Homesteading Calculators

Livestock, poultry, water, wood and off-grid power. 13 calculators for running a smallholding rather than a farm.

Backyard chicken returns is the page most likely to change a plan, and the honest answer is usually that eggs are not the reason to keep chickens. A hen eats roughly 45 kg of feed a year and lays perhaps 250 eggs in her first full year, dropping noticeably after. Against supermarket prices the arithmetic rarely works, particularly once the coop is amortised. It works far better against free-range or organic prices, and it works best if you value the birds for other reasons. The page shows the breakdown rather than a verdict.

Rainwater harvesting uses the figure people underestimate: roughly 0.6 litres per square metre of roof per millimetre of rain, after runoff losses. A modest 100 square metre roof in a place getting 600 mm a year yields something near 36,000 litres. The constraint is almost never annual rainfall, it is storage against the dry gap, which is why the page asks for the longest dry spell rather than the yearly total.

Livestock acreage and pasture rotation take your own forage quality, since stocking rates vary by more than a factor of five across regions.