How We Raise A Year's Worth of Meat & Never Buy Meat from the Grocery Store Again

[Music] so i wanted to take you through what it looks like when you're planning what type of livestock to get and your livestock needs for a year so it's going to depend obviously on a few different factors one how much space you have especially if you are not living rurally but you have an hoa or maybe some different city ordinances and what on what you're going to be able to raise also depends on how much time and effort you are going to be wanting to put in to get that food so we're going to start out with kind of the smaller animals and work our way up and also be sharing with you how much we do of each of those to provide my family with a year's worth of food and kind of what that workload looks like so first up of course is chickens and chickens people like to say are the gateway animal i have to tell you though we actually started with cows but chickens are great because you've got obviously during the most part of the year you're going to get a day an egg a day from your chicken so you're getting something daily from them to feed your family they're also small many times you can even raise them in a backyard environment so they can work really great for that now of course here i have got in this coop which is a combination of a chicken tractor and coop in one so i move this every few days across our pasture so that means my chickens are having the benefits of being free range so they're moving over our pasture fertilizing it scratching it up and that works out really great and they're being protected from predators we live out really rurally there's our dog there's neighborhood dogs but mainly that we have a lot of coyotes we do have bear here occasionally cougar bobcats that type of thing the coyotes are our main predator we also have eagles so i do not free range my chickens because i've lost too many in the past and i keep them there now in this particular coop i have six chickens and these are my main laying hens and right now because we're in the middle of winter i'm not getting a ton of eggs from these six hens i'm probably only getting about six eggs a week right now i'm getting about an egg a day maybe a little bit less but in the summertime every i get an egg a day from all of them so there's different uh different coops you can raise just a couple of them and then i also have another movable coop that i've got a rooster in with two other laying hens and that's over here and this coop if you watched my video on meat birds raising our meat birds this is what we keep our meat birds in so of course with your chickens you've got your eggs but you also have the option of raising chickens for meat so we do meat birds in the springtime so i like to get my meat birds in we usually raise them to about eight to ten weeks so i don't have them for a very long period of time which i like we usually get them in the first part of may and then i like to be butchered by the first part of july now part of the reason for that is because i don't want to be dealing with butchering in the hot part of summer meat birds also during really hot spells they're more prone to heat stroke and other things like that than your regular hens are so for those reasons i like to be done before the heat of summer but it's great because for eight work eight weeks worth of time i've got a year's worth of chicken so we raised 25 whole chickens for my family of four in combination with all of the other livestock that we raise for meat that takes us through a whole year with our chicken now i will be totally up front with you there are occasional times where i want just some wings or just some breasts for chicken and i will buy some organic chicken from the store but usually it's only a couple of times a year predominantly we're just eating those whole chickens so again the meat birds you can have only an eight works time eight weeks worth time of investment this is the coupe we keep them in we can move them around the pasture once they get bigger but you can do it in a pretty relatively small area then you've got your hens for your daily eggs and you can do dual purpose breeds we don't currently where you raise some of them from eggs they take longer to reach butchering size and you can butcher some of them from meat but i feel like this is an option if you have a small amount of space you can do without a huge amount of investment now up next we have our pigs so obviously it depends on if you eat pork or not we do eat pork i know people have very differing opinions on that so we'll just leave that where it lies here this year is our first year raising american guinea hogs and you can see this is the section of pasture that we have them in um which they're actually getting butchered in a week from now they're almost to butchering and we will raise pigs usually every not every year we usually do every other year kind of depends on how much meat we have from other sources and we kind of evaluate so we'll look right now i know i'm getting ready i know about about how much meat i'm going to get from these and then we'll decide if we're going to get any more piglets or not to butcher for next year so we are raising we've got five of these guys we're doing some from for some family members as well this is my first year with the american guinea hogs and i will say that compared to the hereford pigs that we've done in the past i love the temperament of these guys they are so sweet they are so good natured they're very curious but they're very docile whereas the hereford pigs when they get up to be this size um they are a lot more when you come with the food you best not plan on falling they'll take you out and they will really come in these guys are a lot easier to take care of in that aspect but we've had these pigs almost let's see they're going to be at 10 about 10 months when we butcher them the hereford pigs we butcher it six months so we've had these guys almost twice as long which means twice the amount of food twice the amount