Working for your dreams means sometimes you must put down your thoughts in an organized manner. My goal was to come up with an estimate of how much land I would need, to fully satisfy the nutritional needs of my family.
I annualized what I ate yesterday, 3 eggs, 1/8 of a gallon of Goat Milk, 2 lbs of beef and half pound of pork chops.
This comes to an annual consumption of 1,092 eggs, 45.5 gallons of milk, 728 lbs of beef, and 182 lbs of pork. I assumed all three of us ate the same for simplicity, two of us already do. So, for the three of us that is: 3,276 eggs, 136.6 gallons of milk, 2,184 lbs of beef, and 546 lbs of pork. Excellent
Let’s look at the yields
1 chicken lays 200 eggs per year; 1 dairy goat yields 3 quarts to 1 gallon of milk; One 100-lbs goat yields 25-30 lbs of meat, and 1 pig yields about 100 lbs of meat in 7 months. The annualized column is a way to standardize the amounts across all the products.
I have annual food needs, and annual yields, so we can easily calculate how many animals we need! I have a round column because we cannot have fractions of an animal, and we don’t want to be short and hungry, so I rounded up.
I would need 17 laying hens, 1 dairy goat, 59 goats for meat, and 4 pigs for pork. I switched to goat meat as you may have noticed, mainly because of space and time. More on that later.
With the number of animals in hand, I can now come up with estimated land required per animal. Based on my research, I can fit safely 50 chickens per acre, so that equates to 0.34 acre for my 17 hens.
For goats, you can fit 6-8 goats per acre, so I chose conservative and assumed 6. This means 0.17 acre for my dairy goat, and 9.38 acres for my 59 goats for meat.
Lastly, I can fit 30 pigs per acre, so for my 4 pigs, that calculates to 0.13 acre. The total space required is 10.47 acres!
This is mainly driven by the meat goats obviously. A normal person probably wouldn’t eat this much, so your space requirement may be less.
This is not a large amount of acreage, it probably seems like a lot for the urban city dwellers, not so much for those out of the city. I think it is reasonable and more importantly achievable.
I am a bit skeptical about the space requirement of pigs – what do you think? Are 30 pigs too much?
Additional thoughts. Goats are herd animals, so my dairy goat will be lonely. I can place her with my meat goats, but unsure if that is a good move. May need another dairy goat. Also I’ll be producing milk in excess (need 136.5 gallons, produce 225 gallons, 450 gallons if two).
Obviously feed my goats kid first but the excess could be sold, or used to produce soap, creams, cheese or other valuable products. This is an economic bonus!
The hens at some point will taper down egg production, and this means meat bonus for my family. Same applies for my dairy goats. The hide and other goat parts will also have economic value.
I have beef and cow milk as not chosen because of the large acreage requirement, and longer time to slaughter. I’m thinking first goat as a starting point and would love to scale up to having a cow.
This is how it would look like. I would only need 14 cows + 1 Dairy cow, so the total acreage becomes 15.5. 5 additional acres doesn’t sound too much but the time requirement is the more challenging aspect
This was a fun exercise and it gives me a clear idea of how much space I should look for. What do you think? Are my estimates for my animals off? What could be improved upon?
Komen