10 FAQs of Homestead Livestock • Homestead Lady

Thinking about adding homestead livestock to your land? It’s a big commitment and one you’re wise to consider carefully. To help you make an informed decision, here are 10 frequently asked questions (FAQs) of homestead livestock. From questions about which animals to begin with, which ones are easier than others, how much land you need for homestead livestock, and a bonus question of which ones to avoid, this article is your go-to resource!

Be sure to get out your homestead journal before you begin reading so that you can take notes and jot down additional questions and concerns. I’m often confident I’ll remember these important details but end up forgetting them to my detriment. Write it all down!

You may want to also read the following livestock articles when you have time:

Stop! You’re Not Ready for Homestead Animals

5 Small Livestock Options for Small Homesteads

3 Non-Lethal Ways to Protect Your Flock From Predators

FAQs of Homestead Livestock

As you’re preparing to bring homestead livestock onto your land, you’ll gather lots of beginner husbandry information. Beyond these basic principles, it’s normal to have more questions. In fact, asking questions is what leads to learning and learning is what leads to success with animals on the homestead!

Here are ten questions that are commonly asked about homestead livestock:

What is the best animal to start a homestead?
What’s the hardest homestead livestock to take care of?
Can you homestead without killing animals?
What is the cleanest animal on the farm?
What is the most gentle farm animal?
What is the cheapest farm animal to own?
What animals can you raise for meat on the homestead?
And what’s the cheapest homestead livestock to raise for meat?
How many acres do you need to start a homestead with livestock?
Which homestead livestock should I avoid?

What is the Best Animal to Start a Homestead?

The best homestead livestock to begin with is the one you’re ready to house, feed, and keep in a healthy way! It may sound obvious but it must be said first that you do NOT want to start with a milk cow, for example, if you don’t have:

Perimeter fencing
Shelter
Feed/hay/pasture
Milking equipment
Room for calves

You need to be completely ready for any animal you decide to bring onto the homestead before you acquire them.

Having said that, once you’re ready to get started, there are several good options for beginner homestead livestock.

Chickens or ducks are commonly the first livestock raised on a homestead because of their small size, general availability, and large body of training material available in books and online.

However, there are several other worthy livestock options you might consider.

Bees create a valuable product while pollinating your gardens and orchards.
Goats provide protein that doesn’t require butchering in the form of milk and value added dairy products. Plus, goats are considerably smaller than cows, which are the other popular dairy option.
Ducks and chickens can be quite profitable for their egg and meat production. Eggs in particular are highly marketable or tradeable.
Alpacas provide wonderful fiber for fleece enthusiasts without being as temperamental as angora goats or as high maintenance as sheep.
Vermicomposting worms have to be just about the easiest livestock to manage and you can even tend them under your kitchen sink!

Each animal has their own strengths and weaknesses. If you’re a small space homesteader, you may want to consider the homestead animals we’ve outlined in our article: 5 Small Livestock Options for Small Homesteads.

What’s the Hardest Homestead Livestock to Take Care Of?

Hardest and easiest are both relative words in that they mean different things to different people. I can only share my experience to help you answer the question about which homestead livestock are easier than others in their husbandry.

Here’s a rundown of the possible challenges with some homestead livestock options:

Cows are straightforward to raise but are large and can be stubborn and dangerous; bulls or mothers with young are downright scary.
Turkeys provide a lot of meat for one animal and they’re pretty decent grazers. However, turkey poults (babies) have a high mortality rate and are fragile when they’re young.
Bees are wonderful pollinators and provide honey, but they’re potentially dangerous and require specific equipment to care for them properly.
Goats provide dairy (and fleece with the right breed), and eat up brush. However, they can be obnoxious and can butt you with their incredibly hard heads. They also climb everything know to man, including you, and love to break out of their fencing.
Chickens are pretty simple to keep but they can destroy a garden if they gain access to it. They also stink if you don’t keep on top of their bedding.
Guinea fowl are easier on the garden but they’re so loud as to make you forget the value they have in alerting you to the presence of strangers on the homestead. Seriously, they’re so loud! (So are geese, by the way.)
Sheep are great grazers who fertilize fields as they go but they require shearing every year. They’re also prone to escape fencing and they are always looking for the quickest way to die (they can be illness-prone with poor husbandry).
Pigs have excellent meat value and are great foragers; they can even perform light tilling, should you need it. However, they can be hard on shelter, fences, and pasture.
Rabbits are small and have excellent feed to muscle ratio, should you harvest them for meat. However, they breed rapidly and easily, so you MUST commit to paying attention to them carefully. They are also susceptible to heat stroke and fly strike.