of time that we're carrying for them and so now we're caring for them throughout the winter months when the weather's a lot worse so and we're not going to get as much meat off of them these guys are not as large as the herefords would be at butcher time so we're kind of weighing if we're going to do this breed again we'll definitely do pigs again but we're weighing if we're going to do this breed based upon the cost it's taking us to raise them as well as the time investment and i have to say it's kind of nice in the middle of winter to only have to deal with the laying hens and our cattle and not the daily feeding and we're feeding more in the winter because it takes more for these guys to keep warm so we're actually not only are we feeding them longer we're feeding them more so that we're kind of going back and forth with whether or not we'll do this particular breed or not but as you can see this is a pretty good size space now of course this is for five pigs if you were doing just one pig you wouldn't need to have as large of space but the fencing when it comes to pigs is a lot more important than it is if you're doing something like chickens so you can see the cost of the fence here we have got these panels that go all the way around and we've got the metal t posts and we also have an electric fence around the bottom if you do not have electric fence around the bottom with pigs they will root out underneath your fencing and if you want an adventure let your pigs get out and then have fun chasing them i like adventure but not like that so we i highly recommend having a good electric fence like i said just that strand around the bottom will keep them in and then they also do need some type of shelter so you can see we've got a shelter there we put a lot of straw in there they can get underneath the straw and keep warm that way as well as have a place to get dry and to get in out of the weather and then we've got a watering source so those are some things to consider it was more infrastructure and more cost up front for us to buy all of this and then actually make this section of the pasture off for them than it would be for something like the chicken so you definitely want to consider that that we have an electric source and our pump house which is where electric source and water comes from kind of like looking at where you're going to be putting these things in now we do not currently have goats or or sheep now goats or sheep are going to be your next item up as far as size like for pigs they don't require as much space or as much acreage as you would for your cattle but um we had go to the past that were not dairy goats we got them when we first purchased this property and we're clearing it and i got to tell you goats like to get out as well and they can be a little bit ornery we had some male goats that we got just to clear brush they will eat back the blackberry vines and brush but they don't really kill them ours came back um but they did help to clear it out some areas for us when we didn't have a tractor um and we needed to get some stuff cleared out you can see blackberry vines just kind of come up all over here they're a noxious weed they're really hard to eradicate so it's we just kind of try to keep them at bay so i don't have very much experience with goats a dairy goat someday would be something we may look at if we don't get do a dairy cow but i don't have a lot of advice to give you on that except make sure you have an amazing fence for goats because they're houdini's and they most likely will get out so with cattle you're obviously going to need more space right they're a bigger animal and they're going to require more acreage however if you don't have acreage and you still want to raise cattle my brother raises his own beef cattle and has a really decent size herds much bigger than our herd and he instead leases property and has a deal with different landowners and he has his herd and has had a large herd for a number of years without having his own acreage so there are ways to do it even if you aren't living in an ideal spot it'll take a little bit more work so one of the nice things about a cow though is it's a large animal right and so if you butcher one cow depending upon your family size one cow may feed you for a year it may feed you for two years so for our family of four in addition with we're raising the pigs so we have a pig every year every other year we have our meat chickens and then we also go crabbing in the summer and we catch about a year's worth of crab we also have some salmon and then with the beef a half to a quarter cow my size family of four with age that my kids are at that half a cow will feed us for a year so a whole cow would actually feed us for two years so again it's just gonna kind of vary on what other foods you're eating and how large your family size is but that means i've got one animal that feeds almost my my whole family for a full year if not more which is a pretty good return on investment but you are going to need to have some acreage especially if you don't want to feed all year long which is really going to we don't want to feed all year long because one it's a lot more expensive so here with our growing season when we have fresh pasture the average rule of thumb is an acre per large animal like a cow now if you live in an area that doesn't get as much rainfall as we do that may be two acres if you live in a really dry southern arid type climate then you're going to need a lot more acreage per animal in order to have enough pasture to avoid feeding them year round so we are only grass-fed so they are on pasture and eating grass usually through the end of april beginning of may through about october so about half the year we're not feeding the rest half of the year we are feeding so right now obviously we're feeding they've got some hay out there right now and so our goal is to have them on pasture as long as possible the other thing with the cattle are you got to have good fences and that's kind of true with any livestock