In Episode 225 of Mother Earth News and Friends, Pamela Fay of Shogun Farms in Florida answers the question, “Can you eat wild boar?” She shares with us about how Shogun Farms is trapping and farm-finishing invasive wild boars and selling them as high-quality foods to a variety of restaurants — a win for both culinary endeavors and sustainable efforts to minimize food waste and curb destructive invasive species.
Scroll down for our episode transcript, and scroll to the bottom for our show-note resources!
Can You Eat Wild Boar Transcript
Kenny Coogan: [00:00:00] So one of the most popular questions on the Internet is, “can you eat wild boar?”
Pamela Fay: Well, I’m still here and I’ve been eating wild boar for quite some time.
It’s all about safe food handling. It’s also about cooking. And so, wild boar, pork in general, you don’t, you don’t want to kind of cook it. You want to make sure it’s thoroughly cooked to the proper temperatures that are on the labels.
There’s a reason they do that. And it’s to control any kind of parasites or anything that’s in the meat that could cause harm to you that is transferable. So, yes, you can eat it. Definitely don’t eat it raw. Definitely make sure it’s cooked or it’s, it’s prepared properly. But yeah, you could totally eat it in, in all kinds of ways.
Jessica Anderson: Welcome to the Mother Earth News and Friends podcast. At Mother Earth News for 50 years and counting, we’ve been dedicated to conserving the planet’s natural resources while helping you conserve your financial resources. In this podcast, we host conversations with experts in the fields of [00:01:00] sustainability, homesteading, natural health, and more to share all about how you can live well wherever you are in a way that values both people and our Mother Earth.
Kenny Coogan: Good day everyone. I’m Kenny Coogan and joining me today is Pamela Fay, owner of Shogun Farms. We’re going to be talking about wild boar, if you can eat them, and why you would want to. Welcome to the podcast, Pamela.
Pamela Fay: Hi, Kenny. Thank you for having me.
[00:01:28] The Start of Shogun Farms
Kenny Coogan: We are excited to have you.
It’s a very interesting topic. And according to APHIS, the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, the U. S. feral swine population is rapidly expanding, and these animals were first brought to the U. S. in the 1500s by early explorers. But then in the 1900s, The Eurasian or Russian wild boar was reintroduced purposefully for people to sport hunt them, and now they are invasive, [00:02:00] damaging agriculture, natural resources, property and historic sites, and possibly helping with disease transmission to pets and livestock.
Feral swine have been reported in at least 35 states, so they’re a big problem, and there’s lots of ways to combat invasive species. And one of the more interesting ways is to eat them. So how did you and your husband come up with Shogun Farms?
Pamela Fay: My husband, David Fay, this is something he started, which stemmed from his hunting. He’s an avid hunter. I’m a hunter as well, but he’s an avid hunter and he got into hunting wild hogs over 10 years ago. He researched which type of dogs to use for a couple years and he ended up deciding on a dog called the Dogo Argentino. This is a breed that was basically engineered and designed in Argentina by doctors in the 20s. And they were [00:03:00] bred to hunt wild boar and puma, but also to be a family dog. So there was always this disconnect between the hunting dogs and bringing them home to family and them not being able to integrate.
So they took 10 breeds of dogs and took the best traits of these 10 breeds and put them all together, and over the course of many years, they designed the Dogo Argentino. They’re a large, white, powerful breed, very loving very affectionate loyal, fierce, fearless, the whole thing.
So, they are able to find, catch, and hold the wild boar for their hunter to come and take over from there. So that’s how he got into the wild boar to begin with. And so this was back in 2011. So it’s been quite some time. And then, with doing that, he would get contracts to go control wild pig populations on some of the national cemeteries, local public and private lands, like, all over, so we would, we would do that.
But he is a very ethical hunter. He [00:04:00] likes to eat what he kills. Basically our freezer is just full of wild game. That’s all we eat. We don’t buy meat from the grocery stores. He just felt like, wow, , you’re not taking all of the cuts. Out in the field, these things are weighing 200, 300 pounds. He’s only able to cut out the backstraps and go. And so he’s like, this is so much waste of probably really good protein and meat.
