If you own a homestead, you’re likely suffering the same sticker shock that ranchers and pet owners are experiencing right now. When did food — both for animals and humans — get so pricey? If it seems like you’re paying more than ever at the grocery store or feed mill, you aren’t imagining it.
Fortunately, there are ways to stay within your budget while feeding your animals a healthy diet.
Why Is Feed so Expensive?
Animal feed prices remain extremely high. In May 2022, the cost of beef cattle feed was up 16% compared to the year prior. The 2021 and 2022 season-average price of corn was the highest it’s been since 2013.
Due to the destruction of Ukrainian wheat and corn fields, skyrocketing fertilizer prices and major supply chain disruptions, it’s expensive to keep livestock right now. Although that’s translating to higher meat, dairy and egg prices, farmers aren’t always seeing a return on their investment.
How to Save Money on Feed
If you have animals on your homestead, you can find creative ways to keep feeding them a healthy diet without breaking the bank. It will require a little more elbow grease and planning, but you’ll likely cut costs in the long run.
1. Let Your Animals Free Range
One of the easiest ways to help feed your animals a balanced diet is to let them forage for their own food. Of course, that doesn’t mean turning them completely loose — chickens, for example, need to sleep in a coop at night to protect them from predators, and horses will happily eat your front garden if you let them roam wherever they please.
But if you have a fenced pasture, letting your animals out to graze will lower your overall feed costs. It’s also good for the environment. When cattle eat higher quality, more digestible grasses, they produce less methane. Considering the U.S. agricultural system creates almost 11% of the country’s greenhouse gas emissions, it’s crucial to lower your homestead’s carbon footprint.
Just make sure you’re still supplementing your animals’ diets with any necessary nutrients they might not get from the pasture. This will vary a lot depending on the season, how much land you own, which species of animals you keep and the types of forage available. It may be necessary to provide a salt lick or mineral block for your grazing animals.
2. Rent Out Your Goats
If you own goats, did you know you could rent them out to people who want to clear their land? You can even charge for it, so you’ll feed your goats and make extra cash on top of it. While you’ll need a trailer to haul them from property to property, you probably already have one if you own livestock.
Goats love to eat poison ivy, thorny brush, weeds and young trees. They naturally aerate the soil with their hooves as they walk, and they also fertilize the land while they eat. Goats make very little noise compared to machinery. Plus, they don’t produce harmful chemical emissions or require the input of fossil fuels. Letting goats clear the land even minimizes pesticide use.
While there are professional companies that rent out goats, you can still start your own local business doing the same thing. Make sure to sign liability waivers to cover situations like your goats escaping, doing damage or being chased by dogs. Additionally, always ensure your customers have strong fences or set up your own temporary fence.
3. Team Up With Restaurants and Stores
In 2018, more than 55% of food waste ended up in landfills. A lot of it was perfectly good food that people simply didn’t finish eating or didn’t purchase before it expired. That’s why many farmers, homesteaders and animal sanctuaries team up with local businesses to feed their animals.
Many restaurants and grocery stores will happily give you their leftovers if you ask. Fruits and vegetables are among the most common foods that grocery stores throw out, but you can also get meat, bread and pastries. Sometimes, stores will discard an entire pallet of fresh food because the forklift operator dropped it, damaging only the packaging. But a scratched or dented can contains the same delicious food on the inside.
Wherever you live, there are probably laws dictating whether local stores and restaurants can donate food. In some cases, you’ll have to prove that you’re just feeding it to animals to avoid liability. Other laws prohibit the practice completely. Check your local ordinances to find out your options.
4. Feed Them Leftovers
Even if you can’t get grocery store or restaurant food, you’re almost certainly generating leftovers of your own. Be honest — do you always clean your plate? Even if you do, there are certain animal parts most people avoid, such as skin and gristle. But your animals will happily eat these less-than-savory table scraps.
Chickens, pigs, dogs and the two domesticated duck species — mallards and muscovy ducks — are omnivores, and there are numerous foods you can share with them once you’ve eaten your fill. It’s a great way to make use of your leftovers, especially if you’re feeding them to meat animals or laying hens. You just turned trash into treasure.
5. Harvest Plants
Make hay while the sun is shining. Whether you grew the grass yourself or found it growing naturally, if you have a bumper crop of good forage, either bale it or store it in a silo to provide for your animals in the winter. Don’t have any grazing animals? You can sell extra hay bales or silage to local ranchers, then use the profits to buy appropriate feed for your animals.
If you have a garden, set aside some of the crops to feed your animals. Select any vegetables that have worms or bugs on them — your chickens will see it as a bonus. Also, set aside vegetables that grew a little too large and became tough, as well as any mushy, underripe, overripe or misshapen veggies. They may not be perfect, but your animals will enjoy eating them.
