[...]Pig Milk « I HEART BACON[...]…

Pigs can reproduce when they are lactating. We have several sows who will jump the fence to get to the boars in order to breed several days after they farrow. They then gestate while continuing to nurse their current batch of piglets and go on to produce another nice large litter. Blackie, one of our sows who is renowned for this, produces three litters a year, much more than most sows, because she does this. She has jumped four foot fences to get to the boars, and then jumped back, all while fully bagged up.

The flavor of what an animal eats can come through in the milk – just wait until the next time the cows get into the onions to experience this (awful!). Pigs on pasture produce a sweet milk.

Pigs do have udders, in fact ours have fourteen to sixteen teats all in one nice long udder that looks very cow like. The teat count is the real reason you don’t find pigs milk in the store or pig cheese – you would have to have a machine that milks all of those teats and that is a lot more setup and cleanup. The advantage of cows is just four teats. We have sows that bag up just as much as cows. Take a gander at these lovely ladies each of which would make an entertainment star blush:

http://images.google.com/images?q=site:flashweb.com+petra

http://images.google.com/images?q=site:flashweb.com+blackie

http://images.google.com/images?q=site:flashweb.com+torn

Pigs will hold still for milking once trained. Sheep, goats and cows must also be trained and you would be well advised to restrain your cow’s tail and hind feet. An advantage of sows is they don’t kick you in the head. Pigs do have naturally long tails, just like cows so keep that in mind.

Pigs do produce copious amounts of milk. Sometimes we milk our sows to get milk for piglets. I have milked Petra Pig and Anna Pig, some of our larger sows, and I was getting heavy squirts of milk that shot six feet (gotta have a little fun) and would scare a barn cat. The sows, off of just one teat, produced more milk than I had the patience to gather and she still had over a dozen more to go. There is a reason piglets grow so fast – their mother’s milk is high in fat, high in protein and copious in volume.

Cheers

-Walter Jeffries
Sugar Mountain Farm
Pastured Pigs, Sheep & Kids
in the mountains of Vermont
Read about our on-farm butcher shop project:
http://SugarMtnFarm.com/butchershop
http://SugarMtnFarm.com/csa