How Much Food Do We Need? Food Tracking on the Homestead Part 1 Chickens, Ducks and Eggs!
Do you have trouble deciding what plants to grow each year in your garden, or do you have enough chickens to produce eggs for the entire year? What about meat for the family or even herbs? We have a goal here on the homestead to grow or raise 20% of our food. But how can we truly track this and be honest with ourselves and you? Well today is the first step to trying to get some data and putting that data to good use.
Below are 3 links to be able to start tracking your Chickens, Ducks and Egg's productions. This is the first version and only limited testing has been done by us. This is completely free and hopefully it will be a useful tool to help bring some clarity to you're production levels along with feed costs, with the ability to compare to costs at your local stores.
Further more this can adaptive to your own personal needs, maybe you free range all year around and don't need those costs you can easily remove that column. We have a spreadsheet that is compatible with, MS Excel, Google Sheets (free to all google accounts) Open Office(also Free) that you can just plug in the info and get the total amount. In future versions the goal is to be able to track how much total food you need by family size and find a good true estimate of how much food you need to grow or raise. We also provided a PDF download if you prefer a more old fashion route with paper and pen. We use the PDF as a print out and have the kids write down how many eggs are collected and when feed bags are completely used up so we know when to buy more food. The total area at the bottom of the sheet is preset to give you the totals as you plug in the info.
As with everything we do on the homestead, we would love to hear your feed back, if we missed something you feel is useful, let us know so we can add it to the next version. Happy Homesteading and God Bless!!!