So we had recently bought some property in Seffner. And we we bought it to build a home on. And it had been a farm for many, many years of generations before us. So we bought it from this family, and he already had pens set up there, and one day, , we got a call and to go pick pick up some hogs from a hotel. And so we trapped them. He’s like, let’s just bring them back. So he brings back these seven hogs to the farm. And then he had to figure out, well, how do we feed them now that they’re here?
So then he started reaching out to some of the local produce stands and just other food markets that are getting rid of foods that are about to expire or whatever. So we start feeding these seven little hogs. And we had them for many, many, many years, our [00:05:00] original seven. And so that’s kind of how it started. It was just him saying, hey, there’s a, there’s a lot of waste going on here. It’s a good protein source. And typically when you hunt them with dogs or however you’re hunting them, they’re out in the wild. They’re on edge. They’re either looking for food or looking not to get hurt, running from something. So the stress level is a lot higher for them. The meat tastes a lot different. It’s definitely gamier when you eat it out of the field like that.
And so what we just started doing was just clean feeding them, bringing down their stress level. They get very domesticated actually in a short amount of time, I would say, depending on the hogs, like 3 months or so, when they first come in at first, they’re like, they want away from you or they want to attack you, one or the other. And then, after they are there a while, they’re like, oh, hey, feed me, just like a regular domestic pig.
So it’s kind of cool to see. And so then we started, later down the road, obviously, we would try them out and the meat. And it was so different from what we were used to taking out of the field. We’re like, whoa, [00:06:00] this is really good. We might have something here. And so it just started to grow from there. It just stemmed from a love for ethical hunting making full use of what you harvest, and and then going from there and these dogs, these Dogo Argentinos, are really what got us into this whole hog thing because that’s what they were designed and bred to do. And we love them. We even spent some time in Argentina a couple years ago to go down to the original kennel’s family who started the Dogo Argentino, the grandson of the original creator. He still has that legacy going on. So it was really neat to see where these dogs have stemmed from. They are incredible. I actually run the only Dogo Argentino rescue that I know of on the planet. It’s called DC Dogos, and we are nationwide and we rescue and rehab and rehome Dogos from all over the U S.
Now we have over 900 head of hogs at our farm being farm finished. And it’s an incredible, incredible meat source that the, the meat is just top notch for sure.
[00:06:57] Dangers of Invasive Wild Boars
Kenny Coogan: I do like the sustainability aspect [00:07:00] of it because it is more responsible form of culling. And that there’s less waste, but also in the state of Florida, we have a lot of invasive species. We actually have a hotspot of invasive species, and I wrote a animated TED talk about all the invasive species you can find in Florida. And definitely the wild hog was brought up. And earlier you mentioned that your farm is located in Seffner, and that is in central Florida.
Can you talk a bit about the impact that these invasive hogs are causing in at least central Florida?
Pamela Fay: We get calls all the time because part of what we do, how we get our hogs, livestock, is we trap. We humanely trap them and bring them to the farm to farm finish.
We also buy from approved trappers from all over the state, and I would say the majority of them do come from the central Florida area, although they’re all over the state. But we are going to try and expand to bring in more from all over the state and [00:08:00] make it an easier pathway to get them to us so we can make use of them.
But they definitely populate so fast. They’re, they’re breeding before they’re a year old. They’re putting out 2 to 3 litters a year of an average of like eight piglets at a time. So as you can imagine, their numbers just exponentially grow. They cause widespread damage to properties. We have people calling us from HOAs where they live in these beautiful neighborhoods, especially like down in like Sarasota, where they’re just going rampant in the Manatee County area. And they cause damage to the golf courses and to farms. And in Florida, we’ve got a lot of sod farms here. But just any farm in general. And when they come through, they root through that ground and they damage it. They damage the crops, and that’s financially devastating to farmers and the landowners.
And like you had mentioned before, I mean, they also spread disease. And so that’s something that’s we need to control, and diseases that can spread to other livestock where they’re passing through.
They compete for resources with our [00:09:00] native species, and that’s a pretty big deal. Florida is a very delicate ecosystem. And as you mentioned, we’ve got a lot of invasive species here, and I feel like they keep coming. I am a native Floridian. I was born and raised in Florida, and so I’ve watched this happen over the years, and these hogs, they’ll, they also, what’s, what’s really kind of interesting is they do breed with the domestic pigs. So you get a lot of mixed pigs out there too. But they, they just cause a lot of damage.
