What do Pigs Eat?

Really, what do pigs eat?  Seems like I can feed them anything I want and they will eat it.  Is there anything they can’t eat?  These are a few of the questions I asked when I was first venturing into raising pigs for our family farm. 

Over the last five years I’ve been able to raise multiple breeds, each with their own characteristics and personalities(good and bad!)   If you’re interested in how the first couple years with pigs have been, check out my blog post “How To Raise Pigs On Pasture”

This post contains affiliate links. Here is the full disclosure.

By no means am I an expert at this, but I have been raising pigs on pasture for over half a decade now.  Simple trial and error has been my best mentor on the farm, ESPECIALLY with animals.  I tried a lot of things based on what common sense tells me.  Pigs, like most other farm animals, need three things: water, food, and a fence.  If these three things are kept consistent, your experience with pigs should be a good one.  I’m going to focus on the food portion in this post.  I have another post about How to Raise Pigs that talks more about the fencing and the watering parts. 

I have seen a lot of different opinions on social media when the same question is posed to the group, “what do pigs eat?”  As for what works for my pigs, I have them on a mixed diet of garden trimmings and and vegetable excess. This is supplemented with a commercial feed that I ferment prior to giving to my pigs. 

Let me spend a quick second on pigs’ natural diet before I explain the specifics of my diet I use…

Pigs Natural Diet

Naturally, pigs are wonderful foragers. They use their strong noses to root through the ground for grubs, worms, tasty root ends, and anything else appetizing.  Walnuts, acorns, hickory nuts, berries, shrubs; if it’s appetizing to the pig, they’ll eat it.  If it’s poisonous, thorny, bitter etc, they’ll generally keep their distance. 

Pigs are technically omnivores, and will eat meat from other animals if the need arises.  This is much more common in wild settings.  Agricultural hogs primarily live on a herbivorous diet.  I fed my pigs cooked meat once from some leftover chickens we had processed.  Pigs immediately lost their appetite, had diarrhea, and showed signs of just being sick. 

A really good book that helped get me started is “Happy Pigs Taste Better“, by Alice Percy. I read it before getting pigs, then got some pigs and raised them. THEN…I went back and re-read the book again after that first year. It felt like an entirely different book the second time reading it. My first hand experiences entirely changed my perspective and what I gleaned from the book!!

Can Pigs Eat Anything?

I’d love to say that pigs can eat anything, but I don’t want to be on the hook for that.  Pigs ARE opportunistic feeders, and will attempt to eat most foods.  They definitely show preference for certain foods. 

My pigs LOVE watermelons, grapes, apples, cantaloupe and virtually any other fruit I give them.  If there’s no fruit available, they love pumpkins, cucumbers, tomatoes, and nearly any other garden vegetables. 

My favorite feeding times with my pigs are when I get a truckload of apple “seconds” from a local produce business. Or there’s my annual trip to a friends house the day after Halloween every year. I go to gather up the hundreds of pumpkins(literally, hundreds..) that she pays neighbor kids to carve for her so she can display them on Halloween at her place.  I have a standing appointment every November 1st, in her front yard 🙂 

What do pigs NOT eat?

This can get subjective, so pay close attention to what I’m about to say.  Somewhere in time, pigs unfortunately became associated with eating “slop”.  At times it my seem like a pig will eat anything.  Not true.

Similarly, humans ‘can’ eat a lot of different things.  Does this mean we should? If we had a steady diet of chocolate cakes, oreos, and marshmallows, we might feel full and satiated at times, but our nutrient levels would start to decline rapidly. 

Please view your pigs through the same lens.  They ‘can’ eat almost anything, but that doesn’t mean that they should.  The goal should be a nutrient rich diet, with, if possible, access to pasture grass and foods they would naturally desire anyway.

Rationing vs Free Choice

There is an ongoing debate on this topic.  Do I ration certain amounts of food each day, or do I give my animals an unlimited supply and let them decide when they are “full”?  I’m not here to get into the science behind how food is metabolized and what certain studies have shown to be the best food portions to maximize pork yields, etc.

My hog operation as it stands right now is not large enough for me to be stressing over metabolic conversion rates and all that other stuff.  I feed them one pound per day for each month they are old, capping at 6 pounds per pig per day. 

Garden Trimmings and Vegetable Excess

There’s nothing that more visibly explains the connected-nature of a farm to the ground than feeding garden scraps to a pig.  We raise our pigs for meat. Extra veggies that fell off the vine, or grew over-ripe are fed to the pigs. The pigs grow up, fatten out, and are turned into bacon. We then eat the bacon for breakfast, and walk out the garden satisfied, well fed, ready to plant next years veggies and repeat this process.  Between the pigs and chickens on our homestead, there is almost zero plant waste. Something will eat the excess.  Something will. It’s so nice to have automatic recycling centers out our front door! 

Fermenting their Feed

This is a less common practice(from my un-scientific Facebook polls), but such a beneficial practice for hogs.  Fermenting has almost all positive benefits and minimal downsides.  It may surprise you how many fermented foods humans eat on the regular, besides the less attractive sauerkraut everyone associates with fermented foods. 

Sourdough bread, cheese, chocolate, coffee, vanilla, soy sauce, olives, pickles, beer–this is just a sampling of the thousands of fermented products we consume worldwide. To increase your knowledge on Fermenting(for humans) the book The Farmhouse Culture Guide to Fermenting is a really really good one!

Fermenting my pig feed started when I discovered pigs don’t digest whole kernel corn feed, rather it must be ground up for them to properly digest it.  So, long story short, any assistance I can offer to aid in improved digestion, the better the pigs will be, right?  Not to mention the benefits from increased nutrient absorption and overall better gut health for the pigs.  It would take a lot to get me to stop fermenting the feed I give to the pigs.  

All it takes is a 5 gallon bucket, ⅓ part water, ⅔ part feed, mix, cover, and let sit for 48 hours.  Let time be your free employee on this one. Come back in two days, and let the pigs enjoy feed that has been enhanced, filled with positive bacteria, and much easier for them to digest!! 

What do Pigs Eat? – In Summary

So if you decided to skip to the bottom of this blog post to get my summary of “what to Pigs eat”, here it is:  Pig’s forage for what is good for them, and generally leave behind what’s not,  If you give them produce that you’d eat yourself, or scraps from the foods you just ate yourself, you should be good.  Potato peels from last nights dinner? Yes!!  All the extra tomatoes from the garden that are too “soft” for homemade salsa? Yes!!  Overgrown cucumbers while you left for a weekend trip in June? Yes!!

Pigs are smart animals, and a joy to have on our farm. With the appropriate amounts of water, fencing, and the RIGHT foods, pigs are bound to be a joy on your property as well.