My husband and I dream of being as self sufficient as possible in our food production. This would be easier if I were planing on eating boatloads of fruit because we live on an old orchard that has about 100+ aging fruit trees on it and we’ve planted 30ish more since moving in (my husband loves apples but its waaaay more than he or the kids will ever eat). However, since I want to eat a lot of meat I wonder how we can grow more? Currently we have a kitchen garden that provides a lot of our vegetables and have just bred our meat rabbits for the first time. We also have about 2 acres of chestnut. We don’t have much pasture, ~1.5-2 acres of grassy field with the occasional apple or nut tree in it. It needs improvement to be really good pasture I think. We also have about 4 acres of dense forest. I realize that if I’m serious about meat growing we will need to make more pasture but my husband wants to make the most of our currently cleared space. Also the back 4 aren’t flat either. The entire property is a bit hilly, nothing crazy but a hill nonetheless. So far my total newb framer thoughts are 1: get chickens and feed them mostly scraps. I don’t know how much grain they need and we can’t grow grain on our property. Not enough space anywhere for that (the grassy field is sloped/hilly but not too much for sheep). 2: put sheep in the field but we wont get many on that space. 3: get goat and/ or pig to feed fruit scraps/ nettle / blackberry patch we have at the bottom of our property below the chestnuts. Can I feed a pig or goat mostly on what we grow of excess fruit and chestnut? Any advice from farmers greatly appreciated!
Can I turn fruit into meat? (question for farmers)
I think goat/pig is a good idea. Cows? Pigs might be good, if they eat chestnut. Plus, you can feed them scraps too.
Is it 6 acres total? With 130+ fruit trees? Or a lot of acreage for the fruit trees, plus 6 acres?
We have a neighbor who has cows and goats and less than 4 acres. Not sure what they feed them though.
Its a total of a bit over 8 acres. The fruit trees are spread around the property, hard to know exactly how much space they take up. There are patches of them here and there near the forest and around the house/outbuildings, never more than .5 acre in one spot and some fruit trees are just randomly in other spots. This place was a functioning orchard in the 40’s -60’s I think…and it mostly supplied a local grocer. The trees are packed in too tight where they are and are not in great condition now (we bought the place from a very old widow who probably could not have cared for it if she had tried in at least 20yrs since her husband passed) but they still have tons just by the number of them. Close to half of the property is unused forest, ~1.5ish acres is mostly a field, around 1.5-2 acres of chestnut trees, and a little bit of it is cleared for the kitchen garden/outbuildings and the house. I assumed cows would not work unless I cleared more land. They seem big? I don’t know if I can feed pig off just chestnut and apples. Would be great if I could. I’m not opposed to buying feed but I do want to make the most of what we have.
Animals need specific ratios of certain foods, and it can vary according to season (e.g., might need more high-fat grains in winter). You need to research this carefully. I suspect that fruit could never be more than a supplement for meat animals.
Perhaps trade fruit for meat?
Thank you guys. Thanks for the link ctviggen! According to it, it does seem that as islandlight suggested, you need certain proportions and most coming from grain. I think chestnut counts as a starch though it does not mention them here but they are more like potato than fruit but apples and other scraps can only be supplements it seems. Looks like maybe I could provide as much as half their feed between the two, possibly, if I am right in counting chestnut like potatoes (as they are often used in cooking). I also do have room to grow potatoes on the property…but not their main source of food as that seems to be grains. That is still pretty good really, if I can reduce feed cost by half thats certainly something! As far as trading/selling the fruit most people around here have an apple tree or two in their back yard and don’t need more if its not the more popular varieties. Also the trees currently producing need help and don’t produce beautiful salable fruit. When our new trees come into fruit we will be able to sell for sure. In the meantime I would be more likely to be able to sell things made with the fruit, such as jams/jellies and apple butter. I didn’t get to that this year because I had a baby. The chestnuts sell like hotcakes for some reason though and we sold a lot this fall. The thing is that we like the idea of raising the meat/food as much as we can ourselves, you know, in case of the zombie apocalypse 
If that happens I guess we will just become fruititarians 
I’m not an experienced farmer.
Chestnuts and apples are excellent pig food. Pigs only require grains, if you want them to gain fat. Otherwise they will do fine on forage.
You can grow tree based forage as well. It’s worth looking into as it may be better than relying on pasture on your property. Pigs and goats will readily eat the tree and shrub based forages.
It’s nice for the soil to have a mix of ruminant and hind gut fermenters. The ruminant droppings are less ‘hot’ than the monogastric herbivores (rabbits, pigs and fowl). Hilly country suits goats. Goats also provide dairy options whereas it is a challenge to milk a sow.
Look up slow down farmstead on Instagram and see if you can make contact with that farmer, Tar is amazing. And obviously watch the documentary “Biggest Little Farm” (I know you already have).
Pigs and goats will eat just about anything. Any left over apples or chestnuts should be appealing to either one.
Good luck on your self sufficient farming experiment.
Cattle do fine on hilly terrain, as long as it’s not what you would call mountainous. One of my uncles has a farm, the back pasture of which is on the side of a quite steep hill, and the cattle would wander all over it. As ruminants, they are very good for the pasture. Goats can cope better if the terrain is really steep.
