Selling a half hog isn't hard because the butchering is hard — the processor handles that. It's hard because of one decision almost nobody explains up front, and it's the decision that blindsides first-time buyers on pickup day:
The bacon and the ham don't come back as bacon and ham. Unless someone chooses it, pays a separate smokehouse fee, and waits a couple of extra weeks, the belly arrives as a plain fresh side and the leg as a fresh roast. Every farm selling pork shares has had the pickup-day conversation that starts with "wait, where's my bacon?"
The mechanics of reserving a share, weighing it in, and billing it — reserve portions of a dated lot, enter the real hanging weight after processing, charge once — are the same for a hog as for a steer, and they're covered in detail in Selling shares by hanging weight. This guide is about the part that is not the same: the pork cut sheet, the cure-and-smoke fork that sits in the middle of it, and how to collect the whole thing the moment a buyer reserves instead of chasing it the week of drop-off.
A half hog is mostly fresh pork by default
A hog breaks down into four primals, and it helps to show a first-time buyer what each one becomes — because most of it is lean, fresh pork, and the "cured" products everyone pictures when they imagine a hog are a minority of the animal and an opt-in on nearly every one of them.
The single most useful thing you can tell a first-timer: for a hog, the trade-off cut isn't ground beef — it's sausage. Decline the shoulder roasts and you get sausage. Pass on a cut you don't want and it becomes sausage or trim. That one sentence answers half the questions you'd otherwise field by text message.
The cure-and-smoke fork is the expensive surprise
This is the decision worth putting in bold on your reservation page, because it's the one with a dollar figure and a calendar attached.
Bacon is cured-and-smoked pork belly. Ham is a cured-and-smoked leg. When your processor breaks down the hog, those cuts come off the carcass fresh — a raw side and a raw leg. Turning them into bacon and ham is a second job: the processor (or a dedicated smokehouse) cures them in salt and nitrite, then cold- or hot-smokes them. That job:
- Costs extra, usually billed per pound of the cuts being cured, on top of the base cut-and-wrap fee.
- Takes longer — typically a couple of extra weeks beyond the fresh cuts, because curing isn't instant.
- Is entirely optional. Plenty of buyers prefer the fresh side and fresh ham, and some want half their belly as bacon and half fresh.
None of that is a problem if the buyer knew going in. All of it is a problem if they didn't. The farms that run pork shares smoothly are simply the ones that name this fork before taking the reservation — not the ones with a fancier form.
What a half hog actually weighs, and what fills the freezer
The other first-timer question is always about weight, and pork has the same three-numbers trap as beef: the live hog, the hanging (carcass) weight most farms price on, and the lower take-home weight the buyer actually carries out after cutting, boning, and trimming.
In round numbers, a 250 lb live hog hangs at roughly 180 lb; a half is about 90 lb on the rail and lands somewhere around 60–65 lb of packaged meat in the freezer. Tell buyers to clear roughly four to five cubic feet of freezer space for a half, and tell them before they commit, so pickup day isn't the day they learn their chest freezer is full of someone else's quarter.
Put the hanging-vs-take-home gap in writing on the reservation page. The pickup-day complaint that always starts with "I paid for 90 pounds, why is this only..." is prevented by one sentence up front, not argued away after the fact.
How to price it — and bill the smokehouse fee on its own line
Price the meat one of two honest ways, exactly as you would a beef share:
- Fixed price per share — a half at a flat figure, optionally split into dated instalments so you collect ahead of the processing bill. The buyer knows the number the day they commit.
- By the hanging pound — one rate, say $3.75/lb of hanging weight, and the final charge is that rate times the buyer's real share of the carcass, entered after the processor weighs it. Nobody is billed a guess. There's no "deposit" to reconcile — every charge is either a size price or a clearly-labeled fee.
The smokehouse cost belongs on its own fee line, never buried in your per-pound rate. In TallyTill a fee is itemized and billed one of two ways: flat, once per reservation (a $40 cure-and-smoke fee on any half that wants bacon and ham), or per pound of hanging weight on a by-weight lot. A flat fee posts when you confirm the reservation; a per-pound fee posts at weigh-in alongside the meat charge. Either way the buyer sees exactly what the line is — which is both more honest and far easier to defend than a padded rate.
One honest limit, so you're not surprised: smokehouses often bill strictly per cured pound — per pound of bacon and ham specifically, not per pound of the whole carcass. TallyTill's fee bases are flat-per-reservation or per-hanging-pound, so there's no "per cured pound" option. In practice you set a flat cure-and-smoke fee per share that covers your typical smokehouse bill, and charge it only on the reservations that opted in.
Collect the cure choice at reservation, not the week of drop-off
Here's where the admin usually goes sideways: the sale closes, and only then do you email a blank cut sheet and start chasing answers — some the same day, some the night before drop-off, some never, so you guess. For a hog, the cure-and-smoke fork makes that chase worse, because the answer you're waiting on is also the one that changes the price and the pickup date.
Collect it at the same moment the buyer reserves. When someone reserves a share on your farm page, they pick their size (Whole, Half, Quarter, or whatever you named it) and type their cut-sheet instructions right there — including whether they want the belly and leg fresh or cured-and-smoked — before they're confirmed. If you take the order yourself over the phone, you enter the same note on the reservation screen. Either way it's stored against that buyer, tied to that hog, and you never re-type it.
Two honest notes on how this works today:
- The cut sheet is a clear written note, not a structured per-cut builder. It's a free-text field that captures what the buyer wants and prints where you need it — it is not an integration that talks to your processor's system. For pork, that means you'll want to prompt the cure-and-smoke choice explicitly (see the script below) rather than rely on a checkbox that doesn't exist.
- When it's time, print two lists. The Processor list shows every confirmed buyer's name and cut sheet with no prices on it — safe to hand straight to the butcher. The pickup sheet shows the same people with phone, size, hanging weight, cut sheet, and balance, for checking cuts and collecting as they load up.
A short script that kills the "where's my bacon" conversation
Put something like this on your reservation page and at the top of the cut-sheet note. It's three lines, and it does more than any form field:
Your hog comes back mostly as fresh pork — chops, roasts, and a fresh side and leg. Want real bacon and ham? Those are cured and smoked for you: it's a $40 add-on and adds about two weeks. Tell us below: bacon & ham smoked, or keep the belly and leg fresh?
That paragraph sets the price, the timeline, and the default in one place, and it turns the single most confusing decision on the sheet into a yes/no the buyer can answer when they reserve.
The legal bit, briefly
If you're selling custom-exempt (uninspected) pork by the share — the way most small farms move whole animals — the buyer generally has to own their share of the live hog before it goes to slaughter. That's why a lot's reservations-close date has to fall before its processing date: the sale is a live animal reserved ahead of harvest, not packaged meat sold after. TallyTill enforces that date ordering, but confirming your own state's and processor's rules (and the "Not for sale" labeling the processor applies) is on you. They vary more than you'd expect.
Get your first hog lot set up
If you're running pork shares out of a spreadsheet and a group text today, the cure-and-smoke chase is the part worth fixing first — it's where the money and the timeline both hide.
Create a free TallyTill account — the Stand plan is $0 per seat with no card required — then switch on the Animal Shares tools in your CSA settings, build your first hog lot, and add a cure-and-smoke fee line. Set your harvest date, type your sizes, and let each buyer choose fresh-or-smoked when they reserve, long before the hog ever leaves the pasture.
You raise the animal once. Your buyer should only have to be surprised by their freezer space — never by their bacon.