock backs. 

We got 37 lbs of belly! (pre-bacon) 

The rear hams, with hocks removed, are almost 50 lbs so they got chopped into 3 and 4 pieces each. 

I had purchased an old and beat up hobart 5216D saw.. its all stainless, even the base, so I thought I could fix it up.. paid $350 for it and put another $200 into rebuilding it.. 
It sliced through those hams and pork chops like a hot butter knife.. WOW! that was so cool. 
My pork chops are so evenly cut they look like they came from the store. And wow is that saw fast.. it cuts almost as quickly as you can pass the meat through the blade..

We're curing one ham and freezing the rest and the hocks uncured as I understand it will last longer in the freezer. 

We wrapped our freezer meat using a commercial plastic Saran-Wrap, then freezer paper with the wax coating on one side, then another layer of the Saran-Wrap for good measure. 
I'm not really happy about how that worked out.. I would have preferred to go with some kind of vacuum packing next time.

Well.. out of 5 pigs, one sold off, slaughtered one this weekend, and we have 3 piggies left.. 
Interestingly, it seems they get kind of nervous now when they see me there with the rifle in my hand. They won't come to the food as quickly and they sort of hang out 50 feet away just looking at us.


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