And they are a threat to people and pets. So you will hear stories of them charging at you. We’ve, we’ve had it happen. They, they will compete, they will charge, and they’re just definitely a nuisance as well as an invasive damaging species. And so hopefully we can get that under control a little bit with what we do. And at least we’re making a good resource out of it instead of just throwing it away and turning into biomass waste, so that’s what we want to avoid.
[00:09:52] Keeping Wild Boars
Kenny Coogan: So you mentioned you started with 7 pigs, but now you’re up to 900 head. Can you, do you purposefully breed any of [00:10:00] them when you have them?
Pamela Fay: We don’t. Every sow is either pregnant or about to get pregnant. When we bring them in, a lot of times they have their piglets right away. Sometimes, in the next few days. We monitor them. I actually have a full staff and they monitor these pigs very closely. We know when they’re pregnant, obviously, and we, we, we have a whole mom area where we’ll move them to so they can go and do what they got to do in a less stressful environment.
But no, we don’t have to breed them. And we don’t want to breed them because that kind of defeats purpose. We do get quite a bit of piglets and we do try to keep them separated. There’s many pens, but if there’s a will, there’s a way.
[00:10:38] Wild Boars on Shogun Farms
Kenny Coogan: Do you have a limit of how many boar you can bring onto the farm? Is there an open invitation? There’s so many boar.
Pamela Fay: Yes, there are. And that’s what we want to expand. We want to bring in more. There is no limit. We do get inspected by the Florida Department of Agriculture once a year to make sure that we have the correct [00:11:00] set up and it’s safe and everything is done properly. So we do that, but there’s no limit on to how many we can take. And so what we do is we just expand and build more pens, put them in.
So we are in the process right now of opening up a meat harvesting and packaging facility on our site. One of our limitations has been where do we take them to get harvested and packaged and all that? We’ve been kind of at a roadblock throughout this process. Florida doesn’t have a whole lot of, I guess, slaughter facilities and just the, there’s a lot of limitations there. So finally, we decided, well, let’s just do this ourself. And then we could open that up to other local small producers for swine and cattle as well. And so it’s something that producers are struggling with in this state. And so hopefully we help mitigate that.
Plus, it’ll open up our channel to bring in more and then be able to sell more. And so right now we sell to restaurants and brokers and whatnot, but we’ll be able to sell more [00:12:00] direct after this facility is set up, which is hopefully this summer is what we expect. And then we’ll be taking as many as we can.
And hopefully we’ll be setting up some satellite holding areas is what we’re, we’re hoping to do. I know we, like, right now we work with Manatee County and they trap themselves. And so then they’ll hold them until they have enough and they’ll feed them and take care of them. And then we go pick them up. We’ll bring a livestock trailer down there. So we’re open to changing and expanding and working with trappers from like all over the state. Bring in as many as we can.
Kenny Coogan: And earlier you mentioned some full time employees.
Pamela Fay: Yeah, so we have on site there, we’ve got eight employees right now at the farm and we have the one, he’s a animal specialist, animal breeder. He’s actually a veterinarian and he in the process of getting his veterinarian board certification here in the U. S. and so we’re really excited about that, but he’s very [00:13:00] knowledgeable in the, in animal care and everything that they need.
And then we have some farm hands that work with him. We have a driver who literally just all day goes and picks up from our suppliers of food. And so we’re feeding out, over 10, 12 tons of food a day. So that’s an all day task to go out and pick up. And then we also have, we’ve got a kennel technician to take care of our dogs that we have on site.
And then also we have a brand ambassador. And so she helps customer, with customer relations and media and all things marketing related for the farm. And so we have a great staff right now both on site all 7 days a week. They need to be there 7 days a week.
[00:13:45] Can You Eat Wild Boar?
Kenny Coogan: So one of the most popular questions on the Internet is, can you eat wild boar?
And we’ve been talking for several minutes now, and we keep alluding to the fact that you’re selling to restaurants and [00:14:00] brokers and you have a lot of wild pigs, but people are concerned on the Internet, if it is, “safe to eat wild boar”. So, can you talk about that?
