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?