Pea warns foreigners retiring to the provinces against the one investment she says wipes out bank accounts: starting a "pigory" (pig farm). She visits her longtime camera assistant Lucy, who raises pigs, native chickens, and crops on a mountainside lot, and runs the real numbers with her. Pea explains why the math that barely works for a Filipino family fails for a foreigner, and shares how her American ex lost his life savings trying it.
Setup
- Many viewers want to retire to the provinces on a small budget. That's realistic: you can grow food, use solar, and become basically self-sufficient. Pea grew up with that slower life too.
- But someone (your girlfriend, neighbors, or another foreigner) will push you to make extra money raising pigs. Her advice is to say no. She knows quite a few foreigners who tried it, and it almost never works out.
Visiting Lucy
- Lucy has been Pea's assistant and camera person for more than four years. Pea hasn't seen her in almost a year.
- About two Christmases ago, Pea and her viewers surprised Lucy by building her a house. Pea thanks viewers for making it possible. Lucy says the house was "life-changing."
- Lucy is still with her partner Neil.
- Her house sits on the edge of a mountain with a drop of about 200 ft. Pea jokes she knows where Lucy will push Neil if he makes her mad.
- When Pea asks where Lucy's land is, the answer is "down there," which Pea calls "the Filipino way" of giving directions.
- Pea jokes she first thought Lucy was "racing" chickens and pigs against each other.
The pig operation
- Neil and Lucy built the pig pens themselves, no hired help.
- Four pigs total. Two are pregnant sows:
- Ginger: first pregnancy, due the third week of July. She's aggressive. Pea jokes she should have been named Maryanne, and Neil is Gilligan.
- Pula: named for big spots she had as a baby. She's the gentler one, likes belly rubs, a good mama. Due the first week of July.
- They hope for 15 to 20 piglets per litter, since more piglets means more money.
- Breeding was done through a stud service. Instead of paying cash, the stud owner gets one piglet from each sow. Pea suggests they get their own stud someday.
- The other two pigs are about four months old and ready for sale, roughly 90 kg and 70+ kg. They don't name these: "we grow them for sale. So, it's pity for them." They don't want to get attached.
- Pea's aside: "I know I love animals, but I love my meat... I love my bacon." Pigs are very smart.
How pigs are sold
- Live: about 150 pesos per kilo of live weight.
- Or slaughtered and sold by the part, at different prices for different cuts. Lucy says slaughtering brings in more money.
- Neil does the slaughtering with a cousin. The cousin is paid about 500 pesos or more, plus about a kilo of meat.
The rest of the homestead
- A combination cat house ("catio"), chicken coop, and storage shed.
- Native chickens normally eat bought chicken feed. When they run out, they feed them raw rice instead.
- Outdoor cooking area with a firewood store. They're stockpiling firewood before rainy season because it's hard to dry then, and also burn coconut shells.
- Lucy dries and stores seeds (rice, squash, string beans) wrapped in fabric balls hung up high so bugs don't eat them. Pea teases that it's a voodoo ritual and compares the dried bundles to something from Skyrim. One bundle turns out to be laurel, a spice.
- Crops:
- Filipino squash, which Pea says is one of her favorite vegetables and great with coconut milk.
- Beans, hit hard: last year two typhoons destroyed the crops, and now summer drought is destroying them again. Lucy: "I like how fitting my life is right now."
- Eggplant (not yet bearing), plenty of lemongrass (used in lechon and soups, which she hopes to sell at market), and a border row of flowering plants for decoration.
- Alugbati (red and green kinds; she prefers one for taste), a healthy soup green that grows wild year-round. She plans to sell it at market.
- More than 100 banana trees, harvested by Neil and Lucy, eaten and sold at the market and to neighbors who come to the house. They also barter. Pea recalls a past video where she went door to door trying to barter her fish.
- Crop income: about 500 pesos a week. Pea notes that when Lucy worked closely with her, neither was making much, but it was more than 500 a week. "I was a very nice boss." She says they always worked as friends.
- Lucy is rejoining Pea's team: two women with a camera biking around interviewing people. Lucy gets shy; Pea calls herself "the shameless one."
The pigory numbers (why she says don't do it)
- Startup cost for Lucy's small pigory: about 25,000 pesos.
- The two four-month-old pigs: 8,000 pesos for the piglets plus 16,000 pesos in feed, so 24,000 total.
- Expected sale: about 34,000 pesos. That's only 10,000 pesos profit over four months, or 2,500 pesos a month, "under $50 a month."
- "Do you really want to do that? Shoveling shite for 4 months, feeding it and bathing it."
- And that assumes everything goes perfectly. Piglets can die from sickness, even "a simple fever." Last year there was a swine flu outbreak that was very bad. Pigs that die of sickness can't be eaten; they have to be buried.
Why it's worse for a foreigner
- Lucy's 25,000 is a local's price. A foreigner pays more.
- You probably won't build pens yourself, so you'll hire someone, and you'll pay more for materials.
- Sending your Filipina to negotiate might work once, but word gets out that a foreigner runs it, and you'll end up paying "the skin tax" on materials and feed.
- You compete with locals who raise a few pigs in their backyards (often start with two, raise about four) and sell to neighbors.
- Filipinos can gather materials for free, don't pay builders, and live a Filipino lifestyle, so it works for them. A foreigner probably won't want to bury dead pigs himself, so that's another hired expense.
Her firsthand story
- Her ex, an American boyfriend, came to the Philippines and invested his life savings in a pigory. The co-owners were all foreigners. They "somehow got scammed," the pigs died, "and all the shebangs." He went back to the US "with his tail between his legs" because he was broke.
Her conclusion
- Locals can barely survive on pig raising, but they have a support system: if something goes wrong, family and friends make sure they won't go hungry. "But if you get broke, then good luck to you."
- Next week teased with Lucy back behind the camera.
- Outro skit: she's like Maryanne from Gilligan's Island (bubbly, living in bamboo huts, stuck on a tropical island), then the like/subscribe/Patreon ask. She has to take cold showers like Maryanne and ends up catching a "peeping Gilligan": "Only four men on the island and I have to get stuck with a peeping Gilligan."