Pamela Fay: Well, I’m still here and I’ve been eating wild boar for quite some time.
It’s all about safe food handling. It’s also about cooking. And so, wild boar, pork in general, you don’t, you don’t want to kind of cook it. You want to make sure it’s thoroughly cooked to the proper temperatures that are on the labels.
There’s a reason they do that. And it’s to control any kind of parasites or anything that’s in the meat that could cause harm to you that is transferable. So, yes, you can eat it. Definitely don’t eat it raw. Definitely make sure it’s cooked or it’s, it’s prepared properly. But yeah, you could totally eat it in, in all kinds of ways.
In terms of the chops, you can do like pulled pork sausages, all that, anything there is. But yeah, it’s definitely safe to eat. But like I said, you want to make sure you’re cooking at the temperature and don’t try to not do that. And so, and [00:15:00] one of the things that we do with ours, which is different, is when they do come in to us, they are obviously monitored, they’re looked at, they go into a quarantine area, which they’re there for at least 30 days so they could get even closely, more closely monitored. And so we watch for all kinds of just behavior or any kind of ailments, but they are given dewormer when they get there. And again, before they go into general population. And so we help try to mitigate the parasites that they might contain.
And so that’s, that’s one of the things. And we’ll de-louse and we do some other things naturally as well to help mitigate any kind of parasites that they might have. And that might be a little different than if you’re taking out in the field, you’re taking it totally wild that way. And so for sure cook it and yeah, you could totally eat wild boar. I’m still here. So.
[00:15:47] The Process of Trapping Wild Boars
Kenny Coogan: Can you talk a little bit more about the, like, the exact steps of the pig operation? So, you trap them, or somebody else traps them, and then how many are you bringing in at a time?
Pamela Fay: [00:16:00] It varies when they come in, there’s like I said, there’s a quarantine pen area. So there’s a drop off zone. They go into there, they get fully checked over. Sometimes someone’s dropping off one or two, and sometimes they’re dropping off a whole trailer load of, like, 60. And so generally what we ask is for the trapper to give us a heads up so that we can plan ,make space, do what we got to do if it’s going to be a big load like that. So there’s really no limitation on what we can’t take in. But we do need a heads up so that we can shuffle hogs if we need to.
But so they, when they come in, like I said before, they get monitored, treated, they get separated out if there might be something wrong with one to try and care for it, to see if we can make it right. Depending sometimes they got an injury or they’re just not acting right. And then after that, they, they end up going in general population, generally by size. Some do get castrated. It’s something we, like you said, you asked about breeding, but we do castrate some of them, especially, just based on age and size. And then, continually to, to feed [00:17:00] them and try to get them up to a good size.
And like I said, we sort them by their size and we do that and try to mitigate the competition for the food that we give them so, so that everybody gets enough.
[00:17:12] Feeding Wild Boars
Kenny Coogan: And then they’re eating like the seconds of different growers and restaurants, like, or are they, they’re eating like produce? Are they eating acorns? Are they eating everything?
Pamela Fay: So I wouldn’t say that they’re eating seconds, and the staff laughs because sometimes they just, they get better food than we do. And it’s really unbelievable how much food we waste in this country, state, whatever. It’s, it upsets me to think I’m like, there’s people that use this food and here we are just picking it up and able to feed it out. And sometimes we get it based on the fact that It’s about to expire, and so they have to pull and then put the new stuff out. And so we work with some really big food suppliers. And so a lot of it is just them trying to rotate their foods. And so it’s [00:18:00] good. It’s fine. When we bring in tomatoes and pineapples and watermelons and green beans. I don’t know. I mean, you name it. We ran stuffing, bananas, and like it just it’s all over the board. It’s hilarious. And it’s good. It’s I mean you can literally go out there and pick some and eat it yourself. Zucchinis and all that, and it’s good food. It’s not wasted. It’s not seconds. It’s not restaurant waste or any sort of wasted food. We don’t feed them anything they can’t have like meat products, raw meats. They can’t have anything like that. But no, they eat great.
