How Much Money Can You Save By Raising Your Own Food?

For many people, one of the main reasons for rasing your own food is to save money. Taking out the middle man, cutting out the costs of labor and transportation - it only makes sense. Add to that the idea that foods harvested right from your back yard can be richer in flavor and nutrients (saving you money in health care costs) - and of course gardening itself can be a great form of exercise (saving you money at the gym, too!)

But how much money can you really save raising your own food? I ran the numbers for last year (which are lower than they'd normally be, since I only had a minimal garden as we worked to set up our new homestead), and found it can be a lot!

Our biggest savings was from our pork. We raised two hogs this year, which we purchased for $100 ($50 each). They ate about 2,125 pounds of organic feed, bringing our total cost up to $1156.28 (this is actually about $300 more than we would usually spend because of an unforseen delay in our butchering date - you can read about that here). We butchered them ourselves and will be smoking all of the meat at home, so the only processing cost will be for the equipment we purchased (this was our first time butchering our own pigs) for $296.20. So our total cost was $1452.48 for 300 pounds of meat in the freezer, not counting the bones (which we'll make into broth) and lard. We'll be making all of this meat into pork chops, bacon, ham, and bratwurst (this is Wisconsin, after all. We love our brats!) From our normal sources, we would have paid around $3,140 for that amount of meat (in those cuts), so by raising our own we saved just under $1,700 (again, that's counting the price of the processing equipment and the extra feed from raising them longer than we expected). If you'd like more information, you can read more about how much we saved by raising our own pork in this post.

We also raised a batch of 50 broilers this year, each bird averaging 5 pounds. Purchase price was $71 ($1.42 per bird), and total feed cost was $458.84 (about $9.18 each). That price is for organic feed, which is generally about twice the cost of regular. We did the butchering ourselves and used chicken tractors we had already built (you can see my post with building plans here), so our total cost was $529.84 (or $10.60 per bird; about $2.12 per pound, dressed).  Our normal source for organic chicken charges $3.50 a pound, which would come out to $875 for the 50 chickens we raised. So our savings was $345.16, or $1.38 per pound.

From those chickens we also made broth (also known as stock). The cheapest source I have for organic chicken broth is Walmart, which charges $2.50 for a quart. I don't usually measure exactly when I make broth, but a conservative guess at how much we made would be a gallon per bird, which would multiply out to 200 quarts a year, or $500. Since I already calculated the cost for the bones in the meat total, there was no additional cost for the broth.

Our free range hens (which we only had from May to December in 2018 because of our move to the new house) gave us 2,235 eggs this year, at a cost of $297 in organic feed.  If we had paid $4 a dozen (the going rate for organic eggs around here), those eggs would have cost us $745; a savings of $448.

So the animals on our farm alone saved us around $3,000. We weren't able to have much of a garden this year, but we did raise about $116 worth of butternut squash (our cost was just $5 for the seedling plant) and $30 worth of mushrooms (which cost $25 for the spawn, but will give us harvests for years to come). I didn't add up how many tomatoes we harvested (the kids ate most of them before they made it into the house!) so I can't calculate the value of those. Conservatively, then, our tiny starter garden netted us only $121, but obviously that number will go up significantly when we're able to garden more extensively this summer.

But what really surprised me was the amount of money our countertop microbial "farm" saved us. We have kefir smoothies every morning for breakfast, using 3 pints of kefir per day for all seven of us. Using a supermarket price of $4 a quart for plain organic kefir ($6 for our 3 pints) times 365 days a year, that would cost us $2,190. Making our own from organic milk that costs us $1.50 a day instead of $6, which saves us $1,642 over the course of a year - all for less than a minute or two of work per day.

We also make our own homemade kombucha (you can find my recipe here). You can get kombucha at Walmart for about $3 a pint, and we make 2 gallons every week. That would cost us about $2,500 over the course of a year. The tea and sugar required to make that same amount at home would cost around $150, for a savings of  $2,350 (we flavor it with raspberries harvested for free from a friend's garden, so that added no extra cost).

When you add those it all up, our total savings, even without much of a garden, was over $7,000. Our total expenses for all groceries over the past year was around $14,000, so we cut our grocery bill by a third! I can't wait to see how we do next year!

How about you? As you can see, some of the biggest cost savings were "raised" right on our kitchen counter (ooh, that reminds me - I didn't count my sourdough bread! I'll have to calculate that out next . . .) How much do you save by raising your own food?

