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Showing posts from June, 2020

How to Butcher a Pig for Home Use

The University of Minnesota Extension Swine Team has created a video on how to butcher a pig for home use. With COVID-19 causing reduced operations at many pork processing facilities, pig farmers are experiencing a bottleneck of pigs on farms causing them to look for alternative market options. One option is for a farmer to sell a live pig directly to a consumer. The consumer typically would book an appointment with a local small scale meat processor in Minnesota to get the pig butchered, but the problem is when the video was recorded (May 22, 2020) many small scale meat processors are booked out for months. With no space available at a local processor and a pig that is ready for butchering, many people are choosing to butcher the pig themselves. With few Extension resources available on how to butcher a pig for home use, Sarah Schieck Boelke and her colleagues, Ryan Cox, Dallas Dornink and Lee Johnston created a video on how to butcher a pig for home use, including human saf