The, the only thing, I guess, seconds that they get would be spent grains. And so when, breweries have leftover rain after they run their processes, we’ll get that grain. And they love that. Like, they love spent grains. It’s like a, it’s like a happy hour for them, I guess. But no, they eat very well. And the neat thing about all the food that they eat is typically that food would go into our Florida landfills and create more biowaste, more issues, and all that. And it’s going into [00:19:00] good use. So it’s being repurposed and it’s helping us create a really good healthy, rich protein source. So it’s very sustainable practice. And like I said, they, they eat better than us.
[00:19:12] Sustainable Uses for Food Waste
Kenny Coogan: I earned a master’s degree on global sustainability at the University of South Florida. And my concentration was food safety and food sustainability, and there is definitely a hierarchy of like what we should be doing with food, or like agriculture food. Like we should first be feeding it to humans, and then we should be feeding it to animals, and then we should be composting it, and like, the very last thing is be putting it in our normal trash.
Pamela Fay: Correct. Yeah. And actually, really, none of it should go in the trash if we did this right. And so with what we’re doing with the newest facility that we’re setting up is we’re going to make sure that nothing goes to waste. Everything should go back to Mother Earth. Right? And so they even with the waste products, , what you call the “offals”: the blood, the [00:20:00] hooves, ears, all the parts, all of that can go to good use.
Like you said, if it can’t go to a food product, maybe it can go to, I didn’t even know this until recently, the blood they use in some type of fertilizer from the iron that they’ll get from it. And so there’s just a way to repurpose everything, and then even, I’m a huge dog lover, of course. So we’re going to work with someone that is going to make dog treats out of the parts that we can make dog treats out of.
And then you say composting, and that’s a big thing right now. There’s a farm that we work closely with. I don’t know if you’re familiar with Gamble Creek Farms down in Sarasota. And they are a organic farm and they compost, and their compost, they compost everything from the restaurants that they also are connected with. And so that waste goes to the farm, they compost all that, and that’s what they end up giving their, for their, their crops. And it’s just, it’s incredible. So we work with them to get ideas on how can we compost the waste that we’re going to generate from these carcasses or whatever. So we want to make sure nothing goes to waste either.
[00:20:58] Can We Recreate the Shogun Farms Model?
Kenny Coogan: In a relatively [00:21:00] short time, in 10 or so years, you had, like, pretty rapid expansion from 7 to 900 head of hog. So there is a economic opportunity to help biodiversity and the environment by capturing invasive species and then feeding them. Do you think this can be replicated on a smaller scale for homesteaders? Because 35 states are impacted by wild boar, but there’s all these other invasive animals.
Pamela Fay: Right. And I I, I would say in a short answer, yes, but you would also have to be careful about the state and local regulations. And so there’s a lot of them. I know of some people that do it on a small scale in other states. They, they live out and wherever and they, they’ll, they’ll raise one that they catch. You’d have to definitely check your, your local regulations. The last thing you want to do is get in trouble for harboring an invasive species and making sure that you understand the risks and, what diseases they carry and that you’re doing proper biosafety measures to not cross [00:22:00] contaminate into your house or to any other livestock or animals that you might have.
And so there’s, there’s a lot that goes into it, but, yeah, I would imagine, homesteading, of course, and I’m sure there’s a whole lot more people doing it than I know of out there, making good use of them.
[00:22:15] Tips for Hunting Wild Boar
Kenny Coogan: For people who are getting started, and they might want to have a friend help them trap, do you have any tips of how to pay the trappers? Like, are you paying per head? Are you paying by size? How would somebody start?
Pamela Fay: We used to pay by pound, but I don’t know, when you try to get these things on the scale, they don’t always cooperate. And we have a whole system set up and then sometimes the scale decides not to work. Right? So, but we’ve got a pretty good idea of what they weigh by looking at them at this point. We try to weigh them. But you just can’t get an accurate weight sometimes. So what we did is we just do basically a weight range and we pay x amount for them if they’re in this weight range, and then it goes up to this weight range.
And so we have a form that they come and fill [00:23:00] out and we pay based on weight range, and then we pay once a week. So as long as they drop off by Wednesday, if the pigs are still healthy and doing well by Friday, they’ll get paid. What we were seeing fairly far back in the beginning is we’d get them and then they would die the next day or two and we’re like, what is happening?
