You ever heard the saying about "you pay for tile whether you have it or not"?    Meaning you lose enough yield by not having tile that you could have paid for the tile with the lost income.


We've fed pigs in ever sort of building imaginable (total slat confinement, partial slat confinement, hoop barns, old barns/old cattle sheds/old chicken coops with feeding floors and for good measure a "Cargill" floor.

I'm thoroughly convinced that the same thing applies to owning and feeding hogs.  You pay for a total slat confinement whether you have your pigs in one or they're in anything else.

Hogs outside and hogs in a hoop will NEVER match the feed efficiency, growth or death loss numbers that happen in a confinement barn.  AND they take more time to care for, take more time to clean between groups and take more time to handle manure.   And you have less control over Bio-security.

For 6-8 months of the year the hoops will get close to matching but never out do the confinement.  During the winter its not even close, especially if you have to put little pigs out during cold weather.   Taking care of pigs during the winter in anything other than a total slat confinement barn sucks.   Even in the summer the amount of time spent/pig is way less in the confinement than it is anywhere else.



Now the problem is that its going to cost a fortune per space to put up a 500 hd confinement building.    Guys are talking $300+ per space for a 2400 hd building.    I'm sure that it would cost at least $350 to do a 500.

The next problem is that if you should decide that you don't want to feed pigs anymore or the neighbor quits farrowing, Then what are you going to do with a 500 hd building?     The hog industry has pretty well standardized 1200 & 2400 head buildings.   It can be hard to find groups of pigs for odd sized buildings.


Its a tough call, if your neighbor is going to keep farrowing and you're going to feed 500 pigs at a time for the next 20+ years building a confinement barn is the only way to go.

If either one of you is going to decide you don't want to do it inside of 10 years you don't want or need a 500 hd barn.     The caveat to that is, feeding hogs in anything other than a confinement barn will make you want to quit sooner.


Feel free to ask more questions.   Johnny has probably seen hogs raised in everything imaginable too.

Good luck!