You gotta see this!!
http://dsc.discovery.com/videos/dirty-jobs-pig-slop-processor.html
Next Mike goes to the outskirts of Vegas where we meet Bob the pig farmer. Leftover food from many of Las Vegas's restaurants don't go to the landfill, but instead it is recycled at the farm. The leftovers will be food for Bob's 3,500 pigs. He calls it food and conservation through swine. The pigs will eat the leftover food scraps, gain weight and then they'll be processed for human consumption.
A truck pulls up full of leftover buffet scraps. The back of the truck is opened and fills a huge hopper with a messy smelly liquid. It looks absolutely disgusting and splashes all over the place. Once emptied, the truck gets washed and goes back to the Las Vegas Strip to get more food.
From the hopper, the leftover food comes down a converyor belt where Bob and Mike need to manually sort through and take out things that aren't edible to the pigs such as wire hangers, plastic, bones, wine bottles, etc. They need to reach deep down into the food to get the solid pieces out. Mike is a bit slow because he's looking at all the non-food waste. He may be slow, but at least he's thorough. Mike lets too much out of the hopper and the conveyor is overflowing. He has to go down underneath with a shovel and scoop up the overflow and get it back on the belt.
Bob has built many of the machines on the farm himself. The sorted leftovers are dumped into the top of the "cooker" which is basically a huge stew pot where the food is heated and cooked. Mike and Bob climb up to the top of the cooker. It's hot and bubbly and looks like a giant can of soup.
A screen filters the oil from the top of the soup. This oil will be sold to cosmetic companies. There's a screen at the top to filter out any non-food scraps that come up to the top. Mike has to get the trash out of the filter so it doesn't get plugged.
A dump truck carts the cooked food to the pig pens. Mike opens the valve and fills the truck. He doesn't get the valve completely closed so he overfills the dump truck and it's dripping with liquid food. He gets to drive the truck, but he starts up and stops too quickly and spills food all over the place on the way to the pens.
Bob had research done on the pig food to give his pigs the proper nutrition. Added to the food scraps is 16% protein made up of ground and pressed alfalfa plus old bread. Mike pulls a lever on the truck and the hot soup is dumped into the hopper of alfalfa and bread. Bob mixes it all together with a shovel.
Bob then shows Mike the battery operated pig cart. It takes him a while to get the hang of driving the pig cart. It's a pretty crazy contraption - as are most of the machines on the farm. Mike drives the cart to the hopper and they have to manually fill the pig cart bucket by bucket. The food needs to cool down first so the pigs don't burn their mouths. The pigs weigh four pounds at birth and get up to 260 pounds within seven months. Mike drives the cart to the pens where he shovels the food into the pig troughs. The pigs crowd the troughs so he ends up dumping most of the food on their heads. They'll jump from pen to pen and even eat off each other's backs.
Once in a while the pigs jump out of their pens so Mike is sent to chase them. Next they're going to give the pigs milk. The milk is given to the pigs that are going to market in about a month. The milk will help fatten them up. In addition to food scraps, Bob also recycles old milk and ice cream that doesn't sell at the store. This milk is returned from the store because it went past its due date. Bob says it's only slightly old and still sweet. He has a huge tank full of the old milk. Mike has to fill a bucket of milk from a pipe at the bottom of the tank then take it over to the pig troughs. Ice cream can ferment and Bob tells Mike that one time 150 of his hogs got drunk from some fermented ice cream as they were ready to be loaded up for slaughter. It was pretty difficult to get the 250 pounds hogs onto the truck.
