Backyard critters as an economic buffer?

[BettyR]

Quote:
I don't know why the coyotes are so thick here...it's not like they are being squeezed into a smaller area...we live on the Southern edge of the Big Thicket National Preserve and the land is protected. It covers a very large portion of East Texas and the animals that we see are fat and healthy...they are obviously living very well on something.

They killed my Mom and Step Dad's two dogs about 3 months ago. My Mom always got up in the mornings and let the dogs out to go bathroom and they usually stayed in the yard... they very seldom went into the woods.

The little Min-Pin managed to get away and get back to the house but died at the vets office, they killed the larger dog outright. They found his body or what was left of it, in the back yard near the woods. They are just devastated, several of their friends have tried to give them a dog since then and they won't take it. I guess the hurt is still too new.

These were the little dogs.

 

[Lunachick]

OMG how horrible for your parents. Poor dogs.

 

[sdshoars]

Quote:
just a random thought.... if 500lbs of food at 50 bucks a pound, your property taxes are $25,000????!!!! if so, i DO NOT want to live where you are. we pay $435 a year on our house and acre!

 

[JennsPeeps]

Off-topic, but my taxes are around $2500/year for 0.1 acre in a city.

This year I'm going to see how many lbs of food I can raise on my teensy lot:

 

[silkiechicken]

Sorry about those dogs!!! Wonder if they are attracted to humans b/c of food reasons? Like maybe more rodents, natural prey in human situations... or human trash to eat?

As for taxes...7+ acres in the city grandfathered in for 60+ years. The loss of the grass strip on the highway, plus a population of 100k+ explains it.

JennsPeeps, per area, I'm glad I don't have to pay YOUR tax rate!

 

[MichiganWoods]

I can't say we'll save any money, but we are raising them for convenience of food. It's 18 miles round trip to the nearest grocery store from our house. In the winter, we sometimes get snowed in for a few days. However, my coop is right in my back yard. If I am in need of a few eggs (next winter when they'll be laying!), all I will have to do is walk outside and collect them. Or heat up some of the frozen meals I will have made through out the year with the surplus of eggs and meat. This beats having to dig my driveway out (180') so I can try and drive out to get something. I tried to shovel this driveway by hand last year.... lemme tell you, I nearly had a heart attack. We finally found someone to plow it for us... at $20 a pop. And at least once a winter season, if not a lot more, one of our cars usually slips off the driveway down onto the yard and gets stuck. The tow company knows how to get to our house by heart.

 

[Felicitas]

Chicken-keeping will be a new hobby for me, but I also hope to sell enough eggs to be able to help out with the cost of feed and offset other expenses of keeping them. My goal is 8 - 10 laying hens to start with. And thinking longer term, this is part of a trial run for a deeper commitment to farming and self-sufficiency that my husband and I are working on and that is related to the economy and as a reaction to how we lived the first few years of our marriage. Currently we rent, but we'd eventually like to buy a few acres further north in the foothills of the mountains, where we can have plenty of animals and a garden big enough to feed us all.

 

[Wifezilla]

Jenns, please keep up posted on your experiment. I am going to try something similar. My total lot size is 7200 sq ft.

 

[Rosalind]

Quote:
True, but have you read Joel Salatin's books about critter farming? I asked for them for a Xmas present, don't know if I will get them, but he writes about that sort of thing for critters. I'm going to try growing a high-protein chicken feed next year, it's an experiment.

For veggies, though, I think you recoup the costs pretty quickly. Veggies & fruit are pretty cheap to grow. And, like all projects, the main cost is in setting up--once you're set up properly (weeds smothered w/ cardboard, large trees & bushes planted, fences and irrigation systems built) it isn't hardly any work to manage a large garden. All the work is spent on a few weeks in the spring, the occasional weeding, and then harvesting in the fall. I have a 20-tree orchard (to be expanded to 30 next year) and I can't say I spend a whole lot of time working on it; maybe four weekends a year. I really wish that something high protein and low fat grew on trees, they are a LOT easier to manage than grain in a garden. And before someone says "squirrels!", I am a lousy shot with a .22.

What about fish farming? One of my colleagues used to tell me about how fish farming could be done in ponds and such as a nice source of income and protein. I have only read a little bit about how to set up a fish farm, but is raising trout and freshwater shrimps and such economical? I would think that since most fish goes for $8-12/lb. retail, even the crummy cheap stuff, farming fish would indeed pay for itself. Especially if you're growing something like shrimp, catfish, herbivorous fish, etc. that can eat leftovers and garden waste, things that would normally become compost/chicken scraps.

 

[Mahonri]

I'm hoping that my chickens will be available if times get tougher.

Imagine if all the roads shut down and all of the grocery stores emptied out.

At least you'd have protein with your eggs and some occasional meat.

Of course you'll want to always store extra feed just in case.