While reading some of the stories about my ancestors' life on the farm, I wonder how they did common tasks. One of the tasks was "feeding the pigs."
I asked OpenAI ChatGPT5 the question: "I have so many farmers in my ancestry, and they all had pigs on their farm. Please explain how they fed the pigs and used the pigs for food or sale."
(AI Google Gemini Notebook Infographic - Pigs on the farm in the 19th century)
The Feeding and Use of Pigs and Hogs
In the 19th century
Pigs were almost the perfect farm animal for a 19th-century American farm. They could turn things people couldn't easily eat—kitchen scraps, garden waste, spoiled or surplus grain, milk byproducts, and pasture—into pork, lard, and money. For many of your farming ancestors, the pig pen was essentially a small food-processing plant attached to the barn.
What did they feed the pigs?
The exact diet varied with the farm, season, and period, but pigs were remarkably flexible eaters.
Corn was usually the basic feed. Farmers might feed pigs whole corn, shelled corn, cornmeal, or corn that had been ground or soaked. On farms growing corn, pigs were a convenient way to convert the crop into something much more valuable than the raw grain.
But pigs also received a tremendous variety of other food:
- Kitchen scraps: vegetable peelings, potato skins, stale bread, table scraps and other leftovers.
- Garden waste: cabbage leaves, turnips, pumpkins, squash, beets and other surplus vegetables.
- Milk and dairy waste: skim milk and buttermilk could be especially valuable pig feed on dairy farms.
- Grain waste: oats, wheat, barley and the screenings and waste left after milling.
- Potatoes: surplus or small potatoes were commonly cooked or otherwise prepared for pigs.
- Fruit: windfall apples and other fruit that wasn't suitable for the family table.
- Pasture: pigs could forage for roots, insects, acorns and other natural foods.
- Farm waste: pigs could consume materials that otherwise had little value.
One important point is that feeding pigs was not necessarily an elaborate operation. A farmer might simply carry a bucket or trough of feed to the hog pen once or twice a day. On a larger farm, feeding several dozen hogs could become a substantial daily chore.
The farmer was really "feeding corn through a pig"
This is an important concept for understanding the economics of your farming ancestors.
Suppose a farmer raised corn. He could sell the corn, but he could also feed it to pigs. The pig converted the corn into pork and fat, which were considerably more valuable and useful on the farm.
So a farmer might think of his hogs as a way of marketing his grain through livestock.
There was another advantage: pigs produced manure. That manure went back onto the fields and helped maintain soil fertility.
It created a little agricultural cycle:
Corn → pigs → pork/lard + manure → fields → more corn
That was particularly important before modern commercial fertilizers became commonplace.
Pigs weren't necessarily kept in a tiny pen all year
The image of pigs permanently standing in a muddy pen can be misleading.
On many farms, especially earlier in the 19th century, pigs were allowed to range or forage. They might be turned into woodlots, fields, orchards or pasture where they could find roots, nuts, insects and other food.
In the autumn, pigs could be particularly useful in woodlands with mast, especially acorns. A farmer could essentially let the pigs harvest part of the forest's food supply themselves.
Later, more farmers used fenced hog lots and specialized pens, making feeding more controlled.
And the pigs had to be protected from weather. A barn or hog house gave them shelter, especially in winter.
What happened when the pigs were ready?
This is where pigs became extremely important to the farm household.
A farmer generally had two choices: Sell the live hogs or butcher them for the family's use. Sometimes he did both.
A family might keep several pigs and sell some while reserving one or more for winter meat.
For a farm family, butchering hogs was a major seasonal event. It was often done in late fall or early winter, after cold weather arrived. The cold helped preserve the meat before refrigeration.
The process was labor-intensive. The hog was slaughtered, scalded, and scraped to remove the hair. It was then opened and dressed. The carcass was divided into familiar cuts:
- hams
- shoulders
- bacon
- ribs
- chops
- sausage
- jowls
- spare ribs
And almost nothing useful was wasted.
The fat was enormously valuable
One of the most important products wasn't actually the meat.
It was lard. The fatty portions of the pig were rendered in a large kettle. The melted fat was strained and stored. Lard could be used for:
- frying
- baking
- biscuits
- pie crusts
- cooking
- greasing pans
- soap making
- various household purposes
Before modern vegetable oils became common, lard was a basic household commodity.
A successful hog could therefore supply a family with a considerable quantity of cooking fat.
Preserving the pork
Your ancestors didn't have a refrigerator or freezer, so producing pork was only half the problem. They also had to preserve it.
The traditional method was curing with salt.
Hams and shoulders were rubbed or packed with salt, sometimes with additional ingredients such as sugar or saltpeter. They were allowed to cure for weeks.
Then they could be smoked.
A farm might have a small smokehouse where hams, shoulders, bacon and other meat were hung over a slow, smoky fire.
Properly cured and smoked meat could last for many months.
This was crucial because the farmer's hog wasn't simply providing tonight's dinner. One hog might help feed the family for much of the coming year.
Sausage and the "everything but the squeal" principle
Farm families tried very hard not to waste anything.