Pigs can be allowed to forage in the wooded areas. I don’t know how much of the apple crop they will eat, but they will eat a lot of acorns in the autumn.
Chickens will eat anything, including chicken meat, and their manure is good for the soil. If you give them a movable pen, they can be used to recondition the soil in quite a large area, if you move the pen every so often. The big problem with chickens is aerial predators, but that can be overcome in various ways, including putting part of their pen in the woods. You also need a coyote- and fox-proof henhouse for them to be safe in overnight. There is plenty of information about this on line.
Goats, chickens, and pigs will eat all your organic garbage, unless you need it for the compost pile. You are not going to need that many animals, if you are only raising meat for yourselves. You will want more head if you want to sell meat, as well. And be sure to get a big freezer, or learn how to make sausage, if you are going to slaughter a couple of beeves. If you get a bull and several cows, you will have milk, as well as a self-renewing meat source, and if you get enough hens, your egg supply might outstrip your own needs, in which case friends will be delighted to take the excess off your hands (I used to know a couple who got into goat and chicken farming as 4-H projects for their kids, and they would regularly bring eggs to church for anyone who wanted them).
Little House in the Big Woods, Laura Ingalls Wilder’s first memoir, has a pretty detailed account of the slaughtering, smoking, and sausage-making they did in preparation for the winter. It’s not a how-to guide, of course, but it gives a pretty good picture of what is involved in that way of life. I don’t remember Little House on the Prairie nearly as well, for some reason, but I’m sure it also contains useful information.
I might get in trouble for sending you to another site, but this is the kind of thing you should ask permies. You’re literally asking about setting up a food forest. That’s right in their wheelhouse.
If there are deer in the vicinity, and hunting deer is legal, well … deer love apples.
My wife and I have kept a backyard flock of chickens for 10 years here in Chicago. Despite having 12 hens on roughly 2500 square feet of yard space about half of which is gardened and fenced off from them much of the year we probably spend less than $100/year on food for the flock. We get spent brew grains for free from local brewers which provides about 1/3rd of their diet. We dumpster from grocery stores for another 1/3rd of their diet. Forage and garden scraps I’d guess supply another 25%. Much of their forage comes from composting. Chicago doesn’t allow open compost piles and we’ve come up with a work around. We have our garden set up as a bunch of beds each fenced off separately. We idle a garden bed and open it to the chickens. After they’ve scratched it bare we dig it out to a depth of a couple feet and then over a few months refill it dumping in compostable materials such as fallen fruit from our trees topped with thin layers of soil. The chickens love to hang out and work these compost pits eating some of the composting matter and lots of worms and bugs that are drawn to the compost. If we had more property and more compostable matter I expect it could provide most of their food. Here’s an example of someone doing it on a much larger scale:
And here’s a pic of a tray of dumpstered food for the chickens. The food in this picture is typical of their daily fare although I rarely bother to lay it out aesthetically pleasing as chickens aren’t terribly fussy,
Chickens eating brew grain:
Wow thank you guys so much! This really helps. I will check out the books and links I actually haven’t seen most of this stuff. When we bought the place it was quiet the fixer-upper so we focused on the house first. Thanks again everyone !
If anyone has kids and can get them off the mass of fantasy books they can read, these are great books. One Christmas, they get a hand-made doll and a piece of candy. That’s their Christmas. On another Christmas, there’s a massive snow storm, and their dad gets caught in it, and has to hole up in the snow. Meaning, making a place for him to sleep that’s physically in the snow, like an igloo. He survives and comes home, with no Christmas presents.
And I also remember one story, where they get to a town where they moved (I think this might be Little House in the Big Woods, but I’m not sure). The kids are going to school for the first time, and the parents basically tell them to walk the multiple miles down the road and to look for a building that looks like a school. Come back when school is over. Compare that with the helicopter parents of today.
“In my day, we had to walk ten miles each way to school, and it was uphill both ways.”
“And we liked it!”
I remember being jealous when my sister broke her clavicle. In my family, our generation considered a childhood wasted if we didn’t break at least one bone.
I’ll second the deer hunting suggestion. In my State you can even get extra landowner tags to take more deer to protect your Orchard. It would be very easy since you could build a permanent Blind (think kid’s type Treehouse) to shoot them from.
You’re feeding them, you might as well harvest some of them to feed you.
My main problem with chickens is predators. We have bobcats, coyotes, foxes, raccoons, hawks, owls, you name it. The only thing we haven’t seen are cougars and bears, though both are known to be around.
Goats or pigs or cows probably aren’t going to be bothered for the vast majority of predators we have. I don’t know many people whose chickens have survived, unless they build a fortress.
There are suggestions on line to help deal with this. Most mammal predators are active at night, so a solidly-built coop offers a lot of protection. As for avian predators, there are apparently a number of strategies that offer good protection but don’t involve putting up a chicken-wire ceiling on a pen.
I researched this, because the property we bought a few years ago came with a chicken coop. I’m not sure about the amount of work the chickens would take, but I am still considering getting some. My cousin has quite a flock, and they are a lot of fun, as well as a source of fresh eggs.
We have only lost feathers to predators thanks to our dog. Although here in Chicago it is rare to see anything more dangerous than hawks and coyotes.