Raising & Breeding Piglets

Video Transcript

"Alright, I'm Jose Perez and I'm the owner of the Castillo Farms. We breed these pigs here. All these pigs have came, they've been born here, all these pigs were raised here, born here and they do great for us at the show. We order, we don't just use Corky as our boar, we always use the top cut show sires, and their located in Ohio, and we order semen from them, and it comes in within a day, and we breed them on the day that they're in standing heat. They come in a heat every twenty one days, and that's when we try to figure out their heat cycle, so that we know if they don't come in the next month, then they're not bred, so we have to re-breed them. But, they have to be bred within six months before the fair starts, so that they can grow to be around two hundred and fifty pounds. But, here we sell our pigs for two hundred, or two hundred and fifty dollars. We also clip their ears on the markings they have on their ears, we clip those as to tell us our identification, we give them our premise ID number tag, and ours are red, and we also clip their tails. We clip their teeth, if their sucking on the mama. We also castrate them here too, but that's a job that I'm the one whose supposed to do that because it's a really, it's a really hard job for them to, cause if you cut them wrong, it can get infected or the cut will be too long and you can cut into the meat. So, all you want to do, is just do a small incision, behind the back legs. Right now we currently have for the kids for the fair, we sell about maybe sixty, sixty five pigs, piglets and we have around eight sows right now, and two boars. We give them shots here, their iron shots and their penicillin, so that they can stay healthy, and we do that when their young, so it doesn't bother them. But, you have to make sure that it's not in the meat directly, that way it doesn't give them purple meat. Right now it costs about four hundred, fifty dollars to feed our animals a month, and that's just in food, that's not the panels that we buy, the water, it doesn't include all of that."