- Trimmed meat and scraps could become sausage.
- The intestines could be cleaned and used as sausage casings.
- The head could provide meat for head cheese or other preparations.
- The feet could be pickled.
- The skin could have uses.
- Even the blood could sometimes be incorporated into traditional foods.
Hence the old saying that farmers used "everything but the squeal."
It wasn't merely colorful folklore. For a family living largely from what its farm produced, wasting usable animal products made little economic sense.
And pigs were a source of cash
This may be the most interesting aspect for your family-history research. A farmer didn't necessarily raise hogs simply because his family liked pork.
Hogs were livestock that could be converted into cash.
A farmer could sell:
young pigs
breeding stock
fattening hogs
mature hogs
dressed pork
hams and bacon
lard
The farmer might take hogs to a local market, butcher, livestock buyer, railroad shipping point, or larger regional market.
In areas such as Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Iowa and Wisconsin, hog production became increasingly important as transportation and commercial meatpacking developed during the 19th century.
A typical farm might have a little "pig economy"
Imagine one of your ancestors around 1850.
He might have a few breeding sows and a boar—or obtain breeding services elsewhere.
The sows produce a litter of piglets. Some piglets are retained as future breeding animals. Others are raised for meat.
The farmer feeds them surplus grain, kitchen waste, garden produce and whatever they can forage.
As autumn approaches, the farmer decides: "We'll keep two for the winter and sell four."
The ones being sold are taken to market.
The two remaining hogs are fattened through the fall. In November or December, they're butchered. The family spends several days processing the carcasses.
The resulting hams and shoulders go into curing. The bacon is prepared. The sausage is made. The fat is rendered into lard.
And suddenly the farm has a winter's supply of meat and cooking fat. That's farm self-sufficiency in action.
Why pigs were particularly important to farm families
There was also a practical family reason for keeping pigs.
Cattle were extremely useful, but a cow was a relatively large investment and provided milk and perhaps draft power or breeding stock.
A pig was comparatively easy to raise and reproduce quickly.
A family could start with only a few animals and build a herd.
And unlike cattle, pigs didn't have to be kept primarily for milk or work. Their principal product was food, and they could reach market weight relatively quickly.
That's why when you look at old agricultural censuses, farm inventories, probate records and diaries, you frequently encounter surprisingly large numbers of hogs.
And then I asked: "Would the farmer slaughter and butcher the pigs, or would a butcher do it?"
The ChatGPT5 Response was:
For most of the 19th century, if the pig was being raised for the family's own use, the farmer and his family would normally slaughter and butcher it themselves. If the pig was being sold, however, the situation was different—the buyer, butcher, or eventually a commercial meatpacker would generally do the slaughtering.
On the farm
A typical farm family would have done the entire job themselves, often with help from neighbors or relatives. It was a big, messy, labor-intensive job, so butchering day was often a community affair.
The basic sequence was:
Kill the hog — usually by bleeding it after stunning or otherwise dispatching it.
Scald and scrape it — the carcass was immersed in very hot water so the hair could be scraped off.
Gut it — the internal organs were removed and saved or discarded according to their use.
Split and cool the carcass — the meat needed to cool quickly in cold weather.
Cut it up — hams, shoulders, bacon, ribs, chops, sausage meat, etc.
Render the fat — the fatty pieces were cooked down into lard.
Cure the meat — salt, brine, and/or smoke were used to preserve the hams, shoulders and bacon.
The farmer might have had special equipment—a large iron kettle for scalding or rendering, butcher knives, meat hooks, a chopping block, barrels for brine, and perhaps a smokehouse.
But there were professionals, too
A farmer could hire a local butcher to come to the farm and do the job, particularly if the family didn't have the necessary skill or help.
And there was an important distinction between a farm butcher and a commercial butcher.
If your ancestor took a live hog into town and sold it to a butcher, the butcher would normally take possession of the animal and handle the slaughtering and dressing. The farmer got paid for the animal rather than dealing with the carcass.
By the late 19th century, this became increasingly commercialized. Farmers could ship or haul hogs to livestock markets, where they were purchased by butchers and eventually by large packing companies.
Summary
For a typical Pennsylvania, Iowa, Wisconsin, or New York farm family in the 1840–1900 period, Home slaughtering was probably the norm for the hogs intended for household consumption, unless there is evidence otherwise. It was simply part of being a farm family.
There's also a fascinating social side to this: hog-butchering day could be one of the biggest workdays of the year, with several men doing the slaughtering and cutting while women and children handled sausage, lard, cleaning, cooking, and preservation.
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The Google Gemini Notebook Video Overview of this story is below and on my YouTube channel:
This process may seem so quaint and complicated to modern readers (who usually get their pork products from a grocery story ready to cook), but it was necessary for our ancestors in the 19th century and before. But somebody had to do it.
The social history of almost any time and place is available in the pre-trained masterial used by the AI Large Language Models. In the recent past, we would have to find and read books about farm life, take notes, and write a story about it. Now the AI tools can answer our questions in minutes and present it in a logical way for our understnading.
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