Home Smoked Bacon

I was really wracking my brain to think of an exiting title, but really, what's more exiting than that? Bacon is the product of a kind of miraculous alchemy, a blending of meat, salt, and smoke to make one of the top five most spectacular foods ever created. Knowing how to work that spell and make this magic at home (so you know exactly what is (or isn't) going into your bacon) is one of the greatest homesteading skills you can achieve!

I first heard of this recipe from a class I took at the Hay River Traditional & Green Skills 2018 event. The class was called Makin' Bacon! Home Smoking Basics, taught by Brett Laidlaw, a blogger and author with a cabin in northwestern Wisconsin, less than an hour from where I live (here's a link to his blog, which I encourage you to check out: troutcaviar.blogspot.com)

In his class, he showed us how to choose, cure, and smoke bacon in a cheap backyard grill. The best part? He gave out free samples of the finished product, so we could know if we liked it before we went to the trouble of making it for ourselves at home. Smart guy!

Here's the recipe, straight out of his book, Trout Caviar: Recipes from a Northern Forager:

Home-Smoked Bacon

2 pounds pork belly
1/4 cup maple syrup or brown sugar
3 Tablespoons salt (I use canning/pickling salt because of the finer texture)

Rub the pork belly with the maple syrup, sprinkle salt on all sides, and let cure, covered, in the refrigerator for 24 hours, turning occasionally. For a brown sugar cure, mix the sugar and salt and pat it evenly on all sides of the meat. 

The next day, rinse off excess salt, pat dry, and smoke at 200-220 degrees for 2-3 hours. The bacon will be both smoked and fully cooked. If you are unsure about whether the bacon is cooked at this point, set your mind at ease by placing it in a 200 degree oven for 30 minutes. A meat thermometer inserted into the bacon should read 160 degrees. 

Be sure to sample a small slice of he still-warm bacon straight from the smoker and sweating fragrant fat. You'll see that it's more than worth the small trouble of smoking your own.

See how easy that is? Only three ingredients, and if you use an electric smoker with a temperature probe (here's a link to the one I have), it takes all the guesswork out of it. I just rinse the marinaded meat, pat it dry, and set it on the rack. Insert the probe, shut the door, push a few buttons, and a few hours later - pork perfection.

If you don't have a smoker, he details in his book how to smoke your meat on a regular backyard grill. It's more putzy than an electric smoker, but you can still get the same amazing result.

Either way, it's suprisingly simple, and the results are well worth the effort (I heartily second his recommendation of sampling while it's still warm - and perhaps licking the pan . . .) Make sure to save any drippings; these are great for greasing the pan when frying eggs, etc.


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Spring Planting Signs

Everyone knows that farming is dependent on the weather. Where I live, in hardiness zone 4b, we have short summers and long winters, so we really need to maximize our growing season. We want to get our plants in as early as possible; but how do we know when the ground is ready to plant? Too early, and our transplants won't survive and seeds will just rot. Here in Northwestern Wisconsin, frost-out can vary by weeks from year to year - it seems like sometimes the ground thaws out in March, and other times not until mid-April. So how do you know when it's safe to plant?

If you've read Laura Ingalls Wilder's classic book Farmer Boy, you may remember the scene where Almanzo and Alice are arguing about planting time:

At the end of the row he looked at the ash tree’s crumpled new leaves, and asked Alice if she knew when to plant corn. She didn’t, so he told her. Corn-planting time is when the ash leaves are as big as squirrel’s ears.
“How big a squirrel?” Alice asked.
“Just an ordinary squirrel.”
“Well, those leaves are as big as a baby squirrel’s ears. And it isn’t corn-planting time.”
For a minute Almanzo didn’t know what to think. Then he said:
“A baby squirrel isn’t a squirrel; it’s a kitten.”
“But it’s just as much a squirrel—”
“No it isn’t. It’s a kitten. Little cats are kittens, and little foxes are kittens, and little squirrels are kittens. A kitten isn’t a cat, and a kitten isn’t a squirrel, either.”
“Oh,” Alice said.

Squirrels and kittens aside, there are many signs from nature that give us hints at what's going on below ground. One rule of thumb I've heard is that if the weeds are coming up, cold-hardy plants like spinach, lettuce, and broccoli should be able to grow, too. Makes sense, don't you think? If it's warm enough for the "wild" plants to germinate, our cultivated plants should be able to, too.

A more specific tip I've read is that you should plant potatoes, beets, carrots, and peas when the dandelions start blooming. Now, I have dandelions growing right up next to my house that are about to flower, but I'm not going by that, since they're benefiting from the warmth coming off of the foundation - a very different microclimate than down in my garden. I need to look at the dandelions growing around my garden to see when that soil is ready.