Really, any homestead animal has its pros and cons, assets and liabilities. The trick is to learn to be flexible, teachable, and creative when figuring out how to turn those liabilities into assets.

I would suggest that, if you’ve never handled livestock, you begin with the smallest animal on your list of potential homestead livestock. If nothing else, smaller animals are physically easier to deal with most of the time. Their housing and feed are also smaller/less.

Homestead Livestock Liabilities Turned to Assets

There are so many ways to turn homestead elements that at first glance look like problems into solutions.

For example, ducks poop an unbelievable amount and so much of it ends up in their pond/pool water. Instead of bemoaning this fact, position your recreational duck water tank so that it flows easily to some place that could use the poopy water.

How about the veggie garden or the orchard? Duck poop is full of nutrients that plants needs, and along with the water from the tank, they will happily soak it all up!

Got more poop? In the barnyard maybe? Take all that poopy straw and turn it into compost for the garden.

Flies may lay eggs in your livestock dung, but chickens will happily scratch up all that dung looking for larvae to eat. They till the soil AND eat the bad bugs all at once.

To further ponder this idea, please read our articles:

Natural Solutions for Homestead Problems

Renewable Resources: Solutions for Homestead Problems (5th Permaculture Principle)

Reduce, Reuse, Recycle Homestead Waste

Can You Homestead Without Killing Animals?

The short answer is no, you can’t homestead without killing an animal eventually. Let’s talk about this a little bit more, though.

If you’re raising animals for meat, then you’ll need to get a handle on harvesting and processing them. That’s just the reality of being a meat-eater. If you purchase meat at the store, this is already a system in which you participate.

The best part about raising your own meat animals is that you become a responsible part of this system!

When you raise animals to eat, you:

Provide a wholesome, happy life for them .
Harvest them with love and gratitude in a humane way.
Benefit from their useful presence on the homestead while they’re alive.
Teach your children and community where meat really comes from.
Naturally become more grateful and less wasteful of the food you eat.

And so much more!

Even if you don’t eat homestead livestock, there will most likely be other times you’re called upon to kill them. For example,

Predators attack but don’t finish the job of killing your animal and you’re called upon to do so.
Animals get badly injured and require the relief of death.
Culling is often required to improve genetics or remove undesirable traits from your herds and flocks. You could possibly give these animals away, but the ethics of that get sketchy. For example, I would never give away an egg-eating chicken because they’ll simply continue their bad behavior.

Sometimes animals just die even if you don’t kill them, and you’re required to deal with their bodies responsibly.

For example, you can let an elderly hen age out of egg production but still allow it to live and eat bugs around the homestead until is passes naturally or is eaten by a predator. If it passes on its own, you’ll still need to bury it or feed it to the dogs (for example).

What is the Cleanest Homestead Livestock?

In my experience, the cleanest small homestead livestock are honey bees. The honey bee is basically self-cleaning!

Each bee cycles through different jobs throughout its life, including nurse bees (which feed and clean the larvae), and a housekeeping bee that basically tidies the hive and removes pests.

Beekeeping even smells great! Beeswax and honey are both sweet smelling, as well as pollen and propolis. If you ever smell something off in the hive, start looking for pests like wax moth.

As far as more conventional livestock is concerned, I would say rabbits are also pretty clean, especially if you keep them in cages. Their waste is pelleted and can be immediately applied to the garden as compost.

A mother rabbit pulls out some of her own fur to make a nest for her impending babies, but all that material is easily compostable once she’s done with it.

