The Gloucestershire Old Spots is a big, docile orchard pig — white with black spots, bred to graze and glean under fruit trees — and its monthly budget follows that character: serious feed amounts, ground and fencing that must withstand a large animal, and one health line pale-skinned pigs cannot skip, protection from the sun.
Ration, orchard keep, and seasonal gluts
Feed is the dominant line, recorded by quantity per pig per day so changes are visible. An Old Spots on orchard or pasture keep gets part of its living from the ground — grass, roots, and windfall fruit in season — and the honest budget notes when the ration was reduced because the orchard was providing, and when it rose again after the glut ended. Windfalls are a genuine saving but a variable one, and a month that looks cheap because apples fell is not a baseline to plan on. Minerals sit on their own line, offered consistently, and water costs — drinkers, pipework, and the mud a pig makes around both — are tracked with the pen's upkeep rather than forgotten.
Bedding, arks, fencing, and ground
Bedding spend follows the weather: deep straw in the ark through wet and cold months, little when the pig sleeps out on dry ground. The ark itself, gates, and fencing take a rolling repairs allowance, because a mature Old Spots is a heavy animal that leans, rubs, and roots along fence lines, and the ground inside a pig pen needs periodic rest or repair — track any reseeding, drainage work, or moving of housing to fresh ground as pen costs in the month they happen. The wallow is part of summer infrastructure, not an accident of mud: maintaining a clean wallow site is how this breed cools itself, and its upkeep belongs in the budget beside the sun care below.
Health lines, including sun care for a pale pig
Set aside monthly for routine veterinary care, the worming programme, and foot checks and trimming, which matter for a heavy pig on soft ground. Then the breed-specific line: an Old Spots' white skin burns. In strong summer sun, ears, shoulders, and backs need shade that actually works and protection applied where shade runs out, and a pig that has burned is sore, off its feed, and a vet call — so the small seasonal spend on shade and cover is tracked as health care, because that is what it is. Breeding adds its own monthly cluster in season: serving, scanning, farrowing bedding and supplies, and the sow's increased ration through lactation, all recorded separately from baseline keep.
Condition beside cost, every month
Close the month with a condition note — weight estimate or hands-on scoring along the ribs and spine, appetite, and any health event — written next to the money. A heritage breed fattens readily, and an Old Spots quietly gaining beyond target while the ration line stays flat is a pig finding feed somewhere, usually the orchard, and the paired record is how you catch it. Keeping that monthly sheet inside KinsLe's Pet Passport, together with the pig's veterinary and breeding history, means cost, condition, and care are reviewed as one story rather than three.