Another tip I've heard is that when crocus flowers start blooming, you can plant peas, lettuce, spinach, cabbage, and broccoli. Or, if you don't have crocus flowers, you can plant these when the lilacs show their first leaves, or when the daffodils begin to bloom. In our neck of the woods, the daffodils are just sending up their first leaves right now, the lilac leaves aren't out yet, and unfortunately I don't have any crocus flowers planted on our new property. So it looks like I have a little time to wait before I should start planting - which I should note for next year, since the broccoli and Brussels sprouts I started indoors are more than ready to be transplanted! Ah, well. I'll know to start my seeds a little later next spring.

For the more tender vegetables like corn and beans, the old-timers said that you can plant these when oak leaves are the size of a mouse's ear - or, if you're more the Alice type, and want to be contentious about what size mouse, you can wait until the apple blossoms start to fall. Another sign is when the daylillies bloom; that's when you'll want to put out your tomatoes and peppers. And when the lilac flowers start to fade, then you can plant your cucumbers and squash.

In our modern, over-scheduled world, this seems very imprecise and hard to plan. I want to know when to start my seedlings indoors so they'll be at the perfect size when planting time comes! But any farmer will tell you, the real world doesn't necessarily run on your schedule. Some years spring will warm up early, other years you'll get snow the first week of June (my dad has a photo of snow on our lilac bush from a freak June snowstorm when I was a teenager). But knowing what signs to look for can help you know when your part of the world is ready to start growing again.

Taking My Piggies to the Bank

So how much did it actually cost me to raise my pigs last summer? To me, it was worth every penny to know exactly how my pigs were raised and what they ate (actually, I think I saw Hickory chewing on a golf ball once - but I was not about to reach around those teeth to try to get it out! I just let that one pass. Literally . . .) As much as I try to find good food, unless you're buying from someone you know or raising it yourself, you just don't know. And I want to know.

But I still have to try to be practical about it. We need to be good stewards of the resources God's given us, and money is one of those resources, just like the land and animals we're here to care for. So here's how our numbers from 2018 broke down:

Purchase price: $50 each; $100 total
Feed: $.4975 per pound; 2,123 pounds; $1056.28 total
Processing equipment: $296.20
Total cost: $1452.48
Weight of meat (added up after butchering; does not include lard and bones): 300 pounds
Price per pound: $4.84

Oof! That feels like a lot. But then I compare it to how much I'd pay for the cuts of meat we actually eat:
(Prices are all per pound)
Organic Pork Chops: $6.21
Conventional Pork Tenderloin (I couldn't even find organic): $10.94
Organic Nitrate Free Bacon: $15.00
Organic Ham: $11.50
Brats (from Louie's - our favorite local meat shop; not organic): $4.79

And of course that cost included purchasing the processing equipment (which turned out to be less than what we'd payed for processing in the past, but still an expense we needed to account for). Without that extra cost, our price would have been $3.85 per pound. I still have to do my own smoking for the bacon and hams, but I actually prefer that, since I have control over what goes into them.

I do wish we'd been able to butcher them on schedule (click here to read all about why we didn't); that would have saved us almost 300 pounds of feed per pig - and judging by previous years' totals, it wouldn't have reduced their weight by very much, so we could have saved another $300 right there.

So, if all goes well next year, based on my last three year's numbers, I can expect to buy around 750 pounds of feed per hog. If the price of feed holds steady and I can still get piglets for around $50 a piece, that should put my average price around $850 for two pigs. I expect to get about 300 pounds of meat out of them in that amount of time, so that would put my price at under $3 a pound - for organic pastured pork. You're not going to find that anywhere!

All in all, I'm very happy with how those numbers work out. As I said, I think raising our own meat is worth it no matter what the price, but seeing the actual amount I'm saving makes it that much more satisfying.

These Little Piggies Didn't Go to Market

Tomorrow we flip the calendar to May first - which around here means it's time to call our local pig farmer and see if he has some weaners for sale (meaning weaned piglets, not hot dogs). 😉 I had hoped to keep you updated on our three little pigs in 2017, but with selling our old house, hunting for our new one, packing, unpacking, and still homeschooling and making three meals a day (mostly) from scratch, my poor little blog got neglected. As far as I can remember, everything went smoothly, and we enjoyed our home-raised ham and bacon.

Fast forward to spring of 2018, as we were still settling into our new house and eagerly watching the snow melt and reveal new suprises on the property (including an apple tree hidden in the woods!) We brought the chickens home, transplanted some blueberry, raspberry, elderberry, and hazelnut bushes from our old house, and even managed to plant a few tomatoes.

