Starting a Garden and Homestead by Raising American Guinea Hogs

Reader Contribution by Jennifer Kongs
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The Small Home, Big Decisionsseries follows Jennifer and her husband, Tyler, as they build a self-reliant homestead on a piece of country property in northeastern Kansas. The series will delve into questions that arise during their building process and the decisions they make along the way. The posts are a work in progress, written as their home-building adventure unfolds.

Sometimes, in the course of our homestead scheming, we plan and organize and research and come up with the best path forward — or what we hope is the best path forward. Other times, we simply stumble upon a brilliant idea and push ahead, no matter how crazy it sounds. The latter more accurately reflects the situation we found ourselves in as I shook hands a few months ago with a farmer who raises heritage-breed, pastured livestock. With that shake, I was promising to buy American Guinea Hog barrows (male pigs castrated before puberty) from him to raise as feeder pigs at our new homestead. They would be arriving the day after we moved in. In fact, we were arranging our move-in date around when the farmer needed the pigs to be off his farm. Below is a sequence of questions and events that led us to make the leap into raising hogs as our first homestead adventure.

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