Alpacas are also surprisingly clean for a barn animal. They eat tidily, drink tidily, and even poop in a communal area of their choosing which is usually away from where they sleep and eat.

They will poop in a barn stall if they’re confined but their poop is minimal compared to a cow or even a horse.

What is the Most Gentle Farm Animal?

Based on my and my family’s experience, Silkie chickens and alpacas are the most gentle farm animals we’ve ever tended.

Silkie chickens are half-sized, or bantam, chickens and they usually have very sweet personalities. They make excellent egg-setters and mothers.

Alpacas are much larger animals but they typically have very polite temperaments. This can vary, of course, and for different reasons. Males will always be more naturally aggressive and active, for example.

We once raised an orphaned alpaca – we had to bottle feed her and ended up keeping her in our house for a few weeks (it’s a long story). Once she went back out to the barnyard and grew up a bit, she always thought of my kids as her siblings.

This meant she would try to play with them, but her play could sometimes turn rough because of the size difference between her and my younger children.

Cows can be equally mild but they’re very, very large and can hurt you without meaning to do so. The most important thing to do when examining an animal for gentle or aggressive temperament is to pay close attention.

Learn to read their cues and determine when they’re stressed, playful, or perhaps hurt or ill.

On the other hand, sometimes, regardless of breed, you’ll get that one homestead animal that is just so dear, so sweet. Those are relationships you’ll treasure, but they’re hard to predict according to breed.

Other animals are certainly capable of gentleness! Each animal has a personality and they’re all as different as people. We’ve had chickens, ducks, turkeys, goats, and even pigs that were sweet and snuggly and loved to be pet and cuddled!

What Animals Can You Raise for Meat in Homesteading?

The following are all considered common meat animals for homesteaders:

Cows
Goats
Alpacas
Sheep
Chickens
Ducks
Quail
Turkeys
Geese
Pigs

You can even raise something like peacocks for meat, but the list above represents the most common homestead meat animals.

What’s the Cheapest Animal to Raise for Meat?

Again, the cheapest animal to raise for meat is the one you have infrastructure for and the one you can most easily produce on your land, with your space and available feed.

Here are some things to consider when trying to figure cost into raising meat animals:

How long does the animal need to live in order to get to slaughter weight? (Beef steer require a lot more time than ducks, for example.) This will effect how much you spend on feed and/or how much pasture is used while they’re alive?
How many offspring will the animal produce before its slaughtered, if any? (Roosters can be counted on to provide fertile eggs before you harvest them, for example.) This may or may not increase its value to your homestead.
Does the animal require special feed or consideration to get to slaughter weight?
Also, does the animal convert the feed it gets efficiently to muscle? (Rabbits are particularly adept at this, for example.)

I would say that, for most homesteaders, especially if you don’t live on lots of acreage, the cheapest animals to raise for meat are:

chickens
ducks or geese (water fowl take longer to pluck because of their down, FYI)
rabbits

This is because they’re easy to feed economically, they’re simple to slaughter, they’re very easy to market (should you choose to do that), and they’re easy to cook with and palatable (tasty and familiar) to consume.

Cheap is Relative!

Here’s an excerpt from our article, Do I Want to Raise Meat Animals? that raises a few more things to think about:

People always ask, “Will I save money if I raise animals myself?” and the answer is not as straightforward as it may seem.

Do you want to raise them organically? You might save money, depending on how fastidious you are about it.

Do you want to replace all your eggs, dairy, and meat or just a portion? You might save money, depending on how much meat you’re currently eating.

Do you usually buy your meat from Walmart and that’s your price comparison? No, you will not save money no matter what you do.

Do you currently buy your meat from an organic or sustainable, grass-fed farm? You might save money, depending on how you factor in your time.

See. Not straightforward.

To consider this topic further, please visit the article.

What is the Cheapest Farm Animal to Own?

The homestead livestock that will require the least investment in capital are usually the smallest. Like:

Vermicomposting worms and their set up. Worms require bins, compost material, and maybe a bucket. You probably have all that already on hand.
Bees require hive equipment and protective clothing for you, but compared to the fences, barns, and milking equipment required for a dairy cow, this is minimal. Plus, apart from honey and brood frames, bees don’t wear through their equipment as quickly as a ruminant (like goats or cows).
Poultry are also relatively cheap to keep, especially if you scrounge for their coop materials and build it yourself.

