Any guidelines for how many of what kind of livestock to support a given number of persons? Anything like the plant guide?

Americans' annual consumption of beef in 2000 was 64 pounds. Total red meat consumption (beef, veal, pork, and lamb) was 114 lbs. Annual consumption of poultry (chicken, turkey) in 2000 was nearly 50 pounds annually.
from How Much Meat We Eat Meat is a luxury in much of the world. I doubt that many countries eat as much as we do.

Raising your own meat under survival conditions requires properly mineralized soil (nutrition from soil to plant to animal to you), and enough land to feed them year-round, as you couldn't depend on outside sources.

A beef calf needs enough good nutrition to get him up to 700-900 lbs, and that happens more slowly on straight forage (no grain), but it's the most natural. Rotating pastures (see Joel Salatin's book Salad Bar Beef) is best for ongoing pasture maintenance and can probably sustain more cows on the least land while keeping it in good shape, but you still need a goodly amount of land.

Sheep eat grass, goats eat browse.

Chickens need short grass and grain, and are often good foragers if you choose your variety carefully. Free-range birds can hunt weed seeds and insects. If you had to use commercial feed exclusively, one layer hen would require 80-90 lbs of feed per year. Or, you would have to grow enough feed on your land to equal that amount.

Eggs are a great source of protein and fat, and can replace a lot of meat. Some chicken breeds will lay through the winter if they aren't stressed too much by cold. My Buff Orpingtons stopped laying early in Nov, and didn't crank up again until the days got longer in May. My current girls, Columbian Wyandottes, started laying in June and popped out eggs daily all through winter (a surprise), through the wet spring and summer, and up to when they started molting (fall). They are also less finicky about wet weather and are great foragers. Chickens lay the most eggs their first laying year, and less every year after. Some of the egg laying machines produce about 300 the first year, 200 the second and about 120 a year for the next 3 years , averaging about 800 for a 5 year lifespan. But many of these are poor foragers, so that increases the amount of feed you have to supply.

According to the book by Gene Logsden, Small-Scale Grain Raising, with decent soil you can grow one bushel of grain per plot:

Field corn: 10 x 50 ft (56 lbs, shelled)
Oats: 10 x 62 ft (32 lbs)
Barley: 10 x 87 ft (48 lbs)
Rye: 10 x 145 ft (56 lbs)
Buckwheat: 10 x 130 ft (48 lbs)
Grain sorghum: 10 x 60 ft (56 lbs)
Wheat: 10 x 109 ft (60 lbs)

These are estimates, but nine bushels (approx. 500 lbs) of assorted grains might be raised on 1/6 of an acre.

Choices would depend on climate,season, weather and soil, and you would have to keep in mind that for chickens, corn would have to be at least cracked (they can swallow it whole, but they don't get the nutrition out of it), oats* have to be threshed of their tight hulls, and barley* has to have the awns at least clipped.

* Hull-less oats and barley are available, which eliminates the worst of this problem.

And don't forget the lesser-known grains and pseudo-grains: Millet, the 'old wheats' (einkorn, emmer, kamut), triticale, flaxseed, grain amaranth, quinoa (must be rinsed before eating, humans or chickens). The wider the range of feed, the better the nutrition.

Sue

Those crop estimates are quite high, I know my land its a lot lower.
My family of 4 uses about 1/4 of a cow per year. We eat out too much so we should probably be more like 1/2. My parents never raised anything else, my grandparents had pigs and chickens but it was before I started school that my grandmother had them, I can just barely remember walking out with her to the chicken coop and getting an egg for breakfast. I remember one year her burning the hairs off a whole chicken after they plucked it.
My father bought a corn picker and combine, we did 10 acres of corn and oats and ground it up for grain for the cattle for the winter. Had at most 3 dozen head of cattle.

His estimates were for experienced gardeners with smaller plots of improved soil, not 300-acre farmers.

Sue

But I mean its not about at acreage or experience, its about land quality. My grandparents were experienced but had much less yield due to less water, rocky ground, etc. There is no one exact number and you need to prepare for the worst not the best.

The point is that if your plan includes living off the land, maybe you better get deeper and more specific in your planning so that your expectations are reasonable - wherever and whatever land you are counting on.

Expectations are one thing, reality is another! Nothing gets in the way of someone's expectations like Real Life.

Sue

http://www.amazon.co.uk/New-Complete-Boo...942&sr=1-12

This is a great starter book for this sort of thing. You can do a lot with an acre. The key issue to remember is that if you start it will take a while (3-5 yrs probably) to get things up and running properly - a lot of people imagine they can just start up the day after teotwawki but you really can't

Thats what I'm trying to get at. A lot of the examples I see are assuming good soil. It takes a lot more work to make and keep soil good If your planning to live off the land then you need to plan for the worst and not the best because you may not be able to get all the $$ fertilizers and pest control to keep that soil good.

I think everyone should pay close attention to the posts by NuggetHoarder, Susan, and Eugene. These represent cold, hard, practical reality.

It does indeed take years to develop a productive mini-farm, and a lot of hard work. Don't expect to sit around playing video games while your land magically feeds you and heats your house. If you don't get your butt in gear and get the work done, it won't get done. Your hobbies and interests had better be connected to the work, or the whole enterprise will fail. The gardener's shadow is the best fertilizer.

Developing and feeding fertile, productive soil is half the job of gardening. Soil is an ecosystem. I probably have 10,000 square feet in active production (garden and orchard). That's roughly 1/4 acre. It takes at least 4-6 times that much lawn and light bush to produce the clippings and leaves to keep the soil fed. Areas with longer growing seasons have the luxury of planting winter cover such as ryegrass as green manure. Otherwise, it's necessary to rotate crops (which is often necessary for pest control anyway). You also need to adjust your soil-feeding to compensate for high or low pH as well as nutrients (for example, in my naturally high pH soil, I have to limit nitrogen and biochar in areas where I'm planting potatoes; otherwise the flea beetles and nematodes will ruin my crop).

The long and short of it: there is no substitute for putting a spade in the ground. You need to know your soil. Hypothetical plans only produce hypothetical food.