Stretch Your Dog Food Dollar with Homestead Scraps

As a homesteader, I try to be very careful about counting the cost vs. benefit of all of the animals on our property. Each needs to fulfill a role (or our freezer), at the least possible expense.

So when I was walking through our local Farm & Fleet store the other day looking at dog food, I began to reconsider the worth of our pug/dachshund cross. Is she really worth $30 for a 40 pound bag of Iams? I won't even pay that much for chicken feed - and last I checked, our dog hasn't laid any eggs lately!

My daughter, of course, thinks she's worth every penny; and she does serve as a pretty effective doorbell (a loud, high-pitched, hey-that-scary-car-is-still-parked-in-that-same-spot-it's-been-all-weekend-oh-wait-that's-yours kind of doorbell, but still . . .), small rodent deterrent, spill licker, daughter's-bed-warmer, and general source of amusement. She also sings along with the Hallelujah Chorus, so there's that.

Which means she's staying; but it would be nice if we could somehow make her food a little cheaper. So I started researching dog food recipes.

The first thing I noticed was that most of the recipes I could find were NOT cheaper. Chicken breast, rice, special vitamin supplements - this was definitely not going to save me any money. But every so often I'd find ingredients that got me thinking: Liver - I have plenty of chicken livers from butchering our birds, and even though I still haven't found a pate recipe that anyone but me will eat, I can't just throw them away! Eggs - Wisconsin winters mean cracked, frozen eggs, which I don't let my kids eat, but the dog could; Squash - the garden always gives us more squash than we can handle; Apples - how about that experiment where I turned the leftover apple smash from our cider making into applesauce, but it didn't really taste so good? It turns out, there are a lot of things that would make good dog food going to waste in our house.

So I developed a basic recipe, built off of otherwise wasted foods on our homestead:
1/2 cup squash or carrots
1/2 cup meat (chicken hearts, meat from soup bones, etc.)
 - or - 1 egg (with shell; the added calcium is good for them, but smash it well so they don't cut themselves)
1/4 cup livers
1/4 c green vegetables (green beans, etc.)
1 Tbsp fat (lard, chicken fat, etc.)

This is only a base; we substitute, add, or leave things out all the time. I regularly add bone broth - it's mostly water, after all, so it's cheap, and it's a great source of collagen to help our old dog's aging joints. In the winter, when the pigs are tucked away at freezer camp, the dog gets most of the whey from my cheesemaking, too.

Now, I know what you're thinking - this isn't perfectly vitamin and mineral balanced like the stuff in the bags! There's no veterinary nutritionist overseeing this! But hold on a minute. Look at your diet - do you eat the same nutritionally balanced pellet every day? Or do you prefer a varied diet of healthy foods? And no one is saying this has to be your dog's only food - in our family, we mix a homemade "stew" for our dog's supper, but still give her kibble for breakfast - partially for "nutrient insurance" and partially just because we're lazy. 😉

And if you are lazy like us, you can actually make up a big batch all at once in the fall (or whenever) and freeze or pressure can it. A rule of thumb for canning is that your time and pressure need to be what's required for the ingredient that needs the most - usually the meat ingredient (you can check the canning times for most foods in the Ball Blue Book of Canning and Preserving). That way, you just have to pop open a jar when your dog's meal time comes around, rather than cooking a separate meal for her every day. And if a whole jar is too much for your small dog, you can refrigerate the extra and she can have leftovers the next day (just like your kids!)

So I've found that the key to saving money feeding your dog can be looking at the healthy food you're already raising for your family and seeing what's being wasted. Just like we save our kitchen scraps to supplement our chickens' ration and minimize their feed bill, think about what would otherwise go unused that would make healthy and delicious dog food. And remember, this is an animal that eats chicken poop like it's candy - what seems gross to you might be a gourmet delight to her!


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