Other ways to save money with poultry are to:

feed them kitchen scraps
allow them to free range to find bugs and botanical material
sprout what grain you give them to bulk the materials and make it healthier

How Many Acres Do You Need to Start a Homestead with Livestock?

This is a question without a succinct answer, I’m afraid. Again, let me share my experience and see if that helps.

My first homestead was .14 acres in a major city. I had a garden and beehives. I was still in high school and single, with no children.
The next homestead was 1 acre in a suburb. I had gardens, beehives, and laying hens. At this point, I was married with four small children.
After that came another 1 acre homestead in a large city with grandfathered livestock rights. I had gardens, an orchard, beehives, laying hens with roosters to produce fertile eggs for hatching my own chicks, and milk goats. We also added ducks and turkeys eventually. On this homestead, I added my last baby for a total of five, homeschooled kids.

Since we’ve lived in Missouri, we’ve skipped around from 20 acres in the country, to .25 acres in a small town (an emergency house when a land deal fell through), to 80 acres while we squatted on a friend’s farm living in a 500 sq. ft. tiny home waiting to purchase our next homestead.

Here we’ve learned about milk cows and geese!

During our crazy years in Missouri, we ran all the other livestock previously mentioned and added alpacas just for fun to feed my textile addiction. Apart from our time in the little house in town, we’ve had livestock on all these properties of various sizes.

Incidentally, the little town we lived in didn’t allow small farm backyard livestock and so we had to campaign for them with the city council. Our group one, by the way, and just as we were leaving the city was finally allowing chickens in the backyard.

So, if I’m answering the question, “How many acres do you need to start a homestead with livestock?“, I would say that as long as you have a backyard, you can start with livestock. Honey bees, vermicomposting worms, and chickens can all be kept on way less than an acre, as long as they’re legal.

If you have as little as an acre, you can graduate to larger livestock. Be aware that the larger the animal, the more they eat and the bigger their housing requirements. The size question becomes exponential, so think before you buy!

Each ruminant requires different amounts of pasture and a good livestock book will give you the information you need to begin. You can also peruse the internet for people’s experience.

For example, Grazing with Leslie has a great article on Calculating Goats Per Acre on the Farm.

If you don’t have a backyard, you can still keep vermicomposting worms under your kitchen sink!

Which Homestead Livestock Should I Avoid?

Avoid any homestead livestock for which you are not prepared – I can’t say this enough!

If it’s not legal where you are, don’t get backyard chickens.
No barn, shelter, outbuilding? Then don’t get poultry, alpacas, goats, cows, or any other animal.
If you haven’t purchased feed, have no access to pasture or hay, then don’t bring an animal onto the homestead that needs to eat until you’ve remedied that.

Simply not ready for animals? That’s ok, but don’t get livestock UNTIL you’re ready for them!

Here are some other things to think about when considering which animals you want and which you don’t:

Do you have small children? Children and livestock are a great combination with good rules, education, and supervision. In fact, I’m a big fan of kids having livestock chores.

However, small children can be at risk of injury or worse around large animals. Even something as small as a goat can break bones, or worse. Be advised that kids and livestock need mentoring.

Do you have mobility issues? If you’re hurting, trekking across acres of pasture to do fence checks for cows, alpacas, goats, and horses is going to cause a lot of hurt. It may even make your health situation worse.

Be realistic about your everyday chores where livestock are concerned because, with living things, if you neglect to feed and water them from day to day, they die!

Worried you’ll have to always keep the animal? You can always change livestock based on your needs! Be flexible and get feedback from your family about each animal. If it turns out you don’t like the animal, don’t like the taste of the animal, or simply don’t find a use for the animal, be ready to pass it along to another homesteader.

Being willing to analyze what you’re doing and tweak it to make improvements, especially with your livestock. In permaculture, there’s a whole principle dedicated to this idea – Accept Feedback and Practice Self Regulation.