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Hmmm... food for thought.

It might also be noted that when cows are actually fed grass (rather than corn) their milk is vastly superior in both flavor and taste.

This post cracks me up. I've never wondered about milking pigs, but it seems like the kind of "city girl" question I would ask. Can you imagine trying to milk a grumpy sow? I'm seriously chuckling in my cubicle.

Interesting discussion! I love pork and it's yummy cured meat by-products but I don't think we need to make cheese from porcine milk. There's lots of other great cheese out there already that I haven't tried yet.

Like Squirrely, I can't see a pig being very happy about being milked either.

The food argument makes perfect sense to me since I know that human mothers often have to modify their diets to make their milk appealing to their babies.

cool! My 5 year old asked me this very question last week!

I have been told that there is a pig dairy that makes pig cheese down in Texas. Googling doesn't bring up a web page for them, not using the terms I tried at least.

I have milked our pigs on occasion, just as I've done for our sheep, to get a little milk for an orphan. But it is much easier to graft the orphan piglet onto a mother as quickly as possible. Fortunately the sows are very good about taking on one more mouth to feed.

With a minimal amount of training a sow will stand for milking. I do this because pulling a teat to see how much milk I get is a test for how close a sow is to farrowing, that is to say having her litter of piglets. The color, consistency and volume all tell me how long until I'll see piglets popping. This is the same as with cows, sheep and goats - they all need training to stand for milking.

The pig milk tastes fine and some of our sows would put a holstein or porn star to shame with their, er, cleavage. They bag up most impressively. Still, milking 14 to 16 teats on a regular basis (clean, sanitize, pre-milk, milk, drain, dry) would be more of a chore than I want to take on. Hope, our youngest daughter, thinks we should open a pig dairy. I think not.

As to the grass fed issue, our pigs are grass fed, just like cows which is part of what makes them taste so good. They get well over 90% of their food from pasture in the warm months and hay in the winter. They also get whey, left over from making cheese, which provides them with lycine to complement the proteins in grass. The remaining 3% of our pig's diet is a mix of what ever is available from pumpkins, beets and turnips from our farm to the occasional treat of boiled barley from a local brew pub and bread from a local bakery. We don't feed commercial hog feed or any other grains. Over 97% of their diet is pasture/hay and whey - I have been told by chefs that it is the whey which gives their fat the sweet flavor and the grasses & herbs that gives it the 'nutty' flavor. While they may not be as efficient at digesting grass as a ruminant, they do thrive on the diet. I often have people tell me that "pig's can't eat grass" but I refrain from telling the pigs. :)

Cheers,

-Walter
Sugar Mtn Farm
in Vermont

hmm, i never thought about it, but pig cheese does sound disgusting for some reason.

Humans are omnivores and our breast milk is supposedly delicious. Is it just that pigs are omnivores or that they eat slop? I would imagine that the slop's taste does not translate into their milk since grass isn't particularly tasty to humans yet grass-fed cows give the best milk.

milk a pig? how about a cat?

"could you milk me greg?"

hahaha

sorry, i think milk is gross.

lol @ leilatamar

Actually, what an animal eats has a direct effect on the taste of their milk. This is why when the cows get into the wild onions the milk tastes so bad.

What i don't get is this:

Many people find the taste of meat to be delicious. Arguably, ALL people find the taste of grass unappealing (hence we don't eat grass). How, then can one conclude that a meat-eating animal will have bad tasting milk, while a grass-eating animal will have good tasting milk BECAUSE it eats grass?

Is it like "opposites day"? If it tasted good before, it will be bad once digested by an animal, and if it tasted bad before it'll be awesome once pre-digested???

thanks for the info, walter! with all of press about horrible, factory-like farms, it's wonderful and refreshing to hear from a farmer who is truly an expert and demonstrates a passionate knowledge about their craft. hats off! we need more like you!

walter is very cool - thanks for all the info. wish i lived in vermont!

This doesn't make much sense to me...

Traditionally, cows ate grass, but current factory farming practices have turned cows into cannibalistic omnivores. Most of the milk consumed in this country comes from cows that have been fed everything from bovine blood to chicken waste and any other cheap "disposable" by-product of the factory farming industry. Yet people still seem to love it.

I can't imagine that pig slop contains anything more objectionable than what's being fed to cows these days.

Jems, thanks for asking... that was my first thought. Although the food will affect the taste of the milk, I don't think that being an omnivore automatically means that the milk will be bad.

I'm going to guess the problem is efficiency: too much labor (as Walter pointed out) for too little product. Could it matter that pigs' short legs might make milking a bit of a pain for a person? Goats are low to the ground, too, but then again, goat milk is not mass-processed to as wide an extent as cow milk is (or is it?)

Or possibly it's just cultural... the Mongols milked mares, after all.

Walter, thanks for the informative post!

@whytephoenix: there is still a tradition of mare's cheese in mongolia. also yak cheese in tibet!