Butchering a pig is one of my favorite chores around the farm. It is a long process but, oh how nice it is to fill the freezer full of pork for our home meat supply!
My husband breaks down the pig into manageable parts and begins to slice the pork into several cuts with his electric table meat saw. He cuts pieces of ribs, bacon ham, roasts, chops, and steaks.
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| Separating Ribs from Bacon |
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| Pork Shoulder Where We Will Cut Roasts, Steaks, and Soup Bones |
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| Ham |
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| Cutting Pork Chops, Ribs, and Bacon |
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| The Completed Cut of Bacon and Ribs |
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| The Section for Cutting Pork Chops and Ribs |
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| Trimming the Meat |
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| Cutting Pork Chops |
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| The Trimmed Pork Chop |
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| An Electrical Table Meat Saw Helps Greatly in Cutting Accurately |
I take the cuts and trim them so that I can package them into plastic bags and seal them with the help of a vacuum sealer. As we break down the pig into different cuts we begin to put aside a lot of extraneous parts which we will chop into smaller cubes of meat to make sausage. We also save pork fat which will be added to the sausage.
The pig that we butchered this year was our mother pig. She had already raised a few litters of pigs. We estimated that she weighs 400 pounds on the hoof. After butchering her we received 271 pounds of usable pork for food consumption for our family.
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| Our Cutting Chart to Keep Track of Pork Cuts |
It is so nice to raise our own pig knowing it is a healthy animal that we will feed to our family and butchered to our own specifications.
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