Walk around your homestead with a pair of pruning shears, a machete or scissors. Cut down a few tree limbs and shrubs your animals can’t reach, and pull or cut any weeds growing where they shouldn’t. Remove hanging vines and ivy growing on buildings. Much of it can become animal feed.
6. Start a Worm Farm
Luckily, you don’t need acreage to get this miniature farm up and running. All you need is a bin, some soil and a container to collect the resulting compost. A worm farm turns yard waste and leftover food into rich soil. Earthworms usually reproduce quickly, and before you know it, you may have hundreds of extra worms.
Their compost makes an excellent fertilizer for growing your garden. You can set up a circular ecosystem where the worms fertilize your crops, and then you feed some of those vegetables back to the worms.
You can also feed the extra earthworms to your poultry, fish or pigs. It’s a great way to turn something less nutritious — like lettuce scraps or leaves from your yard — into a valuable protein source. Chickens and ducks get much more excited to eat worms than they do vegetables.
Additionally, you can sell the compost or worm tea to local farmers and gardeners, then use the profit to buy animal feed.
7. Do Some Yardwork
Your neighbors would probably love for you to lend a hand with their yard. Offer to mow people’s lawns and trim their trees, then bring home the plant clippings for your animals. Use a lawnmower with a bag attachment to collect the grass as you cut it.
You could even start a side gig doing landscaping, charging people to haul away their brush or making their front yards look nice, and spend the extra cash on animal feed. It’s a win-win situation.
8. Feed Your Animals Eggs
Are your chickens laying more than you can eat? If you have omnivorous animals on your homestead, then eggs are a very healthy way to supplement their dietary protein and calcium needs. And, yes, chickens and ducks love eating eggs. In fact, many birds will naturally start eating their own eggs if they aren’t getting a balanced diet.
Since you don’t want to encourage your poultry to break their eggs, it’s best if they don’t recognize that you’re feeding them eggs in the first place. Giving them a whole egg or cracking one in front of them can create this bad habit. Instead, crack an egg into a bowl, cover it and microwave it for a couple of minutes. You should feed your animals only cooked eggs to minimize the risk of foodborne illness.
Next, add the eggshell to the bowl and crush it up. This adds a crucial source of calcium for laying hens. If you’re feeding pigs, it’s fine to give them whole, hard-boiled eggs, since there’s no need to trick them into thinking they’re eating something else. They absolutely love these bite-sized treats.
Make sure to feed your animals eggs in moderation. You’ll need to look up the dietary requirements for each species to determine how often they can eat eggs.
At the store, you might see eggs for sale labeled “vegetarian-fed,” meaning they came from chickens who only ate plants. Contrary to popular belief, this is an unhealthy diet for chickens because laying hens have extremely high protein requirements. It also means the chickens were never allowed outside. After all, chickens that go outside naturally eat bugs, bird eggs, mice, lizards and other small animals. Steer clear of these eggs and source them from healthy, happy chickens instead.
And, of course, always give your chickens a balanced diet. If you keep your chickens confined indoors, they can technically get all the nutrients they need from chicken feed, so don’t overdo it with the extra protein.
9. Use Coupons, Memberships and Sales to Your Advantage
Many feed stores offer memberships that let you accrue savings over time. Some give discounts to 4-H and FFA club members so students can get animal feed for slightly cheaper prices — make your teenagers do all the shopping!
If you provide your address, most feed stores will send coupons in the mail that you can use to buy feed. They’ll also notify you whenever they have sales. Take advantage of these sales and buy your feed in bulk while the prices are low.
10. Feed out of Troughs
When it comes to feeding treats, a lot of animals enjoy searching for them in the grass or dirt. It’s a great enrichment activity for chickens, pigs and dogs to hunt down a tasty morsel that you threw outside — they love to dig and sniff around. If you’re trying to save money on your animals’ main food source, however, keeping it contained is the best bet.
Although it’s fine in many cases to throw animal feed directly on the ground, some of it will inevitably go to waste. The wind will blow it away, cows will trample it into the dirt and some of it will be hard for your animals to find in the grass — looking at you, bird seed. Your animals just won’t eat every bite.
Instead, try to keep the bulk of your feed in troughs or feeders. This will cut down on waste and make it easier for your animals to locate their dinner. The initial cost of the troughs will be worth it over time.
Reducing the Cost of Feed
Keeping animals on a homestead can be expensive, but you can lower your feed expenses by following a few common-sense practices.
Let your animals find some of their own food. Ask local restaurants if they’ll donate their leftovers. Take advantage of sales, and don’t be afraid to put in a little extra work to produce your own feed. Your animals — and your wallet — will thank you.
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