is you really need to have good fencing because this depends on where you live if you live in an area that has open range then this isn't true but where we live there is no open range and if your livestock gets out and is on the road or someone else's property and calm is damaged or a car wreck or something like that then you're liable so we take our fences very seriously we do barbed wire we have too many acres our herd of cattle right now we're at six and so we have a lot of acreage that is fenced in they're on for our acreage they're on 12 of our acres not all of it is pasture though about six of those acres is wooded so it doesn't have a lot of grass but a little bit but that's still fenced in for them and so you can imagine we would never run an electric fence on 12 acres worth of pasture so we use barbed wire with metal fence posts and stays and also with electric fencing for to doing that much we have a lot of brush that grows here and so when the brush grows up which is something we have to really be on top of with the pigs but it's a smaller area so it's doable is if you get a lot of grass growing up or a lot of weeds or a lot of brush and it touches that wire it can ground it out or disrupt it and then you've got areas that there's not actually an electric going to and so it's a lot more upkeep so if you have a good fence in that's a really key and good pasture land for your cattle they don't have to have shelter so you don't have to have a barn for cattle if you have a lot of bad weather there are going to need some places to get in out of the weather but here we've got some of our evergreens so you can see we've got evergreen tree there and we actually have their feeder underneath it and so that way if it's really heavy rain or we were to get snow they've got an area that they can eat and get under and it's going to provide some protection we also have some natural hills here so we get what in the winter months especially we get what they call a northeasterner comes out of the northeast out of the fraser river valley actually up in canada and it filters down and it's a really cold frigid wind and it'll blow across so when that happens the cows will actually come down along this bank and snug in right up against it and so then the wind goes over their back so you can look at your property and there's likely areas and the cows will naturally find them that do offer areas of protection if you don't happen to have a barn or a running shed and of course you can build those sheds and that type of thing but when you have really large herds which we only have a herd of six it's not a large herd by any means but when you've got you know cattle's up in the hundreds if not bigger like some of the larger operations do if not in the thousands all their cows are not going into barns and sheds and so they will do just fine provided they've got some areas that they can find shelter so as far as your cost when you're buying a cow your cow is going to cost more than a pig your pig is going to cost more than a chicken but you're getting a lot more meat and for the amount of work with the cattle they actually probably are the least amount of everyday hands-on work because we're just making sure that the water tanks are full every day with this with the hose and then during the summer months we're not feeding at all so just making sure that the fences are in good shape and you know keeping an eye on them and then in the winter time we feed the big round bales and so we're still not feeding daily we'll put a round bale out and it lasts for these guys right now with their size and the amount of cows we have those round bells will last they're about a half a ton they'll last about three to four days um so we're only actually feeding every three to four days it's not a daily feeding maintenance so it feels like that the pigs are a lot more work because we're out there with them every single day taking them their food and that type of thing so there's also that to consider but like i said for the amount of work and the cost it really feels like the cattle for us so the least amount of daily work if you take it into you know like for the whole year and you're getting a lot more meat for that effort but yes you do have to have more space so looking at the space that you have the amount of money that you want to put into it up front for the cost of the animal the infrastructure that they're going to require that can give you some good guidelines to look at so for what we do as i said we have i have got eight laying hens so that's usually an egg per day during the summer and it obviously sucks off quite a bit in the winter months we do 25 meat chickens for a year we do one whole pig for a year usually and then we do a half a cow for a year so for my family of four that feeds us for a year so just some some things to consider and then sometimes we'll decide you know not to do pigs for a year because we've got enough meat that we don't need to do another pig and even same thing with the cows we may have a year where we decide oh we've you know we've got enough meat we don't need to to butcher this year we can breed or we can sell the cow lots of different options so i hope that you found this helpful if you're also curious about how we go crabbing and get a year's worth of crab in our little ski boat just with little crab pots you can watch that video and then i also have how much to plant per person for a year's worth of food when you're looking at your vegetable garden

Channel: Melissa K. Norris - Modern Homesteading

Views: 526,117

Rating: 4.884336 out of 5

Keywords: raise farm animals, backyard chickens, raising livestock for beginners, raising livestock on small acreage, raising meat chickens, raising meat pigs, raising meat chickens for beginners, raising meat cows, backyard farming, grow your own food, best livestock for food, backyard farming ideas, Livestock for a Year's Worth of Food

Id: QSHSgGtks6Q

Length: 16min 53sec (1013 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 10 2021