Part 3 · Subsistence First
Animals at Household Scale
Poultry, goats, pigs and rabbits on a household holding, with real feed and yield numbers, and the test that tells you when an animal is a net loss.
Whether to keep animals at all is a land question, and it comes after the crops, not before them. Alik Pelman made his farm plant based and kept no livestock, to minimise land, water and emissions. His own paper adds a qualification: it is possible to incorporate a small production of animal food, for example eggs, without dramatically changing the inputs of land, labour and training. Animals are not forbidden by the arithmetic, they are judged by it.
The one test: the feed comes from the farm
An animal is a net gain when it eats what a human cannot eat, crop residues, browse, kitchen waste, surplus and insects, and returns food and manure. It is a net loss when it eats feed a human could eat, or takes ground that could grow human calories. The land cost is the whole test. A hen fed purchased grain is a way of turning a bag of wheat into fewer eggs at a cash loss. The same hen foraging the orchard, the beds after harvest and the kitchen scraps is turning waste into food, and the conversion is a gain. Hold that test against the four household animals below.
Poultry
Poultry come first because they ask little and give eggs nearly every day, and eggs do not mind the cold if the flock is fed, watered and safe. The hen forages weed seed, grubs and insects, scratches a bed clean after harvest, and leaves manure that is the fastest and hottest of the common manures, so it must be aged before it touches a growing crop. The trap is the feed. A working flock still needs some grain, and the moment the grain is bought in, the flock is a food sink. Feed it on the farm's own waste and surplus, move it around so the ground is not over-treated, and poultry is the cheapest animal protein a household can keep.
Small ruminants
Goats and sheep turn ground nothing else will work, brush, bramble and marginal slope, into milk and meat. Two numbers decide whether they pay. The first is the browse: a ruminant worth keeping must get most of its feed from the farm's own rough ground, and hay or grain brought in changes the accounting. The second is the season: a dairy goat dries off and gives no milk in the winter, so plan the household's milk around the flush.
Pigs
The pig is the surplus converter and the cheap tiller. Cull vegetables, whey, acorns, crop residues and the extra corn go in, and meat, lard and a turned, manured bed come out. In a cold climate the lard is oil, the densest stored fat the farm has, which is the fat budget met by an animal instead of a tree. A pig finished on the farm's own surplus is a net gain. A pig finished on bought grain is a grain competitor, and on a land-constrained farm that grain could have fed a person.
Rabbits
Rabbits are small, quiet and efficient on forage and kitchen scraps, and they produce a strong manure that can be applied more directly than poultry manure. They suit a small holding with no pasture and no room for a pig, multiplying the farm's own fodder into meat. The cost is the same as every animal's: feed them from the farm, or they only buy meat at a higher price.
The fertility case, honestly attributed
There is a strong argument that on a closed, land-constrained farm the small flock is not a luxury but a requirement, because the harvest steadily exports minerals plants cannot replace from the air. On a two acre closed loop feeding a family of five, one modeling report puts the annual harvest drain at about 45 pounds of nitrogen, 15.5 of phosphorus, 22 of calcium and 38 of potassium, and finds that a strictly plant-only closed farm runs all four in deficit, while a bird-integrated farm turns all four to surplus, the bird's gizzard grinding grit and rock into plant-available calcium and phosphorus. The same report gives the human side: on a closed plant-only farm, liver stores of vitamin B12 run dry in five to fifteen years, and three or four eggs a week per person covers the need. Attribute that carefully. It is a modeling report, held in the vault as moderate evidence and medium confidence, not peer-reviewed. The Pelman papers are peer-reviewed but describe a farm with no livestock. Treat the closed-loop case for the flock as an argument with numbers, not measured data, and test it on your own ground.
Exercise
Run the feed test on one animal
Pick one animal you want to keep. Write the feed it needs for a year in kilograms, marking each item as grown on the farm or bought in. Convert the bought-in feed to human calories and compare that to the calories the animal returns as meat, milk or eggs. If the bought-in feed carries more human calories than the animal returns, the animal is a net loss on your land, and the fix is to change the feed, not the animal.
Exercise
Design the flock on the waste stream
List everything the household and farm discard in a season: kitchen scraps, crop residues, cull vegetables, surplus, windfall fruit. Estimate the weight. Match it to a flock, roughly a hen per two to four pounds of food waste a day, and write how many birds that supports, how many eggs a week that implies, and where their manure goes before it touches a crop.
Fieldwork
Count the eggs and the feed
If you keep hens, weigh the feed they get for seven days and count every egg collected. Divide the total egg weight by the feed weight for your real conversion ratio, and write both numbers on a board in the coop. Then work out how much of that feed came from your own ground and how much from a bag. If the bag outweighs the farm, the flock is buying you eggs at a loss.
Failure mode
Animals you cannot feed from your own ground. The failure mode of household livestock is the bag of bought feed that keeps arriving, not the animal. It hides the cost, ties the household back to the shop, and turns a fertility engine into an expense. Feed the animals from the farm or do not keep them. And respect the single-person fragility Pelman found when he was away teaching and his irrigation failed and the garden dried out: one person has no redundancy, so keep the count to what one pair of hands can manage.