And so, some of the, some of the trappers would just leave them in the traps too long is the problem. And so when we trap, we have cameras on our traps, we can see right away that there’s a hog or several hogs in that trap and we get out there and get them out. You can’t leave them in there for days and hours on end. It’s stressful. They’re going to escape. They’re going to hurt themselves. It’s not good for the animal.
And so we found a lot of trappers don’t properly monitor their traps . So that’s when I say “approved trappers,” we try to make sure we’re using people that are using humane methods, not letting them sit in traps for many, many days. And, I’ve seen definitely a improvement.
So if someone gets into trapping, they definitely want to do some research on how you’re going to get the pig out safely. So we have a whole system with our [00:24:00] trailers on when we go to pick them up, we don’t have to even get in there, touch pig, nothing. So it’s safe. One person could go out there and do it and get several pigs out of a trap safely.
Kenny Coogan: Okay. I know you’re getting a wild boar at all different ages and sizes and sexes. Can you give me. The shortest turnaround and the longest turnaround for trapping to harvesting?
Pamela Fay: The shortest would be probably about three months. So if we trap them, and they’re a good size already, we generally like to harvest like around 180 pounds plus or minus is a good weight, so their hanging weight is about 120, 130. It’s just a nice weight to work with generally. Sometimes they get too big to work with. And so we found that that’s an ideal weight, 180 to 200. And so if we get one at a good weight, and we put them through quarantine, and then we feed them a clean feed diet, kind of bring down their stress level, they’ll probably be ready and cleaned out within three months or so.
Typically they’re with us much longer to kind of get that, that [00:25:00] wild game-ish flavor, feel, all that out of their meat. But that’s, that’s the short. And then the long is obviously is if they’re born on site. Now you’re looking at close to, close to a year. They don’t get up to weight as they do like out in the wild.
When we hunted, we get 300- plus pound pigs all the time. Well, they’re out there gorging themselves in, in cattle troughs and eating all that kind of stuff. And we’re not feeding them that, that high sweet, sweet feed.
So it’s a little different, but anywhere from a few months to a year.
[00:25:30] Marketing and Selling Wild Boar
Kenny Coogan: For people who are interested in doing this, what experience or advice do you have for marketing? Do people or restaurants enjoy buying wild boar? Is that a asset or was it a liability in the beginning?
Pamela Fay: It really, it depends on the restaurants. Like some of them were just they’re really into this new stuff and they’re really into just different meat sources and stuff. And so there’s the total [00:26:00] artisanal thing and local. And so there’s a ton of restaurants and chefs that are just, they get so excited about this because it’s different.
And what we’re trying to do is minimize the stigma of the wild game meats because everyone’s just so used to grocery store and their typical meats. And I think people need to realize that there’s other meats out there. I’ve seen it more and more on menus.
I think that in a marketing side, you just got to know where your niche is, and see who’s going to try it. A lot of times we’ve sent samples out just to kind of get them to try and they’re like, “oh, wait, wow, this is really good. This is better than I thought.” And then they’re going to order again. It’s definitely a niche, it’s a different market. It’s not for everybody, but it is for a lot. And it goes from regular, like, taco type trucks all the way up to fancy high end restaurants.
So, but we, the high end restaurants seem to like it the most. They all say this is the Wagyu of pork.
Kenny Coogan: Thank you so much Pamela for joining us today. We really enjoy learning about Shogun Farms. And we encourage [00:27:00] people to check out your website and learn more.
Pamela Fay: Thank you for having me. We’ve got some exciting things coming out this summer. So we look forward to seeing more people check us out and try out the wild boar meat.
Jessica Anderson: Thanks for joining us for this episode of Mother Earth News and Friends. To listen to more podcasts and get connected on our social media, visit www.MotherEarthNews.com/Podcast. You can also email us at Podcast@OgdenPubs.Com with any questions or suggestions. Our podcast production team includes Jessica Anderson, Kenny Coogan, and Alyssa Warner.
Music for this episode is “Hustle” by Kevin MacLeod.
The Mother Earth News and Friends podcast is a production of Ogden Publications.
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