Interactive lesson

Grain stores for the year, step by step

Interactive lesson: how much grain the house, the animals and the field need from harvest to harvest, where to keep it and how to measure it without scales.

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The whole lesson as text

1. Five parts

A year's grain store is one sum with five parts.

From harvest to harvest — The grain year doesn't start in January but with the harvest: in lowland UK and Ireland, barley, wheat and rye in July and August, dry beans in September, maize in October and November.
Kitchen per AE — Per adult equivalent a year: 100 kg of bread grain, 25 kg of maize and 6 kg of pulses (5–8). A child of 7–14 is 0.7 AE, up to 6 years 0.4.
Animals and seed — Animals often eat more grain than people. If you sow your own, seed is the third part.
Reserve and losses — Add a 10–30 % reserve for a bad year and mistakes in the sums. Storage losses run from 1 % to 15 %.

Why: The house, the hens and the pigs all eat from the same store, seed is taken from it, and it covers every mistake. A homesteader who counts only the kitchen runs out of maize for the hens in March.

Total store = (kitchen + animals + seed) × (1 + reserve) + losses.
Grain is cheapest straight after harvest, and dearest in spring before the new crop.

2. The animals

On a homestead with animals, grain for the animals is often more than grain for the kitchen.

Laying hens — A laying hen eats roughly 30 kg of grain a year: maize, wheat and barley.
Fattening pig — A pig from 25 kg to slaughter needs roughly 250 kg of grain, mostly maize and barley.
Goats, sheep, rabbits, horse — Dairy goat 80 kg, sheep 30–40 kg, doe rabbit with litter 40 kg, working horse 400 kg of oats.
More is used in winter — From November to March there's no grazing or greens. Count the animals' winter months at roughly 1.3 times their use.

Why: A family of 3.1 AE with six hens, two goats and one fattening pig needs 590 kg of grain for the animals. That's almost as much as the kitchen, and more maize and barley than wheat.

The figures are the rough grain share of the yearly ration; the full mix is in H33-07 and H33-02.
A meat chicken eats roughly 6 kg of grain in one batch.