Things were looking more and more like a homestead, so much so that in June I decided we could probably even manage to raise a couple of pigs. We almost couldn't find any because it was so late in the year already, but the farmer we'd bought from the year before had a cancellation, and so we we were able to bring home our girls - Maple and Hickory (a hint to my husband that I was hoping to get a smoker for my birthday in the fall). 😉

The summer progressed and the pigs grew just like they were supposed to. Since we'd gotten them late, we would have them longer into the fall, and I was excited to see if we could take a cut out of their feed costs by feeding them products from our new property. One of the first things we used was acorns from the oak trees in our woods. The apple tree we'd found in the spring also bore abundantly that fall, and anything the kids wouldn't eat went to the pigs.

We were very blessed to have friends who were willing to share their bounty with us that summer - at least four ladies called us up and asked if we could use apples from their trees, and were delighted when we volunteered to gather the wormy windfalls to fatten up the pigs. The chickens were delighted, too, to clean up what the pigs left behind - we gleaned so many that our porkers couldn't even eat them all! 

We weren't able to have much of a garden that first year on the new land, but I did manage to squeeze in a butternut squash plant and some cucumbers near the tomatoes. The squash did amazing - we harvested everything that was ripe before the fall frost, and everything that didn't have time to ripen we cooked up and fed to the pigs. And of course if I found an over-ripe cucumber or a tomato too blemished for us to eat, I'd lob it straight into their pen.

A month before our planned processing date, I called the butcher shop, only to find that instead of processing my pigs in early October, as I'd planned, they were booked until early November and wouldn't be able to pick up my pigs until then. I cringed at the thought of feeding two full-grown pigs for an extra month (at that age they're eating a LOT of feed - that extra month would end up costing me over $300), but what could I do?

Then, when butchering day finally did arrive, I was shocked to get a call from the butcher asking when we would be bringing our pigs in. I had specifically asked for on-farm slaughter, since I had no way of transporting them. I explained this, in desperate tones, to the butcher, and he told me he'd see when he could get me on the schedule and give me a call back. 

He didn't call back. 

I called him, daily, and he kept putting me off, while I got more and more desperate.

Meanwhile, friends of ours, who'd purchased their pigs at the same time we'd gotten ours, were planning a butchering party. A member of their church was a retired butcher, and had agreed to show them (and any interested friends, like me) how it was done. I jumped at the chance, and the kids and I spent two days learning just what it took to process a hog.

At that time, we still held out hope that the butcher would pull through for us - my husband really wanted to avoid the stress and mess and just hire out the job. But after the butcher put us off twice more, he finally gave in and said we were going to have to do it ourselves (before we went broke from buying pig feed!)

We headed over to our local Farm & Fleet store and bought what supplies we thought we needed - a pair of gambrels, tow straps, a clean reciprocating saw blade to halve the carcasses, and the smoker I'd been hoping for (a couple of weeks late for my birthday, but I was OK with that!) I was pleased to see that the cost of the supplies added up to less than what we would have paid for processing, so at least we weren't getting any farther behind as far as money was concerned. But we still had a big job ahead of us, and with each purchase the fact became more and more real - we really were going to do this!

Hearing the anxiety in my voice as I told my friends about our decision, they volunteered to help us out. My 18-year old son and his buddy did the actual killing and gutting (his friend's deer hunting experience was very helpful for this), his mother, sister, and my girls helped with the skinning and cleaning, and I got to be manager and facilitator (that's a fancy way of saying go-fer) 😉 for the operation. 

My daughters helping out with removing the hide

We left the carcasses to hang overnight (shooing our kitten out of his normal spot in the garage and locking him in the workshop) and finished processing the cuts the next day. Another friend came to help me with wrapping the cuts in the kitchen, while the rest of the crew did the cutting up outside. The only major hitch they ran into was cutting up the pork chops - we didn't feel like we could do the job safely with either the handsaw I'd bought nor our reciprocating saw, so the chops went into the freezer unchopped, in one big chunk (where they're still waiting to be cut up, almost six months later . . .)

When all was said and done, after two long, anxious days of hard work, we had 300 pounds of organic pork safely stored in our freezers. It was a big job, and one I definitely wouldn't want to do every day, but all in all it went much better than I'd feared, thanks to the help and support of my husband (who financed the whole operation), our kids, and our wonderful friends. 


Please note - the links above are affiliate links. If you make a purchase after clicking I will receive a small commission, but your price remains the same. Thank you for your support!